Chapter 4

Toward a New Brooklyn

In April 1865 the people of Brooklyn, along with countless others, celebrated the end of the Civil War, and then mourned the death of a president, as epochal events in American history. But if a local legend is true, Brooklyn would soon experience its own epochal moment, known at the time to only a few. On the bitterly cold evening of December 21, 1866, the city’s leading public works contractor, William C. Kingsley, visited State Senator Henry C. Murphy in his Bay Ridge mansion. Kingsley’s mission was to convince Murphy, a powerhouse in the Democratic Party, that the time had come to realize a long-discussed but elusive project—the building of a bridge, not a temporary dam of ice on a cold winter’s day, but a real and enduring span of iron, steel, and stone, across the East River. The project was enormous and expensive, and Murphy was skeptical, but when Kingsley won him over one of the most iconic events in Brooklyn’s history was fairly launched. The state legislature passed Senator Murphy’s bill authorizing the building of the East River bridge, a company was organized, and the accomplished engineer, John A. Roebling, was hired to plan and supervise the immense undertaking. But three years passed before construction began and another fourteen before the bridge was completed. Appomattox and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln were distant if still-vivid memories when what was soon known as the Brooklyn Bridge opened to traffic on May 24, 1883.¹

The ceremony on that day was like nothing ever seen in Brooklyn’s long history. Even before the festivities began the New York Times called it, with customary condescension, “the greatest gala day in the history of that moral suburb.”² It was indeed a gala day of school and business closings, marches, speeches, receptions, dinners, a massive evening display of fireworks, and ceremonial cannon fire from Governor’s Island, the Navy Yard, and an armada of Navy ships. Governor Grover Cleveland was there, as was the president of the United States, Chester A. Arthur, who once had run the Custom House of this very port.³ The Eagle devoted the entire front page and four interior pages of a twelve-page edition to the event and followed up with two more pages (nearly half of the paper) the next day. “UNITED!” its headline proclaimed in the paper’s largest type.⁴

When the smoke from the fireworks and cannons cleared, the bridge went about the business of proving itself worthy of the celebration. In the days, months, and years that followed, many thousands of people crossed the river each day on foot as well as in carriages and wagons, and many more boarded the bridge trains (they were cable cars) when that service to and from Manhattan began in September. By 1885 the trains were carrying twenty million passengers per year, and in 1888 the bridge trustees reported more than thirty million rail passengers and nearly three million pedestrians. Carriage passengers were not counted, but the revenues from this source were four times as large as those from the pedestrian promenade.⁵ In its fifth year of full operations, about one hundred thousand people crossed the Brooklyn Bridge each day.

Dubbed by locals the Eighth Wonder of the World, the bridge, and Brooklyn itself, attracted the admiration of many who did not need statistics to know something grand had happened. Writing in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine a decade after the opening, the journalist Julian Ralph could hardly contain his astonishment at the throngs that flowed toward the bridge from the New York City side each workday evening. The crowds of London or Paris, he wrote, are nothing in comparison:

Here come the elevated railways that carry three-quarters of a million souls a day, the surface vehicles of the million and six hundred thousand people of Manhattan, the streets leading from the densest population in America, all meeting in one little square, all pouring out people, and all the people streaming into a great trumpetlike mouth of iron in order to be shot across a hanging cobweb of metal threads into a city that has not its mate or counterpart on earth—Brooklyn!⁶

Brooklyn’s rapid growth and its continuing attraction to those who worked in New York City in the years following the completion of the bridge earned that exclamation point. Between 1880 and 1900 Brooklyn’s population more than doubled from more than five hundred thousand inhabitants to well over a million, about twice the growth rate of all the other major east coast cities, including the very big one just across the river.⁷ The bridge no doubt played an important role in Brooklyn’s remarkable growth. But Brooklyn’s population had also doubled during the twenty years before the bridge was completed, and its decade-to-decade rate of growth was about the same—an impressive 42–48 percent—from just before the Civil War until the end of the nineteenth century. The growth of the 1860–80 decades is especially impressive because it had been quite slow during the war years.⁸ Brooklyn added more people in the decades following the opening of the bridge, but the rate of growth was greater in the years just before the speeches, the fireworks, and the cannons of May 24, 1883, than it was after they had all quieted down.

More important than these statistics is the kind of place Brooklyn was before and after the bridge was built and the role this robust city played in the expansion of a much larger metropolis. Ralph’s celebration of Brooklyn as “a city that has not its mate or counterpart on earth” did not contradict the Times’ more modest and less appreciative “moral suburb.” Despite its size Brooklyn was still a “town across the river” from a still larger place, its industrial waterfront (extending now as far north as Greenpoint, and around the southern shoreline to Gowanus Bay and up the now-canalized Gowanus Creek) continuing to serve as part of an industrial periphery of Manhattan that also reached across the Harlem and Hudson rivers to the Bronx and New Jersey. And its role as a suburb was by no means eclipsed by Brooklyn’s expanding industrial zones or its own downtown. On the contrary, much of Brooklyn’s post–Civil War expansion was in its residential neighborhoods and in new areas that became residential as the city—both cities—reached out to incorporate them. Brooklyn “is like a city in some things,” Julian Ralph wrote. “It is a vast aggregation of homes and streets and shops, with a government of its own. Yet many things it has not got—things with which many a little town could put it to the blush. And every other city earns its own way, while Brooklyn works for New York, and is paid off like a shop-girl on Saturday nights.”⁹

What made Brooklyn so notable, then, was its size and significance as a gigantic suburb within the nation’s greatest metropolis, a place whose role could be best understood by watching hordes of commuters returning across the bridge to their homes. “What is Brooklyn to which all these persons go?” Ralph asked. “It is the home of the married middle people of New York, Manhattan Island being the seat of the very rich, the very poor, and the unmarried. It has been called the sleeping-room of the metropolis.” This time-worn image—the “sleeping-room,” the “bed-chamber,” the “dormitory”—of the real city across the river, had been spoken for many years by those who sneered at Brooklyn and accepted by those who extolled it. All that had changed by Ralph’s era was the scale. There were many towns across the river and many others with no river to separate them from nearby larger cities, but no suburban town anywhere in America was remotely comparable to Brooklyn. Nor did any other place have a dual identity as one of the largest cities and industrial centers in the nation and, at the same time, a suburb of an even larger and more powerful city. “Nine hundred thousand persons call Brooklyn ‘home,’ ” wrote Ralph in 1893, “though, as a rule, they write New York opposite their names on the hotel registers when they travel…. These men are far more interested in New York than in Brooklyn. They do not know in which ward of Brooklyn they live, they cannot name the sheriff or their members of the Assembly.”¹⁰

Brooklyn was large and industrial enough even before the bridge was built to present this same anomaly. But its massive growth in the post–Civil War period presented new challenges, including to the way prominent Protestants shaped the public policies and quasi-public initiatives that gave character to this “moral suburb.” Continuing urbanization was itself a threat to Brooklyn’s old order. New and proliferating urban institutions expanded life choices that could and did compete with older rules and values. And an equally important challenge arose not from Brooklyn’s thickening urban fabric but from the physical spread of its suburbs, both within the existing boundaries of the city and beyond them into the neighboring towns of Kings County. Could the old order maintain its influence over a much more widely spread population? Had the moral suburb reached its physical limit? The story of Brooklyn’s physical expansion is also the story of its cultural and political evolution.

Brooklyn’s post–Civil War expansion reflected the interplay of population pressure, the projects of real estate developers, and the continuing construction of the city’s system of mass transportation. Pre–Civil War horse cars left many areas of the county well beyond the range of feasible daily commutation to either New York or downtown Brooklyn. These distant and largely agricultural areas might have continued to thrive outside of the metropolitan orbit, but real estate investors, developers, and transportation planners saw the Kings County townships as future suburbs and accepted the notion that Brooklyn would sprawl, not concentrate.¹¹ The bridge helped advance this suburban vision, at least with respect to potential commuters to New York. But other improvements were needed, and the most significant of them were not only in the air above the river but on and just above the ground, stretching far inland. The growth of post–Civil War Brooklyn, and especially its physical expansion, was stimulated and controlled by horse cars, elevated railroads, street-level “steam dummies,” and electric trolleys, as much as by its spectacular new bridge.¹²

The horse cars had served Brooklyn well when the outer reaches of the city were no more than a mile or so from the East River ferries. But in the postwar period settlement pushed well beyond the practical limit of horse car commutation. A striking example was the village of East New York in the Town of New Lots, on the eastern edge of Kings County. More than five miles from the Brooklyn waterfront, East New York traced its origin to the 1830s, when John R. Pitkin, a wealthy Connecticut businessman, bought several farms, laid out streets and small building lots, and built a shoe factory. Then, through advertisements in the press, he invited artisans and small manufacturers from New York and Brooklyn to escape “the ruinous effects of a crowded city, where vice and immorality exist to a great extent, alluring the young and inexperienced.”¹³ Unfortunately for Pitkin, the enticement of a presumably more moral atmosphere in easternmost Kings County did not rescue his plan from the sin of bad timing. It was offered to the public at the beginning of the economic depression of 1837, and though Pitkin did his best to create a community among the few residents he attracted to East New York, he did not advertise his project again. Pitkin soon surrendered much of the land he had bought.¹⁴

Later entrepreneurs revived Pitkin’s plan, but their efforts were limited by the village’s distance from Brooklyn and the East River ferries. The Fulton Avenue horse car line of the Brooklyn City Rail Road Company extended as far as East New York, but the five-and-a-half-mile trip consumed more than an hour, and most cars went out only as far as Bedford, itself an expanding suburb two miles closer to the ferry.¹⁵ New Lots, including East New York, contained nearly ten thousand residents by 1870, but significant growth awaited three developments: The introduction of steam to street railways in 1877; the extension to East New York of an elevated steam railway in 1885; and the replacement of street-level steam dummies and other types of steam cars with electric trolleys in the early 1890s. The Brooklyn Bridge became part of this system when it was connected to the elevated, but without steam- and electric-powered ground transportation it would have done little to integrate East New York, along with neighboring villages Brownsville and Cypress Hills, into the maturing New York/Brooklyn metropolis. In 1886, the Town of New Lots, including these villages, was annexed by the City of Brooklyn, becoming its 26th ward. The population of New Lots in 1890 was 29,505. A decade later it exceeded 66,000.¹⁶

Brooklyn’s spread through the whole of Kings County involved the annexation of a good deal of land that remained rural and sparsely populated, as well as villages that, unlike East New York, had been on the map since the European settlements of the seventeenth century. Agriculture was by no means in decline in most of the rural townships; 1880 was the peak year of production on Kings County farms as most producers plowed under their grain fields in response to the rising and more profitable market in New York City and Brooklyn for fresh vegetables. This transition, which included the increasing use of urban waste to fertilize fields of cabbages and potatoes, was also a sign that Brooklyn’s suburban sprawl was growing ever closer. Some Dutch farmers, whose families had been on the land for generations, sold their farms, at first to other farmers, many of them first- and second-generation Irish and Germans eager to get a foothold on the land. By 1880, 35 percent of the farm owners and tenants in Kings County were Irish or German. (Only one Black farmer was recorded on the census of that year, an ironic postscript to distant days when slaves tilled the soil on so much of this land.)¹⁷

By the 1890s, farmland passed mostly into the hands of suburban real estate developers, which in turn increased the likelihood of annexation to Brooklyn. Nowhere was the transformation of farm to suburb more dramatic than in Flatbush, which also happened to be the place where opposition to annexation was the strongest. The village of Flatbush had been the Kings County seat until the 1830s, and the township was still the home of many of the county’s wealthiest and most venerable Dutch families. These families retained a strong sense of local identity, and with it a resistance to being merged into Brooklyn. Resistance was rooted as well in anticipated land use restrictions and higher taxes to pay for street extensions, paved roads, and streetcar lines. In the face of local opposition, the Brooklyn City Rail Road did not extend a single horse car line to Flatbush until 1860, and steam was not introduced for another two decades—for a railroad that ran through Flatbush from Prospect Park to Coney Island, the opposite direction from downtown Brooklyn!¹⁸ By the mid-1880s several railroads crisscrossed the township, and some of them led to Brooklyn. The population of Flatbush increased from about 7,600 to over 12,000 during that decade, and it became increasingly clear, even to the most diehard Dutch, that the future of this old rural community lay in suburban development.

Many of the old families sold their land during the 1890s to the Germania Real Estate and Improvement Company, which transformed land that had been farmed for 250 years into newly platted suburbs whose only crops were houses, sidewalks, roads, and people, that last crop increasing to more than twenty-seven thousand during the decade. Any remaining resistance to suburban infrastructure in Flatbush was overcome by commuting newcomers, including affluent Anglo-Protestant and German families, whose interests lay in rapid transit and other modern services. Some of the Dutch farmers who sold their land remained in Flatbush to become members of the nonagricultural business elite, but others relocated further east, beyond the Kings County line to Jamaica, Flushing, and North Hempstead. Flatbush became Brooklyn’s 29th ward in 1894.¹⁹

To the south and southwest of Flatbush and constituting the western end of the Atlantic shore of Long Island lay two more original European settlements, Gravesend, which included Coney Island, and New Utrecht. Along with Flatbush, Brooklyn absorbed these two towns in 1894, leaving only Flatlands, at the far southeastern end of the county, outside the city’s borders. Gravesend and New Utrecht were seaside and bayside towns, distant from the city, and their earliest appeals to city folk were as weekend resorts and sites for summer homes rather than as year-round suburbs. Henry C. Murphy was one of a small number of Brooklynites who made their year-round homes there, and it was for the long journey to his mansion overlooking the water in New Utrecht’s Bay Ridge that William C. Kingsley may have bundled up on that cold December night in 1866.²⁰

During the 1880s New Utrecht was often described as a pleasant summer resort, developing its waterfront attractions despite what “the Yankees call pigheadedness” among resisting Dutch farmers.²¹ The New York and Sea Beach Railway had been carrying weekend and summer visitors as far as Fort Hamilton at the southwest corner of the island since the 1870s, but improvements in the new 30th ward came only after the 1894 annexation. Changes included a more extensive wealthy community in Bay Ridge and more modest settlements of year-round residents in Fort Hamilton and a few other places, all facilitated by steam and electric connections to downtown Brooklyn, the ferries, and the bridge.²² Still, this tilt toward the Yankees in the distant towns of Kings County was far from fully realized. At the end of the century New Utrecht remained more rural than suburban and more oriented to the sea and the bay than to the city.²³ And when Flatlands became Brooklyn’s final acquisition in 1896 (and its 32nd ward), it was a collection “almost exclusively of farmers and fishermen.”²⁴

Gravesend, Brooklyn’s 31st ward, differed from the other annexed towns in one important respect. At its southern end lay a place unique within Brooklyn—Coney Island. Separated from the mainland by a narrow tidal strait, this popular seacoast island did not become just another suburb. “It is the people’s playground of the Greater New York,” wrote the Eagle in 1897, “and as such does not enter into the realty calculations of anyone.”²⁵ Seventeen years earlier Scribner’s Monthly counted sixty hotels and five thousand “bathing rooms,” along with restaurants, food stands, dance halls, and facilities providing every other conceivable seaside amusement, omitting only the illicit ones left for advertisement in less genteel publications. Previously inconceivable developments were soon to come, including a hotel built in the shape of an elephant and the three vast and innovative amusement parks that shaped Coney Island’s lasting popular image.²⁶ Coney Island was already a distinctive and very peculiar place, and Brooklyn swallowed it whole; not, however, without a certain amount of indigestion.

The difficulty came mostly from the more raffish Norton’s Point on the western end of the island (now the exclusive and gated community of Sea Gate). By the 1860s it was “a haven for gamblers, confidence men, pickpockets, roughnecks, and prostitutes, who could ply their trades upon recreation seekers beyond the reach of New York and Brooklyn officials.”²⁷ On the eastern end and in the center, in areas rechristened Manhattan Beach and Brighton Beach, a more respectable world of beachfront leisure was developing, especially with the construction between 1877 and 1880 of three large and elegant resort hotels, the Manhattan Beach, the Oriental, and the Brighton Beach, each accessed by railroads owned by the hotels’ proprietors, and at the Brighton Beach by steamboats landing at its ocean pier. Wealthy New Yorkers, Brooklynites, and tourists from afar patronized these places, while the less well-to-do clustered in hotels, large and small, in West Brighton.²⁸

Even in these more respectable areas of the island, a good deal of behavior did not sit well with Brooklyn’s Protestant leaders. There were theatrical events of dubious merit, dances, alcoholic drinks, and betting on horse races—and much of this occurred on Sunday, the day of the week when Coney Island was the most crowded with people of all classes and conditions who were clearly not spending the Sabbath in church and quiet religious reflection.²⁹ The island itself had no churches until the construction of a Catholic Church in 1880 to serve a small Irish community. There was no Protestant church, unless one credits the “small frame church” lampooned in a newspaper account in the summer of 1868, in which a minister delivers an unsuccessful sermon to a congregation of thirteen adults and five children, the collection is an abysmal failure, and “no announcement is made of any preaching for next Sunday.” Religion, this article concludes, “may be set down as at a discount on Coney Island.”³⁰ Thirteen years later plans were announced for the island’s first real Protestant church, a Union Church without any denominational affiliation.³¹ Religious practice satisfactory to Brooklyn’s Protestant leaders no doubt remained “at a discount.”

Underchurched and oversupplied with brothels, saloons, gambling dens, and criminal characters, Coney Island was on the moral as well as the physical periphery of Brooklyn, a “Sodom by the Sea” that was an embarrassment to the City of Churches. Part of the problem was the tolerant oversight of Coney Island’s long-time Democratic political boss, John Y. McKane, who surrendered his seaside domain for humble riverside quarters at Sing Sing, not by coincidence only two months after Brooklyn took over law enforcement in Gravesend and its raucous resort.³² But hopes that with the departure of McKane Brooklyn’s police force would quickly enforce the city’s sterner laws on Coney Island were not realized. An Eagle correspondent complained a year after annexation that “all parts of the Island are cursed (and have been ever since the McKane reign), with a superabundance of houses of ill repute.”³³ “Immoral dances and shows” remained troubling during at least the next two years, despite assurances that public performances of the “couchee-couchee” and other such offenses would soon be squelched.³⁴

Criminality and vice were ultimately reduced on Coney Island, but by events and developments that had little to do with law enforcement. Almost simultaneously with Brooklyn’s annexation of Gravesend two large fires destroyed many of the illicit operations on the western half of the island. In a few years they were replaced by large amusement parks where excitements were legal and less morally offensive. A “New Coney Island” emerged, resolving some but by no means all of moral Brooklyn’s objections. The exuberant commercialism remained, along with a relaxation of ordinary social constraints, especially between young men and women, and the unapologetic embrace of physical enjoyment away from any church on the Christian Sabbath.³⁵ Nor was Coney Island alone among Brooklyn’s worrisome new children. Racetracks on the Gravesend mainland and in Queens just across the county border from New Lots attracted gamblers, and steam trains catered to factory workers on their way to a rowdy good time at Fort Hamilton, no doubt reminding some Brooklyn old-timers of their fears of Sunday horse cars.³⁶ Although none of these attractions, not even on Coney Island, unraveled the social fabric of New York’s “moral suburb,” Brooklyn’s annexation of the five Kings County towns presented a challenge to those who had exerted moral leadership over a much smaller city.

Altogether, the annexed towns amounted to one hundred forty thousand inhabitants at the end of the century, about 12 percent of Brooklyn’s population. Most of the city’s post–Civil War growth, therefore, occurred within its older boundaries, thickening up some of the already densely populated neighborhoods near the East River waterfront and around a shifting and growing downtown, but for the most part extending the built-up parts of the city into wards that had been sparsely populated before the war. In the earlier days of Brooklyn’s growth, the principal direction of physical expansion was southward toward Gowanus and Red Hook. Contemporaries celebrated South Brooklyn (roughly the areas known today as Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, and Boerum Hill) as a wealthy and middle-class extension below Atlantic Street of the suburban world first established in Brooklyn Heights. But South Brooklyn also contained working-class neighborhoods adjacent to the bustling waterfront. These expanded as new docks, warehouses, and factories were built further south, down to and around Red Hook along Gowanus Bay. The huge Erie Basin, completed just after the Civil War, attracted much of the grain trade and a good deal of ship repair to the southern shore of Red Hook, while the Gowanus Canal pushed the commercial and industrial waterfront—a crowded array of factories and lumber, coal, brick, and stone yards—into what had been a bucolic area of marshes, ponds, and farms surrounding the meandering Gowanus Creek.³⁷

Red Hook and Gowanus contributed to Brooklyn’s robust growth during the post–Civil War years, but contemporaries were not quick to appreciate it. “The name South Brooklyn has not had a good favor with some Brooklyn people,” wrote the Eagle in 1886, “the very name has been an injury to it as a residence district and tended to drive people away and to depreciate the value of property.” Red Hook “enjoys the distinction of being … the dumping ground of the city and the shantytown of Brooklyn,” while Gowanus is noted for the stench of its canalside factories.³⁸ The Eagle also complained of criminals who used Gowanus and the canal’s docks and barges to store and transport stolen goods.³⁹

Developers often established residential suburbs on open land beyond unattractive zones of docks and factories, once these areas were provided with good transportation to the city center. New Utrecht’s Bay Ridge was already growing in this way, and between Gowanus and Bay Ridge was a tract within the old city boundary dubbed for a time “the real South Brooklyn.”⁴⁰ This area, with hundreds of comfortable new houses, would soon be called Sunset Park, but despite the pretty name it attracted more waterfront workers than commuters after the new Bush Terminal docks and warehouses made the waterfront there as busy as any in the Port of New York. In general this southwestern region did not greatly extend the once-dominant southern axis of Brooklyn’s suburban development.

During the post–Civil War decades that axis shifted decisively to the east.⁴¹ When Julian Ralph described Brooklyn as “made up of hundreds of miles of avenues and streets lined with little dwellings,” he no doubt meant new sections of suburban housing stretching eastward from downtown Brooklyn, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, and Williamsburg, a large area known then as Bedford and East Brooklyn and today as Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, and Bushwick. Ralph was intrigued by modestly situated New Yorkers “shot across” the East River each day: “Sooner or later such ones move to Brooklyn where there is elbow-room and a hush at night, and where they see trees and can have growing flowers…. There lies the secret of the suburb…. It is possible for a clerk to own a house in Brooklyn; it is easier for a clerk to fly than to own one in New York.”⁴² In New York clerks lived in boarding houses, tenements, or apartments. In Brooklyn, Ralph estimated, each of them could have a house for half the cost. This was Brooklyn’s niche in the metropolis and why it spread so widely as it grew.

In Bedford and East Brooklyn, broad and elegant streets provided housing commuting clerks and even small businessmen could not hope to buy or rent. Yet within this extensive gridiron of streets there was considerably more modesty than opulence. As early as 1871 the Eagle pointed to the 21st ward, which encompassed much of this area, as “the banner ward of Brooklyn as to buildings,” 550 houses having been built there in the previous year. Nearly all of them were reasonably priced two-, two-and-a-half-, and three-story row houses, some designed for two families.⁴³ The “builders’ art” was soon applied to two empty square miles and to Bushwick just to the north, yielding a still wider spread of housing within the price range of Ralph’s commuting white-collar workers. Four years later the state census tabulated nine thousand houses in this eastern end of the city, four-fifths of which were wood frame. They were valued about 20 percent lower than the average for the city. Some seventy thousand Brooklynites lived in this area in 1875, a number that ballooned to three hundred fifty thousand by the end of the century, about two and a half times the population of the newly annexed townships.⁴⁴

Closer to the ferries, the bridge, and Brooklyn’s downtown were three smaller neighborhoods, each more upscale than Bushwick and the farther reaches of East Brooklyn: Fort Greene, just south and east of Washington Park; a not-yet-named Prospect Heights, just north of the newly completed Prospect Park; and Park Slope, climbing the square mile toward the new park from the more settled parts of South Brooklyn, partly realizing Edwin Litchfield’s dream of an elite neighborhood below his mansion at the top of the hill. Like Fort Greene and Prospect Heights, Park Slope was mostly middle class, with long, shaded streets and an almost even mixture of well-finished frame and brick or stone houses. But there was variation here, with more modest houses in the area closest to Gowanus and its infamous canal and far more pretentious ones at the top of the slope, on the avenues and streets closest to the park. Here in 1890 were the new homes of Thomas Adams, Jr., the manufacturer of chewing gum, Clinton L. Rossiter of the New York Central Railroad, and other corporate executives, merchants, and lawyers.⁴⁵ Around the same time a different breed of men, whose fortunes were made in horse racing, built four adjoining five-story brownstones that were soon known as Sportsmen’s Row and, for several years, “the most talked of houses in Brooklyn.” But if these men of the turf threatened the tone of this new center of wealth and prestige, they did not do so for long. Three of the four quickly sold their houses, and judges, an ex-mayor, and the commissioner of jurors soon dominated the block.⁴⁶ To complete the rout of the disreputable, the First Dutch Reformed Church built its new home, “one of the handsomest church edifices ever erected in this city,” on Seventh Avenue and Carroll Street, in the heart of the neighborhood.⁴⁷ Park Slope remained only partly built-up at the end of the century—one memoirist recalls a girlhood spent mainly among empty building lots—but clearly this was poised to be a center of wealth, and possibly prestige, to rival Brooklyn Heights.⁴⁸

Fort Greene had its wealthy section as well. The neighborhood surrounded Washington Park, but the greater part of it lay south of the park as far as Atlantic Avenue. Brick and stone townhouses lined most of these streets, giving the area a distinctly upper-middle-class character. The most elegant part of Fort Greene, though, was on the two blocks facing the east side of the park. Shortly after the war William C. Kingsley established his home there, as did his partner in the construction business, Abner C. Keeney.⁴⁹ They soon had neighbors in elegant brownstones up and down the two blocks.⁵⁰

In the 1870s a new neighborhood developed that soon became the only legitimate rival to Brooklyn Heights as a center of wealth and influence in the city. Before the war, Clinton Hill was largely undeveloped, though several expensive country villas were built on newly laid-out Clinton Avenue, five blocks east of Washington Park. After the war, rows of brownstones appeared on nearby streets, just as they did in nearby Fort Greene. But the area was truly transformed after 1874 when Charles Pratt made Clinton Avenue his home. Pratt was one of the latest of Brooklyn’s successful New England immigrants. Born in Massachusetts in 1830, he moved to New York as a young man and almost immediately prospered, first in the paint and whale oil business, and eventually—and spectacularly—in the new business of refining petroleum. In 1867 he and his partner Henry H. Rogers established Astral Oil and built a large kerosene refinery on Newtown Creek in Greenpoint. This venture became part of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust in 1874 and Pratt, now a member of the Standard Oil board, began construction of a large Italianate villa, a project that pleased him so much that he (and later his widow) built mansions on the same street for each of their four sons. By 1878 another dozen of “the ‘golden guild’ of the town” resided nearby and “the Hill” became a counterpoint to “the Heights” in Brooklyn’s lexicon of lofty neighborhoods.⁵¹ “The Slope” would only later enter the conversation.

The appearance of Charles Pratt and other Gilded Age industrialists on Clinton Hill might suggest an old wealth/new wealth cultural divide between the Heights and the Hill and with it a significant challenge to the influence of post-Puritan New Englanders so long associated with the churches and the sober lives of Hezekiah Pierrepont’s original suburb. But this does not seem to have been the case. Pratt himself, who is best remembered for the Pratt Institute, the Pratt Library, and contributions to Adelphi University, was not just another rich businessman and philanthropist who happened to be from New England. During his long residence on the Hill he was a leader (and had been a founder) of the neighborhood’s Emmanuel Baptist Church. When he died in 1891 Emmanuel’s pastor, the Rev. Dr. John Humpstone, eulogized him in terms that could have described any number of Brooklyn’s Protestant elites: “His life from first to last was the fruit of that New England Puritan spirit which has truth for its staple and righteousness for its practical aim.”⁵² (It might have been no coincidence that Pratt’s business partner, Henry H. Rogers, claimed descent from Mayflower Pilgrims.) Nor did the new residents of the Hill display their wealth with more ostentation than did those on the Heights. Without distinguishing between the rich families of the two neighborhoods, the Eagle described the tenor of their lives: “Our people, in the main, live moderately, no matter how wealthy they are, and the general tone is one of culture rather than display.” New York City is where opulence and social climbing is to be found, “and it so happens that the current of Brooklyn’s social life runs with a deeper and more even flow.”⁵³

The Hill did not disturb Brooklyn’s social and moral order in large part because it so closely replicated the suburban ethos of the Heights and the upper parts of South Brooklyn. That ethos had long been linked to Brooklyn’s Protestantism in ways that were not entirely distinctive; it was a widespread assumption in Victorian America that piety and good works were nurtured in just the kind of family settings that suburban homes provided. But the extensiveness of middle- and upper-class suburbanism in Brooklyn, and the imprint of the Protestant social and moral order on many Brooklyn suburbs, was unusual if not unique.

Not all of Brooklyn’s growth took the form of individual houses. A degree of population concentration in a new domestic setting for middle- and upper-class families—the apartment house—proliferated across the city during these years, even in the most suburban neighborhoods. Apartment buildings were generally four to six stories, tended to cluster on main thoroughfares and near elevated railway stations, and offered comfortable housing to people across a broad range of income levels. Brooklyn Heights contained no fewer than seven luxury apartment houses by the 1890s, all with elevator service and other amenities, and all with imposing names such as the Montague, the Pierrepont, the Grosvenor, and the Berkeley, the grandest of them being the ten-story Margaret on Columbia Heights. Several smaller houses on the Hill rivaled Heights apartments in luxury. Concentrated housing of this sort, however, on the Heights, the Hill, and in less wealthy neighborhoods, did not threaten the suburban ideal. In most of Brooklyn’s suburbs, apartment buildings were small and pleasantly designed, and fit comfortably into the fabric of areas dominated by single-family homes.

Tenements were another form of concentrated housing, long associated with poverty and squalor and with the bad behavior more fortunate people expected from the poor. Squalid tenement houses continued to be found in Brooklyn, particularly in the waterfront wards. But surprisingly, as the tenement population increased, the association between multiple unit dwelling and squalor weakened. An 1878 Sanitary Commission report was upbeat in its assessment of the cleanliness and healthfulness of Brooklyn’s tenements, although its definition of “tenement” as a building housing three or more families included many structures that diverged dramatically from the structures we have described on the South Brooklyn waterfront. The commission found tenements in all of Brooklyn’s wards, with by far the greatest number—more than 1,000 of some 6,700—in the 16th ward, Dutchtown, which was not a poor neighborhood. Many of them must have been three-family houses, or buildings with a floor or two of apartments above a store or workshop. In Dutchtown and in the city as a whole the tenements in the commission’s tabulation averaged fewer than five families per building.⁵⁴ Brooklyn did have larger buildings rented out in single accommodations of two or three rooms, but some of them were “improved,” according to the Eagle, and “the actual difference between the improved tenement and the apartment is one of degree” only. “There are a few in crowded portions, but not enough to be considered a feature. She [Brooklyn] leaves that phase to her twin sister at the other end of the big bridge.”⁵⁵

In this era, the tenements of New York’s lower east side were becoming the subjects of searing social criticism; in nonfiction such as the journalist Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives, and in fictional accounts, none more powerful than Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.⁵⁶ In Riis’ tenements successful domestic life was a heroic achievement; in Crane’s it was an impossibility. Places in Brooklyn could have achieved the same notoriety, but none did. Throughout this period Brooklyn remained, in image and reality, predominantly suburban.

Public spaces that reinforced the controlled rusticity of spacious neighborhoods became important components of Brooklyn’s suburban world. The two major parks, Washington and Prospect, both built on land that was in the path of suburban rather than urban or industrial development, were magnets for new residential neighborhoods. Prospect Park, by far the most significant public park in Brooklyn, had for years been on the minds of leading Brooklynites. In 1859, in response to the success of New York’s partly opened Central Park, the state legislature appointed a commission to create a plan for a large park and parade ground for Brooklyn. The commission’s proposal of three large parks and five smaller ones spaced across the city did not go over well, given the cost and the question of how it should be apportioned across the rapidly expanding municipality. In 1860 the legislature appointed a new commission, with James S. T. Stranahan at its head, which proposed a single park on Prospect Hill, a lovely spot with far ranging views in all directions and attractive woods, meadows, and ponds. Some residents from distant wards groused about the location, and some about the price tag, but objections were easily overcome, and the commission quickly appointed Egbert Viele as chief engineer and de facto designer. The outbreak of the Civil War considerably slowed progress on construction, however, and by the war’s end a new design within a somewhat smaller footprint was developed by Central Park’s designers—Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted. Even before its completion in 1873 Prospect Park was uniformly celebrated as a great success. Brooklynites soon boasted that it was superior to that other park across the river.⁵⁷

The city parks were not just popular public amenities and attractive front yards for contiguous suburban neighborhoods. Brooklyn’s Protestant leaders, led by Stranahan, readily subscribed to Olmsted’s claims that large urban parks were healthful and morally uplifting environments, where working-class people and others not trained in “respectable” social decorum could observe and emulate the behavior of those who were.⁵⁸ The leisure activities available in the park—boating, ice skating, picnicking, listening to brass band concerts, carriage driving, walking and resting in a beautiful natural setting—contrasted with the more suspect and downright illicit pleasures of Coney Island, and were embraced as moral counterweights to dangerous amusements in the city.

Vaux and Olmsted also envisioned parkways fanning out from Prospect Park, including one that would extend to and beyond the river to provide a natural corridor between the two great parks of the two great cities. They designed and built only two, however, neither of which goes toward New York or the urban parts of Brooklyn. Eastern Parkway heads from Prospect Park toward Evergreen Cemetery and the Ridgewood Reservoir near the eastern boundary of the city; Ocean Parkway heads south from the park’s southern end to the ocean at, ironically, Coney Island. These roads were undoubtedly inspired by the great Parisian boulevards built by Baron George-Eugène Haussmann and Napoleon III. But they are institutions of the suburbs, not the city, and parkways is the better term for them. They are wide, with tree-lined, grassy malls separating side roads from the central roadway. Benches and pedestrian paths make these malls extensions of the park itself and the parkways’ central carriage roads (neither Vaux nor Olmsted anticipated the automobile) led naturally to the carriage drives within the park. Most important, alongside these parkways were not the beaux-arts city buildings that lined the boulevards of Paris (or the less uniform but distinctly urban structures along New York’s Park Avenue), but suburban villas, behind which lay block after block of other, often smaller, suburban homes. The villas were integral to the intention of linking suburban Brooklyn with Prospect Park as a unifying secular institution. The construction of Eastern Parkway contributed to the obliteration of the once independent African American communities of Weeksville and Carrsville, but there is no evidence of concern on the part of the promoters and planners of the larger project. Prospect Park and its parkways served the purposes and shared the moral ethos of the predominantly white City of Churches and Homes.⁵⁹

Brooklyn’s suburban development during the post–Civil War era is most notable, though, for its sheer extensiveness. A broad swath of upper- and middle-class residential neighborhoods spread across the city from the East River to the Queens County line, absorbing a large portion of Kings County’s eighty-one square miles. Even more than before the war Brooklyn’s townscape was dominated and defined by residences. It was in this era that the old sobriquet City of Churches was often expanded to City of Churches and Homes, suggesting that Brooklyn’s brand of New England Protestantism and its suburban social world were two faces of the same thing. Did that claim retain its strength in the rapidly expanding city? Even leaving aside the increasing presence of a decidedly non-suburban industrial and commercial waterfront, and of non-Protestants within the suburbs themselves, we may question the nature and force of Brooklyn’s long dominant religious leadership, especially in the more distant suburban neighborhoods. Suburban homes may have been the natural allies of Yankee Protestantism, but the spread of those homes beyond the old centers of influence presented challenges as great as the brothels and gambling dens of Coney Island.

The incubation of religiosity in suburban homes was by no means universal; if a family was not pious the home was not going to make it so. More common among suburbanites of all stripes was the embrace of individual and family privacy as valued features of daily experience. More than in the crowded city center, the homes of the sprawling suburbs were separate enclaves, not precluding neighboring and a broader religious and civic engagement, but not encouraging them either. Rather, these forms of sociability and public responsibility occurred when they did despite an impulse to withdraw within the domestic moat and pull the drawbridge up. (Privacy was enhanced within the home, too, when steam heating allowed individual family members to withdraw from the family hearth to separate rooms.) Many suburbanites engaged in an active religious life outside the home, and for pious Protestants especially the privacy of suburban life accorded well with the doctrine that an individual’s relationship with God exceeds the communion provided by the church. But privacy could lead in other directions.

When Brooklyn was a small city, it was institutionally thin.⁶⁰ The suburbanites of that era had little interest in replicating the secular institutions of New York, concentrating instead on building and maintaining the churches that served them and their families on the one day of the week they all gathered on the east side of the river. But as Brooklyn grew it acquired many new institutions, a significant number of which were offshoots of its churches. These did much to underscore religion’s force, particularly among suburban women. The Brooklyn that Julian Ralph described in 1893 was “a woman’s town.” In the weekday absence of men from “those endless miles of dwellings,” women not only ruled over “children, maids, nurses, shade trees, flowers, and pretty door-yards,” but served outside the home as “the backbone of the churches, in which they sing and hold fairs.” Even at the upper reaches of Brooklyn society women reached out primarily through their churches: “Instead of one crowning triumph of caste, society there is divided into church coteries, and out of these grow many sorts of little circles.” They include “bowling clubs, whist clubs, euchre clubs, poker clubs, literary guilds, musical coteries, amateur dramatic companies, and dancing classes.”⁶¹ Clubs and coteries of this sort had little to do with religion, but even in these secular recreations the church remained an important source of life beyond the home.

Many women’s institutions, not noted by Ralph, were closely related to the church’s mission. Every church in Brooklyn had one or more auxiliary organizations in which women had a significant or exclusive role (in 1888 the Eagle listed nearly two hundred for a partial list of Protestant churches), and there were women’s benevolent associations with looser ties to specific churches.⁶² Men, too, were active in church auxiliaries, benevolent associations, temperance societies, and the YMCA. In all these ways, for both women and men, Brooklyn’s institutional expansion magnified older forms of religious activity and influence in the City of Churches and Homes.

This is not to say that religion and the churches monopolized institutional life in post—Civil War Brooklyn. Organizations developed that had little or nothing to do with religion, including some that fostered exclusivity alongside and at times in competition with a more inclusive religious or civic engagement. The most significant of them were men’s clubs devoted to sociability among a selective membership. Entirely independent from larger organizational networks, and lacking the regalia and rituals of the Masons, Odd Fellows, Knights of Pythias and other fraternal lodges, the new clubs also differed from the New England, St. Nicholas, and St. Patrick’s societies in their possession of elegant clubhouses that provided the setting for year-round sociability. The first of these institutions in Brooklyn, the Union Club, was founded during the war “by certain of the most prominent gentlemen of the day” on principles that accorded well with the reigning Protestant ethos. Neither drinking nor gambling was permitted on the club premises, and “the ‘sport’ was denounced as a character to whom it would be impossible to grant the right of entry.” This might seem a natural adaptation of the club idea to Brooklyn’s dominant culture, but the Union Club failed on precisely these grounds. The “perfect fabric” woven in Puritan zeal was tattered by later entrants, mostly younger men, who “somehow or another, made their way into the sacred precinct.” Drinking and gambling became common at the Union Club and in 1872 it disbanded, “leaving a chorus of ‘bloods’ to chant its requiem over their champagne cocktails.”⁶³

The fate of the Union Club points to a split between older members who sought sociability without violating religious principles and younger men with fewer scruples toward improper Christian behavior. A similar divide seems to have occurred, but without fatal consequences, in the Brooklyn Club, which was founded in 1865 and quickly became—and long remained—Brooklyn’s most exclusive social organization. Its members were, as in the Union Club, selected from the most prominent businessmen and professionals in Brooklyn. Many were residents of Brooklyn Heights, the first president was a Pierrepont, and the clubhouse was a large and elegantly furnished affair in the heart of the Heights.⁶⁴ “The two conditions of wealth and social standing are imperatively demanded on the part of candidates applying for admission to its charmed circle,” wrote the Eagle.⁶⁵ The Brooklyn had some of the same rules as the Union—no game of chess, whist, euchre, billiards, or pool was to occur between 11:55 on Saturday night and seven o’clock on Monday morning, and no gambling on these games was permitted at any time. The founders were at times derided as the “Old Men’s Christian Association.” But when younger members took control they created no serious schism in the ranks, evidently because the “bloods” among them were less impious than those at the Union, but also because the “OMCA” included men more interested in the enjoyment of exclusive sociability than in the enforcement of the club’s “blue laws.”⁶⁶

Other clubs founded during this era sought the social exclusivity of the Brooklyn. The Hill had the Clinton, the Oxford, and the Lincoln, and Park Slope saw the building of a magnificent Venetian-styled clubhouse for the Montauk and the rebuilding in grand style of the Carleton. But many other types of clubs were established as well. The Long Island and the Constitution were places of resort for Democratic city and party officials (the Long Island for the higher ranks of the party, the Constitution for less exalted troops in the inner city’s 5th ward), while the Union League did the same for local Republicans. The Faust was made up of journalists, actors, musicians, and artists. Poignantly for some, the old Hamilton Literary Association, no longer a young men’s debating society, was transformed in 1882 into the Hamilton Club, an older men’s place of quiet conversation. There was a Yacht Club and an Athletic Club, the latter occupying the old Second Presbyterian Church building on Brooklyn Heights. There were clubs in Williamsburg, South Brooklyn, Flatbush, and the distant 23rd ward. A social and literary club made up of printers was based in the 25th ward. The Columbian and the Manhasset were unusual in consisting (at first) only of Catholics and the Germania of well-to-do Germans.⁶⁷ A number of clubs were short-lived and some merged, but new foundations kept the numbers growing. In a Sunday paper at the end of 1893 the Eagle ran a full-page story, complete with portraits, of twenty-one presidents of Brooklyn’s leading clubs.⁶⁸

Pointing to the short life of several local clubs, the Eagle had claimed in 1877 that Brooklyn was not a “clubbable” city. It did not elaborate at the time, but seven years later it provided a very telling explanation: “In a community so largely domestic and so habitually religious as the Brooklyn of the past the secular club found little encouragement.” Then “we really were a city of churches and the influence of the church was felt in social life as it is no longer felt.”⁶⁹

Clubs began to flourish, according to the Eagle, in response to the fading influence of the church, and their rise contributed further to the church’s retreat. Was, then, a new generation of Brooklyn’s clubmen turning away from what for many years had been the city’s defining institution? Did the men’s club encourage a pivotal transition in Brooklyn’s history? A few years later, while noting that “Brooklyn is fast achieving popularity as a club city,” the Eagle reported on the removal of South Brooklyn’s Manhasset Club to palatial quarters on the corner of Clinton and Union streets. The Manhasset, an offshoot of the Young Men’s Union of St. Stephen’s Roman Catholic Church, installed an entirely nonsectarian and secular regime.⁷⁰ “At the present ratio of increase,” the Eagle wrote a few weeks later in introducing the new Hanover Club, “the city of churches will, ere long, be able to lay claim to be the city of clubs.”⁷¹

A City of Clubs did not necessarily efface a City of Churches, especially where clubs were linked to churches or adhered to religious principles. But most clubs had no religious connection and many challenged Brooklyn’s traditional religious order with an alternative ethos of secular camaraderie that included violations of that order with respect to drinking, gambling, and Sabbath observance. The structure of clubs was also significant. It was private and exclusive, where the churches generally welcomed anyone who wished to attend. The two institutions could certainly co-exist and even command the loyalties of the same individuals. But these loyalties were, to some extent, competitive. The problem did not go unrecognized. At a Franklin Literary Society debate on February 18, 1889, the subject was whether “the great social clubs are injurious to the morals of the community.”⁷²

A related trend of this era was the increasing separateness, assertiveness, and celebrity of Brooklyn’s wealthiest and most prominent citizens. After years of insisting that Brooklyn’s elites were interested in no more than a comfortable and pious life centered on their homes and churches—a “deeper and more even flow” than could be found among the opulent social climbers and claimants of New York—the Eagle began to cover the denizens of the Heights and the Hill as a distinct upper class. Exclusive clubs formed part of this new theme, but so too did events separate from them, such as the annual Ihpetonga and other fancy balls, private teas and dinners, and the comings and goings of elite families to Europe and fashionable domestic resorts. Begun in 1886, the Ihpetonga Ball served as a marker of who did and did not belong to Brooklyn’s high society. “The proof is simple,” wrote the Eagle. “If a person is in good society he goes to the Ihpetonga. If he is not he cannot get there.”⁷³ Increasingly, the Eagle covered “Society Events” and by the mid-1890s the paper presented a regular page, “Brooklyn Society,” featuring balls, weddings, receptions, and the comings and goings of the right people on the Heights, the Hill, and Park Slope: “Miss Maxwell, Miss Bowers, Miss Kenyon and Miss Suydam are Park Slope girls, and should give that section a winter of gayety, though they will frequently be seen in Heights parlors…. Debutante teas have, in great measure, been the events of the week that has just passed…. Mrs. E. H. Litchfield introduces Miss Marion Litchfield at 2 Montague Terrace.”⁷⁴

Also keeping up with the times was a new journal, titled Brooklyn Life, which bore the subtitle, A Journal of Society Literature Drama and the Clubs. The first issue, on March 8, 1890, announced its commitment to “the freshest gossip of society, club life, the theatre and politics,” and presented the first of its “Portrait Gallery” of notable citizens: Mr. Arthur M. Hatch, a descendant of “sturdy Puritans,” a partner in the New York brokerage firm of W. T. Hatch and Sons, and a “prominent figure in Brooklyn society” who recently organized the latest Ihpetonga Ball. “Among the Clubs” followed this portrait page. Mixed in with these recurring features were numerous pages of jokes and cartoons poking gentle fun at fashionable men and women.⁷⁵ Clearly and unapologetically aimed at high society readers, this journal remained in print for forty years.

It is interesting that Brooklyn Life chose for its first portrait a society leader who was also a descendant of “sturdy Puritans” and a member of Richard Storrs’ Church of the Pilgrims. But despite this gesture to Yankee religiosity, the tone of Brooklyn Life was distinctly secular. Its editorial stance was often at odds with Sabbatarianism, the temperance movement, and some churchmen’s continuing opposition to the theater. Illustrated ads for luxury goods underscored an editorial embrace of the good life. The Eagle, too, increased its advertising during these years, though with less of a focus on expensive products. This was in part because Brooklyn’s retail marketplace was itself expanding, with large dry goods and department stores such as Abraham & Straus, Frederick Loeser & Co., and Liebmann Bros. joining Brooklyn’s original large retail dry goods store, Journeay & Burnham, on Fulton Street.⁷⁶

Commercial expansion, on the ground and in the press, was hardly unique to Brooklyn. But the change in Brooklyn was more dramatic than in other American cities. It was so long in coming because Manhattan retail shops were within easy reach, a competitive situation unknown in other large cities; and within a short period of time so many more customers appeared for the goods that defined and enabled the middle-class suburban life. Although Brooklynites did not suddenly turn away from their churches to worship Mammon at Abraham & Straus, elements of Brooklyn’s secular life were expanding, along with the more complex array of possibilities that define any large city.

Commercialism was not confined to Fulton Street; nor was it solely directed toward the acquisition of material goods. As in any city, the performing arts, sports, and other amusements competed for Brooklynites’ attention and dollars. As late as 1857 the Eagle had bemoaned the absence of them in Brooklyn: “There is no other city in this country of the same population as Brooklyn as destitute of public amusements. There are no theaters, no concerts—except few and far between—nothing except courses of lectures, which have become a bore and are about to be discontinued.”⁷⁷ The Philharmonic Society and the Academy of Music soon addressed this complaint, at least for the wealthy, the academy becoming “a veritable home to Brooklyn society—yes, and its nursery, too; for up to this time there was hardly anything that might be regarded as organized society in the city. There were church circles, and neighborhood circles, and family circles,” but virtually nothing beyond them to bring certain kinds of people together.⁷⁸

Secular institution building did extend well beyond the Academy of Music and served a larger population than the embryonic upper class. In 1863, only two years after the Academy of Music opened with a hesitant policy toward theatrical productions, an elegant Park Theater appeared on Fulton Street just across from City Hall Park. Within a few years half a dozen theaters in Brooklyn offered serious drama, minstrel shows, and variety shows that catered to all classes of people. Lyceum lectures faded for a time but revived as evening entertainment for some, including working men and women.⁷⁹ Organized sports—baseball and horse racing above all—provided daytime entertainment on days other than Sunday, a limitation that reminds us that religious leaders still cast a watchful eye over Brooklynites’ use of leisure time. No church, however, appears to have supervised or objected to the tours of Green-Wood Cemetery offered by hack drivers, who delighted in pointing out the graves of murderers and their victims, an amusement not anticipated by Henry Pierrepont and Green-Wood’s other founders.⁸⁰

The growth of the theater in Brooklyn is particularly notable, given the long history of opposition from churches. That opposition appears to have become somewhat idiosyncratic. In 1869 the Eagle scorned the efforts of Rev. Mr. Boole, “a sensation preacher of the Methodist persuasion,” to shut down Williamsburg’s Odeon. “After he has entirely closed the Odeon,” the Eagle suggested, “he may turn his attention to … the Academy of Music, and turn that building into a conventicle, preach down the Park Theatre, Hooley’s Opera House, Donnelly’s Olympic, and all the side shows.” Noting the Methodist Church’s practice of rotating ministers, the paper suggested New York, “a terribly wicked city,” as the Rev. Boole’s next assignment. Moreover, and ominously for Brooklyn, “In New York they have been turning churches into theatres, reversing Boole’s programme entirely.”⁸¹ The Eagle subsequently proposed a more serious solution: “The church and the stage should be co-workers rather than antagonists,” placing both on the same plane, perhaps not in a way either entirely appreciated: “Give us, O preachers and players, good, genuine, honest, legitimate work! Avoid, each of you in his specialty, the meretricious and the sensational, which degrade your several arts, corrupt your professions, and weaken your influence—or, what is worse, strengthens it for evil.”⁸² The church and the theater could and should be not only partners but co-equals in the fight against evil, a proposition that in an earlier time would have been inconceivable in Brooklyn.

Another sensational preacher was not nearly as easy to satirize as the Rev. Boole. Not long after assuming his post in Brooklyn, Henry Ward Beecher was invited to address the Boston Mercantile Library. His speech on “Amusements,” in which he argued there should be more rather than less of them, caused a scandal in Boston, but was more popular closer to home. On other occasions Beecher railed against the theater as the devil’s playground, but here declared that theater was not intrinsically evil but was too often driven and surrounded by evil people. Rid the theater of the pimps, prostitutes, and producers of salacious plays, and it becomes an innocent amusement and a site of possible moral uplift. Beecher had no quarrel, either, with the theater’s commercial character. He embraced money making as a potentially positive force, and without qualms or apology pursued a profitable career of his own in lecturing, writing, and editing—and even as an endorser of consumer products, including Pears’ Soap.⁸³

Other Brooklyn preachers and Yankee Protestants more generally, were not so quick to recognize an alliance between commercialism and the church’s mission.⁸⁴ At the very least, department stores and theaters were competitors for people’s attention and could lead to enthusiasms that did not stem from religious feeling or belief. Sports were another competitor and became increasingly so as three horseracing tracks were built on Coney Island and the Gravesend mainland, and baseball developed as an amateur and professional sport. A club sport before the Civil War, baseball was quickly embraced in the press as America’s national game. Its breeding ground was the New York metropolis (not Cooperstown), and Brooklyn was a full participant, forming at least twenty amateur clubs by 1858.⁸⁵ The clubs were private organizations, but their games were reported in the newspapers and lots of people attended them. Upward of five thousand attended a three-game series played in 1858 in Queens, between leading players selected from clubs in New York and Brooklyn. Tickets cost fifty cents, and the proceeds of this amateur event were donated to charity. This time, Brooklyn fans did not have to “wait ’til next year.” After the New York team came back in late innings to win the first game, Brooklyn won the last two by wide margins. The Eagle reported after the first game that “the assembly was of the most respectable character. It was composed, in the main, of staid citizens, sober business men of various callings.” A “large number of fancy characters” attended the second game but apparently did little betting.⁸⁶ None of these games, nor any of the regular games played by the clubs, occurred on Sunday.

After the war baseball evolved toward professionalism. A National Association of Professional Base Ball Players was founded in 1871, and three Brooklyn clubs joined it just a year later. One of them, the Mutuals, became a charter member of the new National League in 1876, although the team did not last the year. The Brooklyn Grays, briefly renamed the Atlantics, joined the American Association in 1884, and then, with the charming name Bridegrooms, moved on to the National League in 1890, winning the league’s pennant in their first year. This team, in an odd homage to the city’s ever-growing transit system (and pedestrians’ need to dodge its ubiquitous trolleys), would ultimately be named the Brooklyn Dodgers. A popular activity for amateurs, baseball was praised as healthy and invigorating exercise and recreation for the young men who played it. Professional baseball partially transformed it into an amusement for the masses, however, something to watch and follow in the newspapers. As a spectator sport, even more than as a game to be played, it became another secular distraction in the City of Churches.

The prohibition of Sunday baseball was by no means trivial, especially to professional teams that had to forego their most profitable day of the week. In 1890 only one professional league, the American Association, scheduled games on Sunday. Its Brooklyn team played home games just over the city line in Ridgewood, Queens, without any interference from authorities on either side of the boundary. That summer the Brooklyn members of the Players’ League attended a special Sunday service in their honor at Christ Church on Bedford Avenue, the Rev. Dr. Darlington pointing out with satisfaction that the league “had many opportunities to increase its wealth by Sunday ball playing, but out of respect for the day had always refused.”⁸⁷ The Rev. Darlington was no doubt less pleased to know that certain amateur baseball clubs in Brooklyn had no such scruples. Near the northern edge of Red Hook regular Sunday contests drew upward of five or six thousand spectators, who did not pay an admission fee but were encouraged to enjoy a beer or two at the nearby saloons, which in all likelihood supplied the $10 or $20 stake that went to the winning team. “There is no church in the vicinity,” wrote the Eagle, “and most of the residents not being at all Puritanical, there are no complaints.” The police did not interfere with the game or the saloons.⁸⁸ No force was strong enough to overturn the Sabbatarian laws that had prohibited Sunday ball playing in Brooklyn since the earliest days of the incorporated village. But there were places in the city, and just beyond it, where those laws, as well as the old Yankee Puritanism that inspired them, were ignored. The offenders were not merely those who played the game. In far greater numbers they were people, no doubt including some Yankees, who came to watch.

Attending a Sunday afternoon baseball game was less of a violation than betting on a cockfight in a downtown stable or a bare-knuckle boxing match in a remote field. Enjoying some of the more innocent amusements of Coney Island, shopping in a fancy department store, attending the theater or a weekday ballgame, or reading about these activities in a local newspaper, was not a violation at all, but merely the act of private citizens availing themselves of the diverse offerings of the big city Brooklyn had become. Some of these offerings enhanced the sense of belonging to a larger community. But experiencing them accorded well with the withdrawal into private space that was a feature of Brooklyn’s post–Civil War suburban sprawl.

As Brooklynites experienced these pleasures and opportunities, some of them began to question (and absent themselves from) the occasional transformation of city streets from their usual role—conveying persons and goods between homes, stores, docks, factories, workshops, churches, and places of amusement—into sites of public celebration. As in cities and towns across America, Brooklyn had for years celebrated the Fourth of July with parades that occupied many of the city’s major streets for hours at a time. It also extended the privilege each March 17 to its oldest, largest, and politically most powerful ethnic minority on the traditional birthday of Ireland’s patron saint. Additionally, and uniquely, residents of Brooklyn took to the streets near the end of the school year with Anniversary Day marches of thousands of children from the evangelical Sunday schools. This tradition endured and was generally applauded as a fitting celebration for the City of Churches, despite frequent criticism of the physical demands the marches made on small children and the continuing exclusion of Roman Catholics, Unitarians, and Universalists.⁸⁹ In 1897, in contemplation of the sixty-eighth celebration of Anniversary Day, the last Brooklyn conducted as an independent city, the Eagle looked forward to a time when “it will not be called upon to note that the sinful Unitarian children and the mistaken Roman Catholic children and the erroneous Universalist children have been debarred from orthodox ice cream and evangelical cake and that the pleasure of walking under Calvinistic trees and playing on Arminian grass has been denied to them.”⁹⁰

Missing from criticisms of this sort was any suggestion that the parade of Sunday school children should not occur at all.⁹¹ St. Patrick’s Day parades were also generally accepted as legitimate preemptions of public space, although the history of the event was complicated by a schism in the Irish Catholic community that resulted in no parade in some years and two separate parades in others. A different kind of complication was the extension of the privilege to other ethnic groups such as Irish Protestants, Germans, and, eventually, Italians. In 1871 a long letter appeared in the Eagle protesting the use of the city’s streets for such parades because their ethnic and political character increased antagonisms between groups (Irish Catholics and Protestants especially), and slowed the development among immigrants of an American identity. “Far better … if street parades were abolished altogether, or strictly limited to national or municipal objects, in which all our citizens, native and adopted, could equally sympathize and participate.”⁹²

The celebration that clearly met this criterion was the annual Fourth of July parade. But this parade had been dispensed with by the city, along with the patriotic oration and the recitation of the Declaration of Independence. There had been a parade in 1865, but during the following two years the public celebration of the Fourth was limited to fireworks, the firing of cannons, and the decoration of public buildings. When the parade returned in 1868 objections were raised by militiamen who were forced to spend a holiday from work marching in woolen uniforms at the hottest time of the year. Let them have “one day in the year which they may call entirely their own,” wrote one sympathizer.⁹³ The Common Council complied. There was no parade in 1869, and in the following years the local press reported mostly on “the arrangements for celebrating the Fourth of July by private associated citizens.”⁹⁴ Vast numbers of citizens left town for Coney Island and other resorts. Those who stayed behind enjoyed picnics, band concerts in the park, baseball games, and gatherings at home. Private celebration of the Fourth was probably for the best, concluded the Eagle in anticipation of the 1880 holiday.⁹⁵

At least one of the institutional changes in post–Civil War Brooklyn did nothing to enhance the private amusements of suburban families or the exclusive sociability of upper-class men and women. On January 27, 1869, the Rev. Abram Newkirk Littlejohn, rector of the Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity on Brooklyn Heights, was installed as bishop of the diocese of Long Island. “Brooklyn has long been known as the City of Churches,” wrote the Eagle, not for the first time, and now it is a cathedral city, a See of the Episcopal Church of America. This seminal event allowed the paper to gloat about Brooklyn’s significance as a religious center. The city continued to add new churches—nineteen in the previous year—and to attract distinguished clergy to its pulpits. Other cities might have one or two outstanding orators and theologians, “but taken as a whole, it is conceded now in the religious circles of every denomination, that Brooklyn leads the American pulpit, and that in the City of Churches throbs the brain as well as the heart of religion on the American Continent.” Best of all, its thriving churches and its distinguished clergy account for “the almost entire freedom of Brooklyn from the disgraceful features of almost every other large city in the world.”⁹⁶

The Eagle found other occasions to praise the quality of Brooklyn’s clergy and note the salutary influence of the church on its people. “Wherever else religion may have lost its hold,” it wrote six years after Bishop Littlejohn settled into his new office, “in this city it has gained in strength—a fact doubtless due to the remarkable ability of Brooklyn’s ministers as a class.”⁹⁷ And yet, a far different strain of writing, by newspapermen and clergy alike, paints a darker picture of religion in Brooklyn—of half-empty churches, declining clerical influence, and unseemly attempts to reverse these losses. We have already seen the Eagle, while writing of the influence of secular men’s clubs, refer wistfully to a time “when we really were a city of churches and the influence of the church was felt in social life as it is no longer felt.”

The complaint that churches were half-empty on the Sabbath seems unexpected, given the rapid rise in Brooklyn’s population. In 1874, the number of persons per church in Brooklyn was approximately 2,100, about 22 percent more than the 1,734 for 1855.⁹⁸ Brooklyn still had significantly more churches in relation to its population than New York City, but the pace of church construction had clearly not kept pace with population growth. It would have been a remarkable achievement if it had. According to the state census of 1875, Brooklyn’s houses of worship could accommodate about 38 percent of the city’s total population, a significantly higher proportion than New York’s 28 percent, but hardly suggestive of a surfeit of seating.⁹⁹ Of course, we cannot expect to have found anything approaching universal attendance, even in a place with Brooklyn’s reputation for religiosity. And we do not know how widespread church attendance really was in Brooklyn (or how many churches spread congregants out by conducting multiple Sabbath services) during this era or in earlier times when few clergy complained about preaching to empty pews. We do know that such complaints were common in the post–Civil War era and that Protestant clergy and pious laymen regarded the existence in Brooklyn of a vast unchurched population as a gravely urgent issue.

Some, including Bishop Littlejohn, blamed the common practice of selling and renting pews, which kept away people who could not afford the price or felt humiliated by the sexton’s directing them to inferior seating or an unoccupied pew paid for by someone else. “Knock the doors off the pews,” he argued, “and discard the little plated tablets which indicate ownership of a section of the House of God.”¹⁰⁰ Others added that large numbers of poor people and young clerical workers at the start of a business career were intimidated by wealthy congregants who came to church to socialize and show off fine clothes. Still others pointed to Brooklynites who worked on Sundays, had family responsibilities that kept them at home, were simply too tired after six days of hard work, or were inclined to practice their religion in private. “I don’t always go to mass, but I pray a lot to the Lord,” explains Mimi in Puccini’s La Bohème, and no doubt many in Brooklyn said (or perhaps even sang) the same.

More troubling were explanations that looked beyond the irregular church attendance of religious people to the rise of secularism, religious skepticism, and open disbelief. In an article referring specifically to Methodists, the Eagle observed a “profound change” in popular belief leading to “doubts and questions about the Old Testament, the miracles, plenary inspiration and other dogmas which were seldom asked and never answered in the days of Wesley and Whitefield.”¹⁰¹ This was, after all, the age of Darwin, not the Methodist founders, and of other advances in science that raised doubts and questions for some people, including those brought up in Biblical faith communities. Was faith itself declining in the City of Churches and with it the influence of Brooklyn’s eminent clergy? Half-filled churches seemed a symptom of a deeper problem that could not be solved by extinguishing pew rentals.

The problem itself may have been somewhat overstated or, in the matter of church attendance, misunderstood. In most identifiable examples of empty pews and financial unsustainability the church in question was located in one of Brooklyn’s older neighborhoods, where the population was growing slowly if at all, ethnoreligious change in the local population made certain churches lose while others gained, or old schisms (over theology or pastoral practice) led to small congregations even before the decline of potential adherents.¹⁰² The three wards of Brooklyn’s original downtown grew by only 5 percent during the last four decades of the nineteenth century, while the city as a whole quadrupled. Within those inner wards some streets lost population to commercial and industrial expansion. In 1882, when Methodists tried to consolidate three downtown churches, this population decline (exacerbated by homes condemned and removed for the approach to the bridge) created the attendance problem, not an identifiable crisis of faith among those who remained in the neighborhood.¹⁰³ Some of those no longer filling these downtown churches may well have joined newer Methodist churches in Bedford, Bushwick, and East New York. As Presbyterian pastor J. Winthrop Hageman explained in 1889: “The Protestant Church is on wheels, running after the people who will support it. By the moving out of the population old churches are becoming stranded.”¹⁰⁴

A year earlier Rev. Hageman had offered a detailed (if somewhat tortured) rebuttal of the complaint that churches were losing attendees. Churchgoing in Brooklyn, he maintained, stood at about 63 percent of possible attendees, or even 80 percent if one excluded “the ‘incorrigibles’ whom the church cannot by hook or crook get hold of.” These numbers are almost certainly too high, and in any event the chorus of complaints about half-empty churches did not stop. And when Hageman concluded that “the religious condition of Brooklyn to-day is better than it has ever been,” he pointed to the good work of churches in home and foreign missions rather than to widespread Sabbath attendance.¹⁰⁵ Still, his optimism was perhaps a mild antidote to the prevailing gloom.

Rev. Hageman was joined at times by the Eagle. Noting the plan for a brief religious service (to be led by Bishop Littlejohn) at the ceremony opening the Brooklyn Bridge, the Eagle acknowledged “it may be deemed absurd if not superstitious to invoke the divine blessing upon the work in the presence of at least a respectable minority of atheists and agnostics.” But never mind: “Considering that the vast majority of our citizens … still believe in a God, an invocation and a hymn of praise to Him would scarcely seem inappropriate…. Brooklyn is a theistic city,” and the only expected complaint will come from sectarians who object to an Episcopal service rather than one from their own denomination.¹⁰⁶ Three years later the Eagle provided a similar confirmation of Brooklyn as a city of believers, again in the face of “the prevailing talk about the decay of religion and of the religious sentiment, about the growth of agnosticism, and about the rising power of science.” Most of its readers, the editor claimed, believe “there is something good in religion,” and “if the City of Brooklyn is to be kept right … the churches will not only be cared for, but made to keep pace in their progress with the progress of the city.”¹⁰⁷

Believing “there is something good in religion” may not have been a stronger answer to agnosticism and the embrace of science than Rev. Hageman’s calculations were to perceptions of declining church attendance. But arguments of this sort did, like Hageman’s, at least complicate an issue otherwise left entirely to those who claimed the influence of the church in Brooklyn was declining, a claim that was frequently found as well as rebutted in the Eagle. Vacillation between levels of hope and gloom on this critically important subject is perhaps not surprising, considering that the appraisal was not a simple one to make.

The paper was somewhat more consistent in its treatment of the more sensational style of preaching offered by some as an antidote to declension. In 1875 a month-long revival conducted by America’s leading itinerant evangelist, Dwight Lyman Moody, and his assistant, the gospel singer Ira Sankey, drew nightly crowds of six thousand people to an auditorium set up in a downtown Brooklyn skating rink. The Eagle approved of their attempts to reach people who were not attending any church. Moody and Sankey left town, however, without firm evidence that they had converted many unbelievers or deepened the commitment of churchgoers.¹⁰⁸

Brooklyn had its own evangelist in Thomas DeWitt Talmage, who preached in a more sensational style than Moody. The Eagle, for the most part, approved of him too. Talmage’s base was the Brooklyn Tabernacle, where he regularly drew crowds that rivaled those that flocked to Plymouth Church to hear the theatrical preaching of Henry Ward Beecher. Perhaps sensing the need to outdo Beecher, Talmage reportedly opened one sermon by sprinting across the raised Tabernacle stage. As he reached the end and his audience gasped at the certainty of his hurtling into the crowd, he leaped upward, landed safely at the edge, and shouted, “Young man you are rushing toward a precipice!” “By many he was declared a pulpit clown and a mountebank,” wrote the New York Times in 1902 on the occasion of Talmage’s death, but “his preaching became the religious sensation of the time.”¹⁰⁹ A back page story for the Times, Talmage’s death was a front-page headline for the Eagle, even though the preacher had left his Brooklyn pulpit (and stage) for Washington, DC, eight years earlier.¹¹⁰

The Eagle approved of Talmage and Beecher mostly because they consistently drew large crowds, just as Moody did, and seemed to keep the church alive and relevant, even while departing from the more sober conduct of a Richard Storrs. But in emphasizing performance over denominational doctrine these preachers also threatened the old order. In an 1882 article assessing Brooklyn’s clergy, Mary L. L. Bradford praised Storrs and other conservative preachers but gave short shrift to Beecher and was downright hostile to Talmage, whose influence, she argued, “cannot be considered as part of the living organism of the city. His activity is not functional, and is in the nature of an excrescence upon the body politic.” He should be dismissed “rather as a sensation than as a motive power in the religious world of Brooklyn.”¹¹¹

In one respect the Eagle was entirely consistent. It used forests of newsprint to highlight religion as a topic of primary importance to the City of Churches. Each Monday the paper’s lead story summarized what had happened in Brooklyn’s churches on the previous day, and on most other days religious affairs occupied a good deal of columnar space. The Sunday paper contained a religious section along with potentially distracting summertime baseball box scores. And if its most frequent assessment was that the influence of the clergy had in fact waned, the Eagle was not bashful in stepping up to fill the void: “The mantle of prophecy has fallen on the press; the Sunday EAGLE is regarded by the Christian people of Brooklyn as an Encyclical, and the alleviation of consciences is no inconsiderable part of our editorial function.”¹¹²

The press had always been an important voice for organized religion in Brooklyn, and the laity, within and beyond the churches, had played a significant role in transporting religious values into the city’s secular affairs. If the personal presence of the old Yankee leaders no longer reached as easily to the peripheries of the city, the movements these leaders had generated—temperance, Sunday schools, and others—continued to thrive, and Sabbatarian and licensing laws were still on the books and generally if imperfectly enforced. The extent to which the Yankee leaders of the old order were able to assert their moral authority and political influence in the face of new challenges may be difficult to judge, but the continuing presence of that authority is beyond questioning. “City of Churches” continued to express that presence, even when tinged with nostalgia for an age that seemed to be slipping by.

During the latter decades of the nineteenth century the most active and visible of the New England-born Protestants to face challenges to their moral authority was a newcomer, and not at all the old type of Brooklyn leader. Born in 1844 in New Canaan, Connecticut, Anthony Comstock came to New York, as so many had before him, as a young man looking to climb the ladder to a lucrative commercial career. By 1871 he had climbed high enough to marry, and established his nest in Brooklyn on Grand Avenue in Clinton Hill. He soon became a member of the Clinton Avenue Congregational Church. Comstock had joined the Sons of Temperance before he left Connecticut, and in his teens developed a penchant for vigorous freelancing in his enforcement of what he (and sometimes the law) considered immoral activity. In one instance he broke into a New Canaan barroom at night, opened the taps, emptied the bottles, and left a sign warning the owners that if they didn’t close their business the building would be destroyed. The owners left town.

In New York City this penchant blossomed into a crusade against illegal drinking, gambling, prostitution, abortion, contraception, free love, and, most famously, the production and distribution of what Comstock considered to be salacious books, magazines, and works of visual art. In 1873 he became secretary and de facto head of the newly founded New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Before the year was out he coauthored an “Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use,” known throughout the land as the Comstock Law. Comstock was appointed an inspector and special agent at the Post Office, a position he used for thirty years to prevent the mailing of “obscene” materials.¹¹³

Comstock’s most significant activity in Brooklyn was in Coney Island, where he focused mostly on illegal racetrack gambling. He was not popular there. One day in August 1884, a group of Kings County deputy sheriffs approached a “pool selling” club house on a civil matter that was quickly misinterpreted as an anti-gambling raid. One of the deputies resembled the famous reformer. A scuffle ensued and “the crowd which filled the place set up the cry, ‘Comstock! Comstock!’ and scampered helter skelter for the doors and windows.” Those who remained gathered around the supposed Comstock and cried, “’Kill him!’ ‘Slug him’ ‘Hang the ___ ___ ___’!” The mistake was quickly corrected, and the deputy was spared. A witness reported: “If that had really been Comstock I don’t think he would have left Coney Island alive, and his double would have fared badly but for a friendly voice saying ‘That ain’t Comstock.’ ”¹¹⁴

Anthony Comstock would serve nicely as an emblem of the decline of Yankee influence in the City of Churches if the narrative of declension were clear and uncontested. But as we have seen there is evidence of endurance as well as decline—of the continuing influence of the Lows, the Stranahans, and others among Brooklyn’s lay leadership, and of the clergy as a body. Mary Bradford was particularly eloquent in her description of Brooklyn’s cultural continuity. “The singleness of aim, the simplicity of life and the intensity of moral earnestness which characterize the beginnings of municipal life are still deeply felt in Brooklyn,” she wrote. “The old time power in certain classes of society is still theirs, and the law givers of the social and intellectual life of the city sit in their time honored seats.” Of the clergy, “nowhere else,” not even in New England, are they “so dominating a force in the social and civil life of a community.” If Beecher was tarnished and Talmage a mere sensation, dozens of others carried on the good work of decades past. “Brooklyn,” she concluded, “is the city not only of churches, but of what gives churches their worth, a place where a high plane of living is possible, because the values by which life is tested are other than material ones.”¹¹⁵

Bradford wrote about the Brooklyn she knew and cared deeply about, but in doing so she excluded such uncomfortable facts as emptier churches, the spread of the city to places physically and perhaps culturally remote from the old centers of influence, and the development of a wide array of secular opportunities that included and even promoted those material values she rejected as measures of the good life. Nor is there anything in her essay that recognizes the strains that class and ethnic diversity placed upon Brooklyn’s old pattern of influence. Her insistence on the endurance of that pattern is not easily dismissed. But it needs to find a proper context in the bigger and more diverse city Brooklyn had become.