Chapter 2

The City of Brooklyn

On Thursday, April 24, 1834, the Long-Island Star announced a civic procession and church ceremony in celebration of the incorporation of the City of Brooklyn: Local military and civic organizations will assemble at one o’clock on Friday afternoon in front of the Dutch Reformed Church. Under the auspices of the marshal of the day, Major F. C. Tucker, they will then march through the new city’s streets, first in the downtown and then in Brooklyn Heights, ending on Cranberry Street in front of the First Presbyterian Church, in which the ceremony will be held.

The restrained tone of this announcement is somewhat surprising, given the long struggle that preceded the incorporation. The event is neither Grand nor Glorious nor Triumphant, as any political party victory of that era surely would be, just a “City Charter Celebration,” headlined in bold print. More noteworthy is the symbolism of the procession itself—leaving from Brooklyn’s oldest church and marching toward the city’s powerful new center of Yankee Protestantism. Inside this post-Puritan church, the ceremony was to include an unspecified ode, oration, and anthem, and a song in praise of “The Pilgrim Fathers.”¹

Alden Spooner, who bore the name of one of those Fathers, would not have resented this rendition of Brooklyn’s past. Neither, apparently, did the author of a long letter published in his newspaper, who focused on the benefits of incorporation. The new city charter, he predicted, would distinguish Brooklyn from the many villages that dot the state; attract the attention of men with capital to invest; and “lead to efforts for the recovery of other rights which have long been withheld from us.”² That last prediction deserves a closer look. Among other things, the concern for those “other rights” helps explain why it took nearly a decade to get the act of incorporation through the state legislature.

In 1825, when local citizens first assembled to petition for a city charter, Brooklyn was already the third largest locality in the state. Of the four cities already incorporated, the second most populous, Albany, was only moderately larger than Brooklyn, while the third and fourth, Troy and Hudson, were smaller.³ Surely, it was time for Brooklyn to be granted the dignity and enhanced powers of an incorporated city. But when Brooklynites arrived at the district schoolhouse in December for a public meeting called by citizens who favored incorporation, they found that the meeting had been hijacked by their opponents, who unanimously rejected the incorporation proposal and then adjourned for twenty-one years! Although no one took that last gambit seriously, the rejection set back the movement for a charter by half a decade. Spooner attributed the opposition to an unwarranted fear of tax increases and, more crucially, to the concern of real estate speculators that their property lines for lands lying beyond the bounds of the present village would be overridden by a new city plan. He reiterated what was becoming, and would long remain, a common complaint—that Brooklyn suffered from a weak civic culture, born of an excessive preoccupation with individual speculations and many commuters’ identification with the big city across the river.⁴ That said, when the drive resumed an external foe, the Board of Aldermen of New York City, emerged as the major threat, bringing into prominence those “other rights” a City of Brooklyn might finally claim as its own.

At the end of 1830 a revival of the petition for a city charter was discussed at another public meeting, but the only outcome was a call for the appointment of delegates to a convention charged with repairing defects in the village charter. When the delegates completed their work fully a year later, their only proposal was to petition the state legislature once again for a city charter. This time the public meeting approved the charter proposal unanimously, perhaps because the inclusion of the village’s most prominent men on the roster of convention delegates (Hezekiah Pierrepont and David Leavitt represented the Heights) snuffed out any opposition.⁵ Spooner, who was a delegate, had little to say on this occasion about the failures of Brooklyn’s wealthy men to uphold the common good. Rather, he wrote of the good spirits prevailing at the annual supper celebrating the transition to a new village board, at which, to much applause, a guest offered this impromptu song:

Heaven send us blessings down,

Make a city of our Town,

Daily may honors and benefits flow—

Bedford and Wallabout,

Join in united shout,

City of Brooklyn! Behold how we grow!⁶

The drafting in Albany of legislation conferring the city charter took a long time. Presented to the Assembly, New York State’s lower house, in 1833, it passed with no difficulty. But then the New York City Board of Aldermen exerted its influence to defeat the bill in the Senate. At issue were those “other rights”: control over the East River ferries and even the Brooklyn shoreline, both of which had been granted to New York City by the English colonial government more than a century earlier and confirmed in the postcolonial era by the State of New York.⁷

The ferry rights gave New York City control over nearly every aspect of this vital link between Brooklyn and Manhattan, including the awarding and financial terms of ferry leases, the locations of landings on both sides of the river, and the approval or disapproval of new ferry lines. Passengers often complained about fares, schedules, the quality of service, and the unfairness of New York’s collection of annual rent from the ferry company, which resulted in Brooklyn’s people paying higher fares to cover the cost.

The 1708 grant to the city from the English governor Cornbury included the unappropriated land between the high and low watermark on the Brooklyn side of the river, from Red Hook to Wallabout Bay.⁸ Brooklyn was already expanding its footprint along this shore, filling in land and building wharves into the river. Would a city charter increase Brooklyn’s right to build wharves without interference from or ransom to New York City? Even before news of the charter’s defeat came down from Albany, Spooner confessed that a better course might well be surrender to New York’s superior powers through consolidation with the city—foregoing the City of Brooklyn project to become so many new wards of the metropolis. The most prominent reason for this surrender, he noted, was “the extinction of all controversy relative to jurisdiction on the shores—interest in the ferries—water rights—boundaries, &c.”⁹ Brooklyn might become a city after all, but the charter debate confirmed it would never be done with New York.

Spooner may have been right about New York’s tenacity and power, but the local movement for city incorporation revived almost immediately, with the influential lawyer John Greenwood, who had served as secretary of earlier meetings, taking the lead. The initiative was given a boost by New York mayor Gideon Lee, who urged the city’s Board of Aldermen “to see if a mutual and friendly arrangement cannot be had for the benefit of the governments of the two places.”¹⁰ Unmoved, the aldermen were joined in their opposition by the other townships in Kings County. And yet, with support from upstate assemblymen and senators, the bill passed both houses in 1834.¹¹ By this time eight cities in New York State had been incorporated, six of them considerably smaller than Brooklyn. It was clear, too, that Albany, New York’s second city, would soon be eclipsed by this upstart on the East River. Perhaps the obvious injustice of denying Brooklyn its due, combined with ongoing upstate resentment toward New York City, carried the day. In any case, the victory was a partial one, for the new city charter did not affect New York’s jurisdiction over the ferries and the shorelines of the East River.¹²

Emboldened by their charter, Brooklynites mustered compelling arguments for gaining that jurisdiction: New York City’s ancient grant no longer served its original public purpose and functioned mainly as a stifling monopoly; the sovereign state of New York was under no obligation to honor a grant from the defunct government of the colonial era; the true drivers of resistance were Manhattan property owners seeking to minimize competition from Brooklyn’s more attractive neighborhoods; even that the East River was not really a river but a salt-water tidal strait running between Long Island Sound and New York Bay—an “arm of the sea” whose banks were part of the Atlantic coastline, held in public trust.¹³

These arguments proved persuasive to most assemblymen and senators when a bill was brought forward early in 1835 to transfer authority over East River ferries to a commission made up of the highest officers of the state government. Unfortunately for Brooklyn, the Senate set the bar for passage at a two-thirds majority, and the bill failed by a single vote.¹⁴ Sensing the danger of so close a vote, the New York City aldermen soon approved a new ferry—South Ferry, with a landing at Atlantic Street (today’s Atlantic Avenue) at the southern edge of Brooklyn Heights—which was a widely sought link in Brooklyn’s transportation system and a gateway for the city’s expansion into what had come to be called South Brooklyn. South Ferry took the steam out of Brooklyn’s protest, and it did not build up again for a decade. In 1845, with John Greenwood again in the lead, Brooklyn finally succeeded in getting its ferry jurisdiction bill to pass. The Star responded enthusiastically: “FIRST GREAT BLOW FOR BROOKLYN RIGHTS”; “The Ferry Bill Triumphant!!!” “We have hardly language to express our feelings of gratification.”¹⁵ As it turned out, Spooner’s former restraint would have been more appropriate. New York City successfully challenged the law in court, and Brooklyn eventually gave up its plan to appeal. The aldermen from across the “arm of the sea” approved new ferries, which served Brooklyn well. As early as 1837 there were four ferry landings in Brooklyn, and another two in neighboring Williamsburgh.¹⁶ But New York City continued to collect on the ferry leases, as well as quitrents from waterfront properties. And little would change until the consolidation of the boroughs in 1898, sixty-four years after Brooklyn had gained its city charter.

The expansion of ferry service was itself an important victory, as it made possible the continuing expansion of the new city. In the half-dozen years after incorporation Brooklyn added about twelve thousand inhabitants (an increase of some 50 percent) and surpassed Albany to become the second largest city in the state. By 1845, the year of the ferry law, it was nearly two and a half times as populous as the city of 1835.¹⁷ Brooklyn’s newest newspaper, the Brooklyn Eagle, commented wryly: “We do not believe there is another city in the State which can exhibit any such gain as this. Brooklyn now contains 60,000 inhabitants, or, ‘with its suburbs,’ about half a million!”¹⁸

Brooklyn’s growth thickened old neighborhoods, but the city also enlarged its footprint, southward from Brooklyn Heights into areas now known as Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, and Carroll Gardens (a little later into Red Hook and Gowanus), and southeastward from the heavily settled downtown toward Fort Greene and Clinton Hill. Each of these peripheral areas (the 6th and 7th wards of the new city) increased fivefold between 1835 and 1845, accounting for nearly half of the city’s growth. The expansion of the downtown required no new ferry service since many of the people who lived there worked in Brooklyn’s own factories and workshops and on its waterfront. But South Brooklyn, which was almost entirely the product of the new ferry, soon became the focus of most discussions of Brooklyn’s development. Atlantic Street was emerging as an elegant commercial boulevard, made more attractive by the new Long Island Railroad’s decision to run trains down to the ferry landing through a paved-over tunnel. South Brooklyn’s answer to Fulton Street, Atlantic also served the rapidly developing southern half of Brooklyn Heights.¹⁹

A particularly notable development, about a half-mile farther south, was the construction of the Atlantic Basin, a huge harbor enclosing forty-two acres of the passage known as Buttermilk Channel that runs between Governor’s Island and Brooklyn’s waterfront at Red Hook. This was the project of Daniel Richards, an upstate émigré to New York City and then Brooklyn (and another descendant of early Puritan settlers). Richards was one of several entrepreneurs who tried to get ahead of Brooklyn’s expansion by buying land in Red Hook, leveling its hills, and filling in its marshes and ponds in anticipation of yet another ferry and another market for suburban houses. When this project faltered Richards turned to cotton manufacturing and then to improving the South Brooklyn waterfront by incorporating the Atlantic Dock Company in 1840. This enterprise succeeded, although after a few years control passed to James S. T. Stranahan, yet another former upstate New Yorker with New England roots. Richards retained ownership of several warehouses that ringed the basin and in 1846 built a steam-powered grain elevator that drew to the Atlantic Basin nearly all the western grain that came to New York harbor through the Erie Canal and down the Hudson River. By far Brooklyn’s largest waterfront project, the basin helped secure another of Richards’s ambitions, a Hamilton Avenue ferry that drove Brooklyn’s southward expansion well beyond Atlantic Street.²⁰

The Atlantic Basin and other new docks, warehouses, and waterfront factories, along with the retail stores, rail tunnel, and terminal on Atlantic Street, added to the commercial and industrial character of the Brooklyn cityscape. Below the Heights, the sandy beach and small wooden dock where Hezekiah Pierrepont had kept his rowboat were, over time, replaced with docks, warehouses, and a street (Furman) that ran between the Fulton and South ferry landings, linking the South Brooklyn waterfront with the old downtown.²¹ By the 1850s, Hezekiah’s son Henry and several of his wealthy neighbors had built tall warehouses against the bluff on the east side of Furman Street (and landscaped the roofs of these buildings as extensions of the rear gardens of their Brooklyn Heights mansions).²² But as South Brooklyn took shape homes and residential streets predominated, amplifying the perception of Brooklyn as a beautiful suburb. The streets immediately below Atlantic were built up with frame, brick, and brownstone row houses intended for South Ferry commuters, and this expansion extended into today’s Carroll Gardens and Boerum Hill. Contemporaries who largely ignored the mixed business and residential expansion of Brooklyn’s old downtown into the 7th ward were impressed by the suburbanization of the 6th. An 1841 article in The Ladies’ Companion describes “New, or South Brooklyn,” as “crossed by broad airy streets, ornamented with trees, containing large handsome private dwellings, surrounded by gardens glowing with flowers,” the residences, mostly, of “merchants engaged in business in New York.”²³ “The exertions of many prominent merchants” in building up South Brooklyn, wrote the Star a year later, “have rendered it inferior to no other portion of our city in architectural beauty.”²⁴

Many South Brooklyn streets were lined with elegant townhouses, set well back from the street to provide room for ample front gardens. But the district had a good deal of more modest housing as well, and some of the larger houses were rented to two or more families, answering complaints that too much of the domestic construction in this area and elsewhere ignored the needs of less affluent commuters.²⁵ Housing prices and rents remained lower in Brooklyn than in Manhattan, helping to explain Brooklyn’s rapid growth during the severe economic depression that began in 1837. “The pressure of late circumstances have driven many people from the city,” wrote the Star in 1838, “and induced others to quit larger dwellings for smaller.” New Yorkers who had been paying $1,000 and upward in yearly rent could now find “quite as handsome houses” in Brooklyn for $500 or $600.²⁶

Brooklyn did suffer during the depression. If bold business plans such as the Atlantic Basin were realized, others were not.²⁷ Banks, manufacturing firms, stores, and other businesses contracted and failed, driving up unemployment and crippling the nascent union movement. And hard times hobbled local government. When the City of Brooklyn received its charter officials planned to construct a city hall adequate to both the day-to-day conduct of public business and its newly exalted status. The city purchased a triangular plot of land east of Brooklyn Heights, bounded by Fulton, Joralemon, and Court streets, near the old Dutch Reformed Church, a location that expressed not only a connection to Brooklyn’s long history but also the city government’s neutrality toward its old and new neighborhoods. Calvin Pollard, a New York builder, won the design competition and construction began in 1836, only to be halted a year later. The building had barely cleared ground level and there it lay, a low stone wall surrounding a large, triangular hole in the ground. When the depression ended in the mid-1840s, construction resumed on a somewhat more modest Greek Revival design of Gamaliel King. Brooklyn’s City Hall was completed in 1848, fourteen years after the conferral of the city charter.²⁸

With the return of good times Brooklyn’s robust growth continued, as it did in neighboring Williamsburgh, a village of fewer than three thousand souls in 1835, that nearly quadrupled over the next decade, and then jumped to thirty-one thousand by 1850.²⁹ As it grew it began to take on the suburban character we have observed well below Wallabout Bay. “South Williamsburgh is destined to rival South Brooklyn in the regularity of its streets and good taste displayed in erecting houses,” wrote the Eagle in 1849. “Many of the New York merchants and lawyers reside here, and a few editors.”³⁰ In 1852 Williamsburgh was incorporated as a city, even as proposals were made to unite it and more distant sections of the Town of Bushwick with Brooklyn. The two riverfront settlements, Brooklyn and Williamsburgh, had long been separated by the Navy Yard, Wallabout Bay, and the marshy lands around the bay, but growth brought them closer together, giving force to the idea of merging them into a single city. New Yorkers looked across the East River with an appetite for still larger consolidation: “Brooklyn is to take Bushwick for its breakfast,” wrote the New York Courier and Enquirer, “Williamsburgh for its dinner, and when it goes joyously out, rollicking and revelling like a fat alderman … it will find itself seized upon and swallowed by New York.”³¹ That last meal was savored prematurely by nearly half a century, but the table was set for the first two. Bushwick and Williamsburg became the 13th-through-18th wards of the City of Brooklyn on January 1, 1855.³²

At a stroke, Brooklyn became a city of more than two hundred thousand inhabitants. Five years later the US census confirmed its standing as the third largest city in the nation, trailing only New York and Philadelphia, and surpassing Baltimore, Boston, and New Orleans. The combined 1860 populations of New York and Brooklyn introduced to the United States a new phenomenon, a metropolitan area of more than one million inhabitants—in a country that sixty years earlier had no city larger than sixty thousand.³³

Even without the annexation of Williamsburg and Bushwick, Brooklyn’s growth during these years stretched the city well beyond the old neighborhoods. By 1845 the five wards of the old village housed only 60 percent of the city’s total population. That proportion dropped to 30 percent by 1860 (20 percent with Williamsburg and Bushwick included), despite the addition of twenty thousand people—equal to a Manchester, New Hampshire; a Dayton, Ohio; or a Paterson, New Jersey—to these wards. Brooklyn Heights and the old downtown were vastly outpaced by the peripheral wards, especially by South Brooklyn, which grew from ten thousand inhabitants in 1845 to nearly seventy thousand by 1860, mostly in areas within easy reach of Atlantic Street, but also further south in parts of Red Hook and Gowanus. Most of the hills and wetlands east of Gowanus Creek, however, and nearly all the land rising toward Prospect Hill—land that would eventually be called Park Slope—were still largely rural.³⁴ Edwin C. Litchfield, who had made a fortune from Midwestern railroads, purchased a square mile of real estate in this part of the city during the early 1850s, and hired the renowned architect Alexander Jackson Davis to build a majestic mansion at the top of Prospect Hill, an excellent perch for gazing down on the land he expected to become the next Brooklyn Heights. Like Daniel Richards and James S. T. Stranahan, Litchfield was an upstate New Yorker with a New England background—and, like Richards in Red Hook in the 1830s, he was too far ahead of Brooklyn’s expansion. The fashionable neighborhood he imagined was only beginning to take shape when he died in 1885.³⁵ In between were a Civil War, a bridge, and the laying out at the top of Prospect Hill of a magnificent city park. Incorporated into the park was Litchfield’s mansion, which Brooklyn seized through eminent domain, reducing the Litchfields to life tenants of the city. Grace Hall remains today the administrative headquarters of Prospect Park, a stone’s throw from the now fully built-up neighborhood of Park Slope.

A great and growing city, Brooklyn needed municipal services, such as transportation, water, sewerage, street lighting, policing, and fire protection, along with public and quasi-public amenities that would proclaim—to locals and strangers alike—the grandeur of the place. Brooklyn’s city government attended relatively well to most of these public needs, despite the rancor and the oscillations of power and policy inherent in a system shaped by partisan combat and growing opportunities for diverting public funds to private pockets. “Machine” politics was an emerging force in American cities during this era, but as the historian Jon Teaford pointed out, the opening and paving of roads, the laying of water mains, sewers, and streetcar tracks, the expansion and management of public schools, the professionalization of police and fire departments, and the development of libraries and other public services constituted an “unheralded triumph” that moderates a better-known narrative of corruption and inefficiency.³⁶

Brooklyn had its share of party politics throughout the nineteenth century, but accusations of public malfeasance never rose to a fever pitch, and once the pigs were cleared from the city’s streets most Brooklynites seemed fairly satisfied with the work of their city fathers.³⁷ As the city implemented a plan for a new water system illicit money may well have been made from this huge project: a reservoir in Ridgewood, just over the Kings County line in Queens, a secondary reservoir on Prospect Hill, and many miles of water mains laid throughout the city. But when the system was completed in 1859 the Star did not allege corruption, and Brooklynites were as proud of their city as New Yorkers had been when its Croton system was opened in 1842.³⁸ The Brooklyn City Rail Road Company franchise to lay tracks and operate horse cars across the city in 1853 was not generally scorned as a lucrative—or undeserved—political reward.³⁹ Once larger and more comfortable cars began to carry commuters away from ferry landings, and on other routes that stitched together the rapidly spreading city, they were celebrated as a vast improvement over the omnibuses and stages that for decades had bumped along Brooklyn’s streets.

One of the most important issues facing Brooklyn’s city government was the creation of public parks. Because parks involved the removal of land from the real estate market and the apportionment of payment among the city’s inhabitants, their creation was more controversial than any other initiative within Brooklyn’s civic culture. The issue first arose during the village era over the preservation of the brow of the Heights as a public promenade. For years locals had strolled along the Heights, on private land, without harassment from landowners. Seeking to convert this trespass into a public right, Hezekiah Pierrepont asked other landowners to cede land to the village along the edge of the Heights. When a close friend did not agree, Pierrepont dropped the idea. But he remained committed to the provision of public space on the Heights, and after his death the executors of his estate made a large square of land available to the city for purchase as a public park. Faced with opposition from those who feared a significant tax assessment, the Common Council turned down the offer.⁴⁰ The lost opportunity troubled many Brooklyn boosters. Spooner’s Star urged the city endlessly but in vain to buy land on the Heights for a “promenade, which for beauty, is unsurpassed in the whole world.”⁴¹

The Eagle, which opposed the Star on most things political, agreed, lamenting “the shameful loss which has occurred to the city of Brooklyn, and its ‘generations yet unborn.’ ” This 1846 editorial, which may have been penned by the Eagle’s new editor, Walt Whitman, looked forward as well as backward, calling attention to a proposed park on the hill topped by the Revolutionary-era Fort Putnam (renamed Fort Greene during the War of 1812), around which lay a good deal of vacant land in an area that was clearly in the path of the city’s eastward expansion. The site was close to Brooklyn’s only existing public park, which sat on low land next to the Navy Yard and was dismissed by Whitman as “that miserable piece of a place … which will never amount to anything, whatever amount of money should be expended on it.” Far better to develop the land remaining on the edge of the Heights and the area around Fort Greene as Brooklyn’s first truly usable public parks.⁴²

The Heights promenade was a lost cause, but on April 27, 1847, the state legislature authorized the city to acquire thirty-seven acres of land around Fort Greene for what was to be called Washington Park, and to levy a tax on property, according to current valuations, within seven of the nine city wards (exempting the more distant and entirely rural 8th and 9th wards). Not surprisingly, the taxing provision caused trouble. On May 4 the Star denounced those who refused to recognize the park, or any other costly civic improvement, as a shared responsibility.⁴³ For years Spooner had railed against wealthy commuters whose interest in Brooklyn extended little beyond their own domestic comfort, a prospering church, and low taxes. Such a person, it seems, was Lewis Tappan, New York City silk merchant, founder of the credit-reporting Mercantile Agency (predecessor to Dun and Bradstreet), and leader of the New York-based American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Tappan, who eventually led and financed several reform organizations in New York, but whose name is not on any of the lists of officers or benefactors of Brooklyn’s cultural or benevolent institutions, was a leader of the opposition to the taxing scheme for Washington Park. As the principal speaker at a mass meeting on the subject, Tappan (who lived on Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights) argued that since the owners of land immediately surrounding the park would benefit more than anyone else from rising land values, they should bear most of the expense. This argument was based on language in the city charter. But to Alden Spooner, Walt Whitman, and many of their correspondents, it demonstrated a limited commitment to Brooklyn’s civic culture—to Brooklyn as a community to which all its inhabitants were required to sacrifice for a larger public good.⁴⁴

Many of Brooklyn’s prominent men joined Tappan in this protest. David Leavitt chaired the meeting at which Tappan spoke, and the long list of attendees included Leavitt’s son-in-law Fisher Howe; Henry J. Pierrepont, representing the estate of his father; Seth Low, grandfather of his namesake, who would become mayor of Brooklyn and later the consolidated New York City; and the wealthy entrepreneur James S. T. Stranahan, who would lead the movement for Prospect Park.⁴⁵ But men of equal distinction led a well-attended meeting in support of the tax. It was chaired by the aging Augustus Graham, who was widely venerated as one of Brooklyn’s most liberal benefactors, and among its vice-chairs were former mayor Joseph Sprague, the prominent Reverend Evan Johnson, and Alden Spooner. Speeches were delivered by Spooner, his son Alden J., a local attorney, and John Greenwood, the Supreme Court commissioner, soon to be city judge, and surely one of Brooklyn’s most dedicated citizens.⁴⁶ This second side argued that good citizenship required setting the public good over personal interest. The argument had failed to secure a promenade on the Heights. Would it succeed with Washington Park?

Before the month was out both sides agreed that the city should acquire the land and build a public park. They agreed as well that three disinterested commissioners, appointed by the Superior Court of New York City (not Brooklyn), should assign the burden to each ward in proportion to the benefit its residents would derive from the park—the greater burden falling on the property owners near the park, and lesser amounts, diminishing with distance from the park, borne by owners residing in the other wards. To buy the land the city would issue bonds maturing in twenty years and assess an annual tax on each ward equal to one-twentieth of its apportioned responsibility. Spooner was pleased, as the compromise showed the way to draw on the resources of all the city’s residents for other public projects. By April 1848 he was pointing out another excellent spot for a city park on Prospect Hill.⁴⁷

The controversy surrounding the expansion of Brooklyn’s public institutions and amenities should not obscure a larger truth: many of the initiatives that gave shape and character to the growing city were private or quasi-public and lay largely or entirely outside the domain of city government. This was even true, in one spectacular instance, with a type of park. By the 1830s the filling up of small churchyards in the city called for new facilities to inter the dead. In this era of Romantic aesthetics the solution seemed almost foreordained: a large “rural cemetery,” located on beautiful land that could be made still more beautiful by shaping the natural landscape according to design principles Romantics called the “picturesque.” The first application of these principles in the United States appeared in 1831 when Mount Auburn Cemetery opened outside of Boston. A visit to Mount Auburn in 1832 (and some European cemeteries the following year) inspired Henry E. Pierrepont to explore the idea of developing a rural cemetery in Brooklyn. The private project of a joint-stock company, the Green-Wood Cemetery Company was incorporated in 1838 to purchase and develop nearly two hundred acres of hilly and wooded land above Gowanus Bay. The first interments were received by the autumn of 1840. As a cemetery, but just as notably as a quasi-public park, Green-Wood was a spectacular success and would eventually grow to more than four hundred acres. Too far south to receive many pedestrian visitors from the more densely populated parts of the city, Green-Wood became such an immense attraction to carriage-owning residents of Brooklyn and New York City (who took the South Ferry and drove three miles to the cemetery) that separate entrances were created for funerals and more casual visitors. Wags noted that all wealthy New Yorkers made at least one trip to Green-Wood Cemetery—more than one if they intended to enjoy the view.⁴⁸

Most of the large new rural cemeteries, including Green-Wood, belonged to no church or denomination and did not impart a specific doctrinal expression to life or death. They were nonetheless suffused with religion. Graveside religious ceremonies were daily events and religious symbols abounded on monuments to the deceased. Visitors who came to enjoy the cemetery’s parklike qualities almost always commented at length on the solemnity of the place. For some this led naturally to religious reflection: “The very ground on which we tread, the ancient forest trees that surround us, and the very air we breathe, are hallowed by holy associations…. Above all, God is here.”⁴⁹ Whether this sensibility was particularly acute in Brooklyn’s rural cemetery, as opposed to Boston’s or Philadelphia’s, we cannot say. But we should at least observe that Green-Wood was founded and thrived during the heyday of the City of Churches, when religious institutions rapidly multiplied, institutions opposed by religious people did not, and public discourse and public action were shaped by the dictates of a Protestant Christianity based primarily on religious traditions brought to Brooklyn from New England.

As Brooklyn grew so did the number of its churches, and at a somewhat faster pace—the sixteen churches in Brooklyn and Williamsburgh in 1835, for example, swelled to 142 by 1855, a nearly ninefold increase that compares with a sevenfold increase in the local population. This growth impressed contemporaries such as William H. Smith, who published a list of local churches in his Brooklyn and Kings County Record. The list, Smith concluded, fully justified calling Brooklyn the City of Churches, and he thought it “probable that there is not another city in enlightened Christendom that has as large a number of places for religious worship, in proportion to its population.” That claim may have been bold, but Smith could at least point out that Brooklyn had a far greater number of churches, in proportion to its population, than New York City. In 1860 Brooklyn had a church for every 1,734 inhabitants, compared to one for every 3,070 in New York.⁵⁰

These numbers tell only part of the story, and perhaps not the most important part, of the influence of Protestant religiosity over Brooklyn’s day-to-day life. Cooperation among Protestants—increasing the force of Protestantism itself—was enhanced by refocusing many denominations away from fine distinctions of theological doctrine and toward devotional practices that emphasized the exercise of Christian piety at home, at work, and in the larger community. Denominational differences were by no means erased by this shift; nor was the relative power within the community of specific churches and church congregations. Methodists, for example, were less inclined toward influencing public policies, and the predominantly nonelite social status of Brooklyn’s Methodist congregants (Black and white) made civic interventions less likely. Upper- and middle-class Yankee Presbyterians possessed a much stronger inclination and ability to intervene. Still, the grounds for cooperation were improving. Protestants of different denominations may have disagreed about specific ways to create a more Christian community, but they did agree that such a pursuit was necessary and legitimate. Absent from all was any scruple that demanded a wall of separation between the church and the state.⁵¹

As in many other American cities and towns, Brooklyn’s religious people, Protestants in particular, played pivotal roles in creating and operating quasi-public organizations devoted to moral or benevolent reforms. Smith’s 1855 Record includes nearly two dozen such organizations. Two YMCAs (one in Williamsburg), three Bible societies, a religious tract society, a city missionary society, the Protestant Orphan Asylum Society, the Church Charity Foundation, and the Brotherhoods of Episcopal and Presbyterian churches, had obvious ties to Protestant churches, but other, seemingly secular organizations, also expressed Protestant religiosity. Religious groups called for the founding of a city hospital for the poor during the mid-1840s, and at public meetings on this subject Protestant clergymen were among the most forceful advocates. When the cornerstone was laid in 1851, the Reverend Fred A. Farley of the First Unitarian Church spoke at length of the hospital as “a Christian institution … which had grown up under the benevolent spirit of Christ’s gospel.”⁵² A similar spirit, and similar people, animated other institutions: The Brooklyn Association for Improving the Conditions of the Poor; the Brooklyn Society for the Relief of Respectable, Aged, Indigent Females; the Brooklyn Female Employment Society; the Brooklyn Industrial Schools Association; the Children’s Aid Society.⁵³ These institutions were run by religious people, often for explicitly religious purposes and sometimes in connection with specific churches. A report of the Brooklyn Industrial Schools Association, for example, proposes a “solid religious education” for poor girls, and lists below its officers thirty-five “managers,” all women representing different Protestant churches.⁵⁴

Most of the founders and managers of Brooklyn’s moral and benevolent reform societies were men, and even the seemingly all-female Industrial Schools Association had an Advisory Committee of seven males. But women played a significant role in church-related reforms, largely because they were active in the churches themselves, often constituting a majority of communicants. Women’s activism may have been enhanced by the weekday absence of commuting husbands from Brooklyn’s suburban neighborhoods, but women reformers appeared in many American communities of this era, including small ones where husbands worked closer to home. The City of Churches, indeed, was not unique in the extent and forms of its moral and benevolent reforms. More distinctive for one of the nation’s largest cities was the pervasiveness and power of Brooklyn’s resistance to secular institutions deemed incompatible with its Christian ethos.

Opposition to the theater remained one of the clearest examples of this resistance. Flourishing in the pre–Civil War era, New York’s theaters provided Brooklyn’s moralists with highly visible examples of urban evils they expected Brooklyn to avoid. Objections to the theater were threefold: the plays and skits that formed the typical mélange of nightly offerings were often frivolous and sometimes immoral in message and tone; some performers, male and female, had shady reputations; and, most troubling of all, New York’s theaters were closely intertwined with prostitution. Brothels were numerous in the vicinity of theaters, and inside the theater prostitutes hunted for customers in the lobbies and from their perches in the infamous “third tier.” According to the New York journalist and author George G. Foster—no stranger to sensationalist exaggeration—“abandoned women” typically occupy fully one-quarter of the house, “in which they nightly and publicly drive their sickening trade.”⁵⁵ The Eagle’s assessment was no calmer: “The theatres of New York and all our large cities are the rendezvous of the depraved of both sexes. Their lobbies are the resort of prostitutes and blacklegs; and the characters of actors and actresses could hardly be described without offending good taste.”⁵⁶

For all these reasons the theater threatened the public goals of Brooklyn’s Protestant leaders, including many who commuted daily to businesses in New York and wished to maintain their domestic world as a respectable—even a cleansing—retreat from the big city.⁵⁷ Support for the church—the institution that was the focus of their lives during the one day of the week these commuters spent in Brooklyn—was the antithesis and the antidote to support for the theater, which threatened the respectability that was essential to the upper- and middle-class suburban ethos and, even more powerfully, the injunctions of post-Puritan Protestantism. As James H. Callender notes in his insider’s history of Brooklyn Heights, “the community, made up of people of New England birth and upbringing, looked upon the theatre as a creation of the devil.”⁵⁸ We may detect a whiff of hypocrisy as well as brimstone here, as the New York theaters were readily available just across the river, and we can imagine some of the most straight-laced Yankee Brooklynites enjoying an occasional evening at the Park, the Olympic, Niblo’s Garden, the decidedly raffish Bowery, or even “the third tier.” The point of the opposition, however, was not merely, and perhaps not even primarily, one of individual behavior, but of the Christian character of Brooklyn itself. All the better, in this reckoning, that New York had theaters—and brothels—while Brooklyn had none.

This attitude set limits on the realization of another, contradictory goal, no doubt embraced more fully by prominent Brooklynites who were not New York commuters—the enhancement of Brooklyn as a great and growing city. Could Brooklyn be both a suburb and a city when these two social worlds were defined in such antithetical terms? For fastidious Brooklynites one solution was to develop, or make more extensive use of, respectable institutions of leisure. The most widely available were series of evening lectures, offered by the Brooklyn Lyceum and one or two succeeding organizations each week through the autumn and winter months.

Such entertainment was not novel. Cities and towns of all sizes played host to a variety of itinerant lecturers, ranging from famous intellectuals such as Ralph Waldo Emerson to lesser-known scientists, authors, clergymen, and travelers. Topics varied widely, from “The Moral Law of Politics and of Our Political System” (delivered by the Hon. Daniel D. Barnard of Albany), to “The Sidereal Heavens,” (Professor William A. Norton of Newark College in Delaware), to “The Wonders of Science Compared with the Wonders of Romance” (Rev. Edward Hitchcock, who was also a professor of geology at Amherst College), to “The Distinction between Taste and Fashion” (by no less a figure than Rev. Horace Bushnell of Hartford), to the history and topography of Macedonia (by a Mr. Pedicaris of unspecified credentials).⁵⁹ Brooklyn’s press did its best to promote these lectures with favorable reviews and reports of large and appreciative audiences composed of “the intellect, beauty, and fashion of our city.”⁶⁰

Although an element of boosterism motivated this coverage, the lectures did provide an important alternative to less respectable entertainments, and in Protestant Brooklyn clearly carried a moral burden. In 1853 the Eagle praised the Brooklyn Institute for providing not only “a splendid course of popular lectures for the improvement and occupation of our winter evenings during the week,” but also an annual series of six Sunday evening lectures, endowed by Augustus Graham, “on the power, wisdom and goodness of God, as manifest in His works.”⁶¹ A better antidote to the theater could scarcely be imagined. Surprisingly, only a few years later the Eagle complained of boring lectures that attracted small audiences. “The lecturing business has degenerated into verbiage and twattle, never rising above common-place truisms, too silly to instruct and too stupid to amuse.” The ulterior motive of this rebuff, however, may have been to promote an alternative, noting that the “musical taste of our citizens is almost a passion; and concerts are always well attended.”⁶² The music Brooklynites most often listened to, the Eagle implied, was just as respectable, and morally just as safe, as lectures on the goodness of God or the topography of Macedonia.

Much of that music was experienced in churches, not only as the weekly programs of church choirs but also for a time as the evening public concerts of the Brooklyn Sacred Music Association.⁶³ Outside the churches, in venues such as the Lyceum, the Athenaeum on Atlantic Street, and Duflon’s Military Garden, concerts offered secular music of various kinds—popular ballads, symphonic selections, even an occasional opera. A Mozart Association performed at the Lyceum in 1843, and there was a Mendelssohn Society, led by none other than John Greenwood, who also happens to have been the organist at the First Unitarian Church. In April 1857, the very moment the Eagle called for a shift from lectures to concerts, leading men in the city, including Greenwood, founded the Brooklyn Philharmonic Society.⁶⁴ Before then musical events beyond the churches had been sporadic. Another new organization still on the horizon—the Brooklyn Academy of Music—would help change that and, to a degree, reduce Brooklyn’s resistance to nonmusical theater.

Before the founding of the Academy of Music, there had been several attempts at founding a theater in the City of Churches that would be entirely free of the sins associated with the theaters of Manhattan. It was an uphill battle. In 1850 John Cammeyer built the Brooklyn Museum on Fulton Street as a thin disguise for a theater. The second-floor museum “contained a fine collection of stuffed birds, old pennies, … musty coats, deformed skeletons, wax figures” and other attractions, while the third-floor “lecture room” was actually a theater, operating at first under management that included New York’s Frank Chanfrau, famed far and wide for his portrayal of Mose the Bowery B’hoy at the Olympic and Chatham theaters.⁶⁵ Chanfrau, whose Mose thrilled New York’s working men and women but drove away genteel audiences, may not have been the best choice for overcoming the suspicions of Brooklyn’s self-respecting Protestants. The Star greeted the museum as “a beautiful little place of amusement,” deeming its performances “of a character well calculated to draw full and fashionable houses,” while conceding that to date they did no such thing.⁶⁶ The theatrical company soon gave way to performances by horses (coaxed somehow to the third floor!), and then to renewed attempts at human theater, before the building was converted to a regimental armory.⁶⁷

Editors tried to soften opposition by publishing lists of current productions under titles such as “Brooklyn Entertainments” or “Amusements To-night,” implying that entertainment and amusement were worthy in their own right, apart from considerations of morality and decorum. The problem, and not just at first, was that most of the offerings remained well within the nontheatrical canon. On December 1, 1841, for example, the Star listed four “entertainments” in Brooklyn. Three were lectures and the fourth was a concert of sacred music at the First Presbyterian Church.⁶⁸ The “amusements” listed on October 6, 1855, included six theatrical productions, but five of them were at New York theaters, while the sole Brooklyn item was a performance by child actors at the Athenaeum.⁶⁹

But things were changing in Brooklyn, in part because they were changing in New York, with some theaters aiming for greater respectability by excluding prostitutes, and by extension the men who came to the theater in search of them. If New York could make drama more respectable, why couldn’t Brooklyn relax its guard a little and admit first-class drama to its evenings? This question was raised in the context of the building in Brooklyn of an impressive new concert hall, intended primarily for opera and symphonic music, and located on the morally safe ground of Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights. The hall was intended to house an entirely respectable institution, which the New York Times, with some amusement, reported as the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, “a most excellent name, and one which cannot possibly prove offensive to the nice religious feelings of our excellent neighbors across the East River.”⁷⁰ The actual name, of course, was the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which gave offense to no one, and elicited no additional ribbing about Brooklyn’s religiosity from the New York press. The project began in 1858 with a call by the Brooklyn Philharmonic Society for a hall large enough for its own concerts. Following public meetings and a successful drive for stock subscriptions, the state legislature incorporated “the Brooklyn Academy of Music, for the purpose of encouraging and cultivating a taste for music, literature and the arts.”⁷¹ A mixed Gothic and Moorish design was supplied by Leopold Eidlitz, construction began in earnest in the autumn of 1859, and the building delivered its inaugural concert in January 1861.⁷²

Following the overture to a concert that consisted mainly of selections from well-known operas, S. B. Chittenden of the academy board gave a welcoming speech that night in which he spoke approvingly of “the Puritans” before assuring the packed audience that the new building would not be used for theatrical productions, and that every performance that occurred within its walls would be “pure and innocent.”⁷³ He was implicitly acknowledging the visible and vocal opposition to the new institution, especially among the Protestant clergy—the Rev. Benjamin Cutler of St. Ann’s was a particularly adamant foe—on the grounds that this attractive new venue was a Trojan Horse, establishing a theater despite all the efforts of right-thinking people to exclude it.⁷⁴ Among the academy’s subscribers, too, were those whose support was predicated on the banishment of theater from the building. Intended to reassure both groups, Chittenden’s remarks were perhaps also a warning to subscribers who favored the introduction of spoken drama on some of the many evenings when operas or concerts (or balls, or horticultural exhibits) were not offered. They had heard Chittenden say there would be nothing disreputable in or near the splendid new Brooklyn Heights facility and that every production would be under strict supervision, as to content and personnel, by management and a board of directors of unimpeachable respectability. They may have wondered whether this justified classical and other responsible theatrical productions. If the academy board could approve of Verdi’s La Traviata, might they not also approve of the plays of Shakespeare and Sheridan?

“It has been given out that theatrical representations are to be remorselessly tabooed,” wrote the Eagle a week after the opening, a statement that presaged a long battle.⁷⁵ In December the academy board announced a series of four plays to be performed just before and after Christmas, stiffly justifying a clearly controversial decision: “That while the Board are opposed to letting the building for theatrical purposes generally, they will permit it to be used for such select dramatic representations as they or a special committee of their body may approve, subject to such regulations as they may prescribe.” The plays—Hamlet, Othello, and two comedies, Sheridan’s School for Scandal and London Assurance by the popular Dublin-born playwright Dionysius Boucicault—prompted the Eagle to declare it “wonderful that such a fuss should have been made about so small a matter.”⁷⁶ Less than a month later, though, the Star revealed that the academy had “declined to permit Mr. Wm. M. Fleming, the well-known manager, to give a series of dramatic entertainments in so chaste a place as the Montague street temple,” the proposed plays being, in the board’s view, “too light and frivolous for the ‘Hemisphere of Brooklyn.’ ”⁷⁷ So the “small matter” was not fully resolved. Academy members and others who wished to bring the theater to Brooklyn as a legitimate and permanent institution won but a partial victory in the early 1860s. That it would later become a rout—the Brooklyn Academy of Music eventually became and remains today a renowned venue for dramatic arts—should not obscure the strength and tenacity of Protestant leaders, clergy and laymen alike, determined to protect Brooklyn from error.

The Christian Sabbath was another battlefield over the purposes and power of Yankee propriety. From the early days of the village era Brooklyn passed and enforced, with variable success, Sabbatarian laws prohibiting activities ranging from playing ball to selling alcoholic drink. A new Sunday closing law passed in 1852 led to renewed enforcement efforts by temperance mayors Edward A. Lambert and George Hall. A particularly energetic advocate of a dry Sabbath, Hall enjoyed touring Brooklyn on Sundays with several policemen in tow to test whether the side and back doors of taverns and groceries were tightly closed.⁷⁸ Perfect enforcement was impossible, of course, but skirmishes between violators and public officials, often based on differences in social class and ethnicity, rarely became public controversies.

One Sabbatarian issue that did become a public battle emanated from the Common Council’s decision in 1853 to withhold from the newly formed Brooklyn City Rail Road Company the right to run horse cars on Sunday. Apart from an almost instinctive tendency to forbid any secular activity on the Sabbath, the council was responding to the fear that “rowdies” from New York would come to Brooklyn on the ferries, ride the cars, and disturb the quiet observance of the Sabbath, not only in the churches but on the private lands of farmers and suburbanites in the outer wards. Almost immediately, this decision met with opposition, especially from those who sensed a motive based as much on social class as on religion. It would not necessarily be rowdies who would fill the Sunday cars, they argued, but sober workingmen who, with their families, sought the simple pleasure of green fields and open sky after six days of toil in the confinement of Manhattan workshops. Seeking not just a rural retreat but the ability to attend churches distant from their homes—not a violation of the Sabbath but its very fulfillment—Brooklyn’s own workers would suffer as well. Wealthy Brooklynites could take their carriages to attend any church in the city, visit Green-Wood, or go wherever they pleased, without any restriction on their movement. Why should the poor be circumscribed?

These arguments appeared in 1854 in a long letter to the Star from Walt Whitman. Warming up, perhaps, for the following year’s publication of Leaves of Grass, Whitman wrote: “The citizen must have room. He must learn to be so muscular and self-possessed; to rely more on the restrictions of himself than any restrictions of statute books, or city ordinances, or police. This is the feeling that will make a great, athletic, spirited city, of noble and marked character, with a reputation for itself wherever railroads run, and ships sail, and newspapers and books are read.”⁷⁹ Not realizing they had a great poet in their midst, most Brooklynites—save for one who wrote a send-up of Whitman’s prose three days later—appeared to have ignored his eccentric essay. But opposition to the council’s decision was not ignored. Meetings were held and petitions filed, including at least two from South Brooklyn arguing that the 8th ward would become nearly uninhabitable if horse cars ran through it on Sundays.⁸⁰

The arguments for and against the Sunday cars raged on for nearly three years, coming to a head in the spring of 1857. Pious men such as ex-mayor Lambert argued at a public meeting in March that Brooklyn’s Sabbatarian law “was at the foundation of all our institutions, and that the common law recognized the binding obligation of the Christian Sabbath.” Sundays in Brooklyn already saw more crime than any other three days of the week, according to Lambert, and the Sunday horse cars would destroy the “quiet and sanctity” which made Brooklyn a desirable place to live. He and his family walked two miles to church each Sunday; they did not need or want horse cars to get there. Fisher Howe, a City Rail Road Company director and the owner of land in the outer wards, reminded the assembled gentlemen that the “green fields” some proponents of the Sunday cars spoke of as valuable resources for urban working people were also private property whose owners did not welcome trespassers. Livingston Miller, a former resident of Staten Island, amplified the reasons for Howe’s concern, reporting that the New Yorkers who came to the island on Sunday “kept up such a perpetual riot, as to interrupt public worship, and committed such depredations as greatly to diminish the value of property. People had to stay away from church to watch their property.”⁸¹ The Eagle’s response, especially to Lambert’s remarks, was scorching: “In one breath, Sunday in Brooklyn is a saturnalia of crime; in the next it is so quiet and heavenly that people live in it on that account. It is unnecessary to reply to arguments like these; we prefer to let them demolish each other.” As for his family’s weekly two-mile trek to church: Fine, and they can “wear peas in their shoes” if they want to, but “they have no right to demand that everybody else shall do the same.”⁸²

The Eagle’s conclusion cut a little deeper than defenders of Brooklyn’s Sabbatarian laws might have wished: “If the Creator had intended the Sabbath to be on the Puritan plan he would have prevented the sun from shining, the odorous breeze from blowing, the musical brooks from murmuring, the birds from singing on that day; … But he made a lovely and cheerful world to live in, and no man has a right to make a Hades of it.”⁸³

This sentiment may not have eroded in any significant way the influence of Yankee Protestantism in Brooklyn, but it is worth noting that the Eagle was on the winning side of this dispute. In April 1857 the Common Council agreed to permit the Sunday cars. But the City Rail Road Company at first demurred, Fisher Howe and seven other officers voting not to run them. A month later the company reversed course, but only as a three-month experiment, with a limited number of cars running on Sunday.⁸⁴ On May 17, 1857, the first Sunday horse cars ran, and according to the Eagle (perhaps not the most unbiased source), they were filled with respectable people—churchgoers in the morning, and in the evening perfectly peaceable working people, evidently returning from visiting friends. “The rowdies, thieves, and rascals, who frightened the pious and timid souls of Gowanus, … were creatures of the imagination.”⁸⁵ On the following Sunday cars ran full time and continued to do so after the end of the three-month experiment. In February 1858 the Rev. J. L. Hatch, a proponent of both Sunday cars and a joyful Sabbath, wrote to the Superintendent of Police and the president of the Rail Road Company to affirm the success of the experiment. Both responded that rowdiness had never appeared on the Sunday cars, President A. P. Stanton going so far as to declare that “there is better order, more decorum and quietness in the cars on this day than any other of the week.”⁸⁶ Interestingly, two of the original opponents of Sunday horse car service, having seen that their fears were not realized, explained three years later that this experience helped change their minds about the danger of introducing theater to the Academy of Music.⁸⁷ Apparently, Brooklyn was more secure from the devil than some of its citizens realized.

Along with the battle over the theater, the horse car controversy displayed the determination of Brooklyn’s conservative Protestant leaders to define and maintain a Christian community on their side of the East River—to give real meaning to the title “City of Churches.” They lost these battles, but only because others in the community, including devout Christians, thought them mistaken, not about their goals and values, but about the probable outcomes in each case. Brooklyn would remain a City of Churches if it had respectable forms of theater; its Sabbath would not be imperiled by allowing horse cars to run on Sunday. The controversies provoked some impatience with stern Yankee culture, but on the whole the editors of the Eagle and the Star, and presumably most of their readers, remained supporters of, not dissenters from, Brooklyn’s Protestant hegemony.

The battle over Sunday horse cars was fought over a private company’s service on the public streets of the city. Another phenomenon that occupied the seam between the private and the public was the celebration of the founding of the Brooklyn Sunday School Union Society in 1816. In this instance there was very little controversy. The annual commemoration involved much of Protestant Brooklyn and, when fully developed, imparted one of the most tangible public expressions of Protestant domination. Many of Brooklyn’s new institutions—and the conflicts some of them generated—echoed in other, usually smaller cities, particularly within New England and in the path of New Englanders’ westward migration. The Sunday school march belonged to Brooklyn alone, echoing nowhere except on its streets and in its churches.

It is not certain when this celebration was initiated, but brief reports in the local press began to appear in the late 1830s, referring without elaboration to an afternoon procession of Sunday school children and their teachers from, say, Willow Street in the Heights to a not-distant church (in 1837 the Second Presbyterian) for a religious service.⁸⁸ As the years went by the event and descriptions of it grew more elaborate and enthusiastic. “Our City wore yesterday a joyous and triumphant appearance,” the Star reported in 1850; “the children of the Sunday Schools turned out in their gay holiday clothes and their innocent fresh faces to attend the celebration of the Anniversary.” Flags floated from City Hall, while students from thirty-two schools marched through the streets behind their own banners toward a service that began with a prayer from one of Brooklyn’s leading divines, Rev. Richard Salter Storrs. After the service the children sang an anthem as they marched in separate formations toward their own schools.⁸⁹ The sheer size of the event in subsequent years—more than twenty thousand children in the 1856 celebration—required holding the service in different churches, which meant an even more extensive appropriation of Brooklyn’s streets.⁹⁰

An inclusive, city-wide celebration might be said to justify this appropriation of public space, but its boundaries were as important as its size. The parade was, by design, a Protestant—more specifically, an evangelical Protestant—event. None of Brooklyn’s Roman Catholic Sunday school children marched and services were held only in Protestant churches. Brooklyn’s Unitarians and Universalists were also excluded, although this boundary was not at first clearly drawn. In 1841, a member of the celebration’s committee of arrangements asked Rev. F. W. Holland if the children of the Unitarian Society would like to march. The invitation was accepted but quickly withdrawn when several pastors threatened to forbid their own students from participating. For decades afterward, Brooklyn’s Sunday school anniversary celebration remained the exclusive property of evangelical Protestants.⁹¹

This celebration occupied some of the city’s public space on one afternoon each year. Another space—not quite public, not quite private—was occupied each day (except Sunday) by Brooklyn’s Protestants. Brooklyn’s newspapers, like those of other American cities and towns, were the organs of political parties; conveyors of local, national, and international news; community bulletin boards; printers of official government proceedings and announcements, and of presidential and gubernatorial speeches; presenters of poetry and fiction; and compendia of advertisements ranging from real estate to patent medicine. They also printed the opinions of editors and correspondents. In many of these roles, and not just the last, each paper maintained a certain tone and style as it explored and expounded upon a range of topics that editors believed would—and should—interest readers. In Brooklyn these topics, and to some extent the tone and style, varied, but the role of religion in the pages of the Star and the Eagle is striking.

Controversies and celebrations, extensively covered as they were, formed only a portion of the religious reporting and editorializing in the two main newspapers of this period of Brooklyn’s history. Articles on the founding and opening of new churches were omnipresent, and were often long, detailed, and prominently placed. The arrival and departure of ministers were also significant news items. Sermons were printed often, again prominently and in detail; some sermons elicited correspondence and editorial comment for weeks and even months. As Brooklyn’s clergy played a significant role in the founding of institutions and in public meetings, they were often featured in the press. And editors as well as correspondents maintained, as a matter of necessity as well as conviction, a tone of piety and a favorable attitude toward religiosity. For a time during the mid-1850s the Star published a lengthy article each Monday titled “Sunday,” written by a reporter who had attended several Protestant churches on the previous day. “We are much gratified to know,” wrote the Star at the close of one such piece, “that our Sunday articles are well received by our readers, which arouses to further efforts for their pleasure and gratification.” The goal was to visit and report on all of Brooklyn’s Protestant churches as a matter of public concern.⁹²

The many articles on religious affairs, as well as the letters of correspondents, contain a discernible language of respectable Christian piety. This language was not always abandoned or compromised by discussions of topics that did not explicitly evoke “the worship of the most high” or “the path of Christian duty.” The Star and the Eagle were rival political papers, yet the exchanges between editors (and correspondents) concerning partisan combat, victory, and defeat during the political campaign season were far less prone to the denunciation and ridicule that characterized newspapers in many other American cities and towns.⁹³ In these as well as other secular contexts, Brooklyn’s editors sought to maintain a decent and, if possible, elevated tone. And when the topic turned to Brooklyn itself, editors and correspondents alike rarely wandered far from the city’s religiosity. Whig and Republican writers were supposedly more prone to pious effusion during this era, but here is a typical example from the Democratic Eagle in 1844:

That we [in Brooklyn] are a sober, moral and religious people is manifest in every one who has eyes to see with, and makes use of them. The holy Sabbath here is a proud day for the moralist and Christian, as they behold, all around them, the sure evidences of the triumph of their faith. In what other city, of our numbers, are seen so many tall spires pointing upward to the sky from the temples of the living God?⁹⁴

The authors of testimonials of this sort did not ordinarily call attention to themselves as a cadre of the pious, as most signed their pieces with an initial or pseudonym. This meant that the most frequently identified carriers of faith and good works were the clergy whose names appeared within articles and editorials. “The parsons are our chief citizens,” wrote the Eagle in its report on the opening of the Academy of Music. “We take their advice in everything; they teach us religion, and, (some of them) politics; we cannot open a school [nor even, evidently, the controversial Academy of Music] without enlisting them in the good work.”⁹⁵ Credit was duly given for these highly visible roles in religious and civic leadership. Two names appeared most often. These men were most responsible for introducing Congregationalism to Brooklyn, though this mattered less than their individual intellects, eloquence, and personalities. Simply put, they were Brooklyn’s religious superstars. One was Richard Salter Storrs, Jr. The other—The Most Famous Man in America, to cite the title of Debby Applegate’s fine biography—was Henry Ward Beecher.

Storrs was born in Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1821 into a family of clergymen stretching all the way back to Richard Mather (through Increase and Cotton Mather), probably the most distinguished lineage possible for a New England Congregationalist. Educated at Amherst and the Andover Theological Seminary, he was ordained in 1845 and appointed to the Congregational Church in Brookline, Massachusetts. A year earlier, a group of Brooklyn’s New Englanders had formed a Congregationalist society and began building what would become the Church of the Pilgrims on the corner of Henry and Remsen streets in the heart of Brooklyn Heights. When the building was completed the call went out to Storrs to become Brooklyn’s first Congregationalist pastor.⁹⁶

Storrs arrived in 1846 and never left. But spiritually and as a practical citizen, he never left New England either, and probably did more than anyone to justify and maintain the transplanting of post-Puritan Calvinism and a belief in the special civic responsibilities of the clergy from New England to the once-Dutch world of Brooklyn. An extraordinary speaker, Storrs was called upon on countless occasions, including as Brooklyn’s principal orator at the most memorable celebration in the city’s history, the opening ceremony of the Brooklyn Bridge in May 1883.⁹⁷ (It is worth noting that Brooklyn selected Storrs, a clergyman, while New York chose Abram Hewitt, a business and political leader.) The Rev. Joseph Kimball of the First Dutch Reformed Church described Storrs’ talent: “I have heard all our great speakers, but for sustained eloquence, never forgetting for an instant the dignity of his theme, Dr. Storrs surpasses any man I ever listened to. I heard him speak for more than two hours without a note and he fairly electrified me.”⁹⁸ This is an extraordinary statement, especially as it elevates Dr. Storrs’ eloquence over that of Beecher, whose fame as an orator was far greater. But what Kimball was surely expressing was a widespread appreciation in Brooklyn for the substance and gravitas that accompanied Storrs’ eloquence. He might also have had in mind his civic activism. More than any other, this was the man Brooklynites pointed to when they wanted to justify the role the clergy played as chief citizens of the City of Churches.

Unlike Storrs, Beecher was more than a local religious superstar—he was a national celebrity. Born in 1813 in Litchfield, Connecticut, Henry was the eighth of thirteen children of Lyman Beecher. An unpromising youth gave way to studies at Amherst and then at his father’s Lane Theological Seminary near Cincinnati, after which he held two pastoral posts at Presbyterian churches in Indiana, the first in the small town of Lawrenceburgh, the second in Indianapolis. Beecher thrived in Indiana, to some extent as a pastor but also as a leader of revivals, and when a New York merchant named William Cutler came through Indianapolis in the fall of 1846 and heard Beecher preach, a new opportunity arose. Cutler knew of several Brooklyn men who wished to break off from the Church of the Pilgrims to form a more progressive Congregational church than the one just placed in the hands of the conservative Richard Storrs. Brooklyn’s First Presbyterian Church was moving to new quarters, and these men were arranging to purchase the Cranberry Street property for what would become Plymouth Church. Beecher was invited to New York City to address the Home Missionary Society the following May and crossed the river to talk to the new Brooklyn congregation. Plymouth Church was formally organized in June (with a sermon from Storrs), and by October Beecher was its pastor.⁹⁹

Beecher was a sensation. His passionate preaching and magnetic personality drew crowds that were too large for the Cranberry Street church, and he filled even the larger building that replaced it when, in 1849, it was (some said providentially) gutted by fire. The rebuilt church was designed to give its pastor a stage and not just a pulpit to preach from, and Beecher made the most of it. Some years later, Samuel Clemens made the almost obligatory tourist’s visit to Plymouth Church and described Beecher as “marching up and down the stage, sawing his arms in the air, howling sarcasms this way and that, discharging rockets of poetry, and exploding mines of eloquence, halting now and then to stamp his foot three times in succession to emphasize a point.”¹⁰⁰

Beecher was highly entertaining, and his audiences greatly exceeded his Plymouth Church parishioners. The East River ferries were crowded on Sundays, and soon earned the nickname “Beecher boats.” But Beecher was no circus clown. His sermons addressed serious political issues—slavery and abolitionism above all—and conveyed as well, though not without some puzzlement among his auditors, his own theological vision. That vision gradually but decisively departed from his father’s Calvinism, and in particular from the Old School doctrines that Lyman himself had abandoned.¹⁰¹ Beecher arrived fairly early at the notion that “ ‘Love should be the Working Principle’ of religion—not blind obedience, abject submission, or cold justice.” As he elaborated on this idea over the years he was sometimes accused of being a Methodist or, more horrifying still to Calvinist Congregationalists, a Unitarian or Universalist. For many years Beecher insisted he was just updating the old religion to suit modern times, but in 1882, only five years before his death, he explicitly renounced Calvinism and resigned from the New York Congregational Association.¹⁰²

Beecher mattered because of his talent for promoting religion as a proper and productive preoccupation for individuals and society. He magnified religion’s already exalted presence in Brooklyn, in no small part by making attendance at Sunday services an event to enjoy, as well as to perform a religious duty. He may have asked his congregation to accept an interrogation of traditional Yankee doctrine, but by elevating his own status he helped elevate as well the status of Storrs and other more conservative clerical colleagues, a process abetted by Beecher’s amiability and the friendships he maintained with Brooklyn clergymen. The 1870s scandal surrounding his alleged adulterous affair with Elizabeth Tilton diminished his influence, but we may find in the extraordinary Beecher both a force for religious observance and a force leading away from the doctrines that had long given substance to Protestant hegemony in Brooklyn.

As notable as religiosity was in the City of Churches, it did not pervade every corner of Brooklyn’s life. Many Brooklyn men left home for work each day and returned to their families without “wearing peas in their shoes” or in any other way attending to the state of their souls. Many women found other things to do besides attending church auxiliary meetings or instructing the poor on how to make soup and become good Christians. And a few secular institutions were not inaugurated with a prayer or oration by Storrs. Masonic lodges appeared in Brooklyn, as did a larger number of Odd Fellows’ lodges. Although some of the former imagined mystical ties to ancient cosmologies (and proved attractive to a number of religious men, including some of the cloth), they shared no explicit agenda with Brooklyn’s churches.

An interesting set of secular institutions were the New England, St. Nicholas, and St. Patrick societies, organized nominally as ethnic benevolent associations that met once a year shortly before Christmas for sumptuously catered dinners. Religion at these dinners was secondary to the larger goal of enjoying a long evening of ethnic-based conviviality. The first of these was the New England Society, which met for many years in New York City before Brooklyn’s temperance advocates, “dissatisfied with the ‘wine guzzling’ celebrations” in New York, formed a separate organization for Brooklyn in 1844 “on the cold water principle.”¹⁰³ The first meeting appears not to have been a dinner, or an occasion for joviality of any sort; rather, it was a lecture by Rev. Horace Bushnell at the First Presbyterian Church excoriating the Anglican Church, and by extension the American Episcopal Church, for their excessive rituals and church hierarchy.¹⁰⁴

Later events conformed to the New York model in all respects except, presumably, the guzzling of wine: the dinner, an oration, the election of officers for the coming year, and a series of toasts, each followed by a response from an appropriate person. Clergy were present, were not silent, and some of the toasts referred to the religion of the Pilgrims, but the focus was mainly on secular matters, and the tone was invariably lighthearted. At the 1853 dinner, Rev. Beecher, responding to a toast to his home state, spoke of the Connecticut blue laws: “It is said that in this code of blue laws … on the Sabbath and on fast-days, no man should kiss his wife and children. (Applause.) This I regard as slander, for I have made all due enquire, and have been credibly informed that it is not so. (Laughter.)”¹⁰⁵

Two years after the New England Society of Brooklyn established its annual dinners, Dutch-descended Brooklynites formed the St. Nicholas Society. Before the decade was over, there was also an Irish St. Patrick’s Society, which differed from its predecessors only in holding its annual dinner in March, on or around the traditional anniversary of its patron saint. The three societies professed to be sisters rather than rivals and invited representatives of the other two to sit at the head table and join in the revelry. At the 1852 St. Nicholas Society dinner the eighth toast was to “Our Sister Societies—May the friendship of St. Nicholas for St. Jonathan and St. Patrick be ever on the increase, and meet with a warm response.” The response by John Greenwood, the perennial representative of the New England Society, was certainly warm. Greenwood “was glad that Jonathan had been sainted, as it showed that he was improving his morals.” He spoke approvingly of the mingling of New Englanders and the Dutch in Brooklyn and, almost shockingly for a judge and church organist, “knew from experience that the full rounded form of the Dutch girl was very welcome to the embrace of the spare Yankee.” Not forgetting his other sister society, Greenwood concluded by toasting “the daughters of the Isle of Erin.”¹⁰⁶ Such was the tone and purpose of these societies. Tensions among the groups, including the Irish, were avoided, and religious differences were muted on behalf of an evening of conviviality and good will.

Although the New England Society and its sister organizations may have occasionally moderated the presence and force of religion during these evenings, they more frequently complemented Brooklyn’s religious mores. Serious dissent is difficult to find within any of the city’s secular institutions, or in the written record of the attitudes and behavior of the respectable upper- and middle-class people who were expected to populate the Protestant churches each Sunday. Perhaps the most amusing discordant note is recorded in James H. Callender’s Yesterdays on Brooklyn Heights. “The men of the community,” writes Callender, “usually claimed Saturday evening as their own, a reaction perhaps from the Friday evening prayer meeting, and a preparation for the solemn and somewhat depressing Sundays which were then the order of the day.” This meant an escape to “one of the numerous chop houses” for dinner, cigars, and an occasional walk to a nearby stable to witness and wager on a cockfight or boxing match. Callender relates the story of “one very old gentleman, long an Elder in the First Presbyterian Church,” who attempted to sneak away from a police raid on one of those illegal contests by squeezing through a rear stable window. “Portly of mien he stuck half way, and for a time was sure his doom had overtaken him.” Fortunately, he got himself out of the window and “never again could … be persuaded to stray from the straight and narrow path, at least so far as cock fighting was concerned.”¹⁰⁷

The historical record also includes a few departures from Sabbath observance; for example, the practice among some welled dressed “young men about town” of loitering on church vestibules before and after Sunday services they had no intention of attending, so they could offer unaccompanied ladies a tip of the hat and an arm for their walk home.¹⁰⁸ And while many congregants no doubt found the frequent ringing of Sabbath church bells beautiful, others found them annoying. “This bell-ringing business is a growing evil,” wrote one, “and I do not know what right any congregation has to offend the ears of a whole city, many times in a day or of an evening, merely to announce that they are about to worship, lest some careless sinners of that congregation should forget it.” “Cannot our Common Council,” asked another, “adopt some means to prevent the incessant clangor of church bells on Sundays, and at other times”?¹⁰⁹

These behaviors and complaints posed no threat to the rule of Yankee Protestantism in Brooklyn. A somewhat more serious dissent was registered by the church-going Yankee, Alden Spooner, who sometimes tied his complaint about the weakness of Brooklyn’s civic culture to the dominance of churches. “It is said,” he wrote even before the conferral of a city charter, “that in Brooklyn our public spirit and liberality runs in a single channel—that of churches—and if we should divert some of this toward a City Hall, Court House, Jail, Market, public walks, parade, Society Library, Athenaeum, &c., we should be doing a little service to ourselves and posterity.”¹¹⁰ While noting the absence of a city library in 1837, Spooner allowed himself the nearly heretical comment, “We have churches enough,” before calling for a diversion of resources to “our literary and scientific advancement.”¹¹¹ This sentiment appeared again in 1839, when the Lyceum building was put up for sale. A steadfast backer of the Lyceum, Spooner feared that the building would be converted to a church: “There are certainly five churches now in the progress of building in Brooklyn—perhaps more. These are not called for by the wants of the community…. We hope hereafter some of them may be converted into Lyceums!”¹¹²

Spooner would not be the last to question whether Brooklyn had too many churches, or whether the outsized role of religion tended to weaken other aspects of its institutional and civic life. But dissent of this sort was limited in Brooklyn, and “City of Churches” was spoken far more often with pride than regret. As time wore on that phrase was frequently modified to “City of Churches and Homes,” which not only calls to mind the large suburban component of Brooklyn’s population but also suggests a vital connection between its religious and domestic life. As we noted earlier, the church was the institution commuters to New York used on the one day of the week they remained on the Brooklyn side of the East River. It was natural (the more Calvinistic among them might have said predestined) that they should invest their money as well as their time in building up this institution, both physically and culturally—as they were also doing with their suburban homes.

Does this suggest a more secular than spiritual motive for magnifying Brooklyn’s religious life? Serious religiosity, shaped crucially by post-Puritan ideas and practices familiar and acceptable to both New Englanders and the Dutch, was without doubt very powerful in mid-nineteenth-century Brooklyn. But apart from this striking aspect of the life and culture of a rapidly growing city that was also a suburb, there was also the sheer numerical dominance of Anglo and Dutch Protestants, especially throughout the city’s sprawling suburban areas. Even those among them who were not drawn to religion—who might have wished with their Connecticut relatives to kiss their wives and children on the Sabbath—regularly encountered people all around them who looked, sounded, and acted just like they did. These large parts of Brooklyn were, in other words, ethnically and culturally homogeneous. A numerical dominance undergirded the Protestant hegemony.

But Brooklyn was a city as well as a suburb, and men, women, and children who were not Anglo or Dutch Protestants also called it home. Some of them were sprinkled through the suburban parts of the city, but most lived and worked where the suburban dwellers generally did not venture. To find them we must go to the waterfront.