Brooklyn: The Once and Future City

REVIEWED BY JOCELYN WILLS

In his latest book on city planning and the built environment, Thomas J. Campanella tackles the history of his hometown, Brooklyn, once, and until the consolidation of New York City’s five boroughs in 1898, the fourth-largest city in the United States. In 18 chronological episodes, Campanella follows Brooklyn’s history from the 17th-century encounter between the native Leni Lenape and immigrant Dutch, through its revolutionary experience, and on to its 19th-century rise and 20th-century decline as a major urban-industrial zone. Following a discussion of Brooklyn’s demise during the turbulent 1950s-1970s, Campanella then provides a short epilogue that considers the borough’s more recent revivification as a hot-spot of gentrification. Brooklyn: The Once and Future City thus joins a growing number of scholarly works attempting to rescue Brooklyn from is historic treatment as a “city of homes and churches” and America’s “first suburb.” Indeed, over the past twenty years, excellent monographs employing Brooklyn as a significant site for scholarly inquiry have finally begun to replace the coffee-table books that long lined the two or three shelves that New York City bookstores devoted to Brooklyn and Kings County.

What makes Campanella’s book different from other recent scholarship on the borough is his emphasis on changing landscape, architecture, infrastructure, and real-estate projects, particularly within Brooklyn’s “southern hemisphere—everything below the terminal moraine, from Bay Ridge to Broadway Junction.”[i] Campanella’s study, more than other recent works, also attributes to Brooklyn an identity based on its “distinctive topography—of terminal moraine and outwash plain” and “fateful adjacency to Manhattan Island,” at once an “ideal hinterland: close at hand” yet “insulated from the center by a natural moat—the treacherous, fast-moving East River.” This physical separation allowed Brooklyn to become what Campanella describes as a “displacement zone of sorts, a site for peoples and practices untenable in the heart of town,” including religious dissenters, “racial outcasts,” and “nonconformists,” as well as “dirty industrial operations and morally polluting amusements.”[ii] As a result, urban developers— whether public or private, visionary, well-intentioned, and competent, or oddball, bungling, and charlatan—take center stage in Campanella’s drama of the dreamers and schemers who transformed Brooklyn’s landscape or failed to complete their outlandish building projects. This focus on dissenters, obsessives, and cranks additionally provides Campanella with a platform on which to discredit some long-held myths about Brooklyn’s past (including a lively chapter 3 devoted to quashing fictions about Brooklyn’s revolutionary war heroes, including George Washington and the “Marylanders” lost in battle).

Campanella’s Brooklyn is particularly strong on the “urban parks revolution” and system of urban parkways that the 1838 incorporation of Green-Wood Cemetery helped to spark. “Yankee Ways” (chapter 4) explores Frederick Law Olmstead’s partnership with Calvert Vaux, a relationship that culminated in the building of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park as a “mighty green antidote to the metropolis.” The Prospect Park project not only sought to bring “town and country into harmonious union” as part of the city beautiful movement, but also inspired landscape architects to work as city planners. Campanella convincingly argues that Olmstead’s “wholly new urban design vision” of a system of parks and parkways “was the first step toward regional planning” and the “parks-and-recreation infrastructure” that landscape architects proposed and Robert Moses ultimately constructed (in chapter 16) as “instruments of urban order projected across the countryside,” and a regional parkway system for the automotive age.[iii]

“Whip, Spur, and Saddle” (Chapter 5) also opens an interesting window into the evolution of “America’s playground,” in ways that shed light on the “unknown, overlooked, and unheralded” people and spaces the book promises to explore. By tracing the development of 19th-century horse racing (at Brighton Beach, Sheepshead Bay, and then Coney Island) and the beaches east of Coney Island (Manhattan, Brighton, and Oriental) that once served the region’s elite, the chapter reveals a Sheepshead Bay that once housed Brooklyn’s First Baptist Church to nurture Southern blacks migrating to the region. Bringing their knowledge of thoroughbred racing with them, African Americans came to work as jockeys at racecourses and in elite beach hotels and dining establishments. As the region developed, however, white jockeys pushed African- Americans out of the profession they had introduced to New York, anti-gambling reformers helped to enact laws that killed the race tracks, and elite New Yorkers quickly abandoned hotels as speculators developed working-class amusements at Coney Island. Although equally ambitious car racing and airshows appeared in the 20th century in the same area (see Chapter 7), the destruction of horse racing and the development of working-class Coney Island further circumscribed professional, small business, and employment opportunities for African Americans already suffering under the weight of a segregated New York, a reality that also decimated the neighborhoods they had built and about which we still know far too little. As a result, this chapter emerges as one begging for further research into the lives of the many displaced, marginalized, and forgotten actors who did so much to build Brooklyn’s “southern hemisphere” over time.

Returning to the theme of Brooklyn’s infrastructure, “The Isle of Offal and Bones” (chapter 6) offers similar opportunities to uncover a forgotten Brooklyn community. The chapter focuses on Barren Island, a small spot in Jamaica Bay that became, in the middle of the 19th century, the largest waste processing and “reduction complex in the world.”[iv] This fascinating episode in Brooklyn’s history captures the development of New York City’s infrastructural challenges by exploring Gotham’s first major dumping ground for industrial waste, including the 1.8 billion annual pounds of horse dung that finally prompted New York City to incorporate its first Metropolitan Board of Health, not because of the unconscionable conditions under which poor immigrants and African Americans worked and lived, but rather because of the “smell of industrial death” that wafted from Jamaica Bay north and west for 12 miles. Although Campanella reveals that Barren Island’s workers ultimately struck for a public school, a full-time nurse, and better living conditions, we learn little about those who worked together in common cause before Robert Moses demolished the neighborhood in 1936. Fortunately, Miriam Sicherman’s excellent new book, Brooklyn’s Barren Island: A Forgotten History (Fall 2019) adds a significant chapter to our understanding of how marginalized populations in Brooklyn (as elsewhere) can and do build community and inter-racial solidarity in the face of enormous odds.

Indeed, as Sicherman’s study and other more detailed accounts of Brooklyn neighborhoods reveal, the promise of Campanella’s first few chapters begin to fizzle as he wends his way from what did happen in Brooklyn to what a few visionaries and real-estate hustlers failed to accomplish, unless, of course, one assumes that all that happened in Brooklyn during the 20th century was one real-estate development scam after another. Chapters 7 through 12, as well as 14 and 17, may appeal to Brooklyn history buffs, but they will ultimately leave serious readers confused, even frustrated by the 100+ pages devoted to grandiose projects either ahead of their time or that collapsed in absurdity and political wrangling. These episodes also include meandering digressions into the lives of the fortune-hunters and con artists who promised to build the largest schemes the world had ever seen, including monstrous towers at Coney Island, an environmentally unsound deep-water port at Jamaica Bay, a municipal airport at Floyd Bennett Field that could never compete with Newark for want of a proper infrastructure, a new “super stadium” for the Brooklyn Dodgers when it was already clear that the borough had lost its fan base in the wake of redlining and white flight. In these chapters we also find visionaries who hoped to improve the lives of ordinary Brooklynites but nevertheless failed to build “super” schools, linear highways, and other assorted public works. Although many of these chapters are loosely tied together by what Campanella rightly describes as Brooklyn’s “perennial problem of rail connectivity to mainland America,” by the time he returns to interesting chapters on the building of housing (including Fred Trump’s Tudor-style private real-estate speculations in chapter 13, and the publicly funded Fort Greene Houses in Chapter 15), as well as Robert Moses’ “Colossus of Roads” and the displacement of neighborhoods that stood in the way of his grand expressway strategy (Chapter 16), Campanella may lose many of the readers he hopes to engage as they struggle to connect how the chapters ultimately fit together.[v]

Hazards of structure and omission always threaten to undermine the value of sweeping histories, and this one is no different. Campanella concedes that Brooklyn: The Once and Future City is not a comprehensive history, but the idiosyncratic nature of the subjects and episodes he narrates will force readers to confront what the book does not contribute to the expanding literature on Brooklyn as well as what it lacks, including a sustained thesis and the narrative threads and connections about what makes Brooklyn significant to our understanding of the urban milieu and the complexities and contingencies of history and memory. Unlike other recent work, Campanella’s study is neither a social and cultural history nor an economic exploration of Brooklyn’s past. In part, the choice to sidestep many important topics rests on the sources employed for the study. Campanella visited many archives in many places, but local newspapers fill the pages of his endnotes, with the result that it appears he followed the trail of sensational, even if little-known media stories rather than carefully plotting a larger narrative that would make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. This may also help to explain the plethora of visual aids in the book; they enhance individual vignettes but do less than they might to focus the reader’s attention on Brooklyn’s changing landscape.

Although Native Americans, slaves, various communities of color, immigrants, and women make cameo appearances in the book (including Deborah Moody, founder of Gravesend and credited as the first female town planner in Euro-America), Campanella avoids the chance to make his vignettes more meaningful by interrogating some of the thorniest problems and most significant issues in Brooklyn’s history: not only its race relations, immigrant neighborhoods, working-class struggles, and gender relations, but also the many ordinary people who have made Brooklyn a quintessentially diverse, confounding, and contested place. Moreover, despite signaling that Brooklyn’s competition with and post-World War II inferiority complex vis-à-vis Manhattan created the borough’s “unique” identity, this is not a study in mentalités, community formations and reformulations, or changes and continuities in religious, cultural, educational, and neighborhood practices. Additionally, while the book focuses on urban development, particularly public infrastructure projects and private real-estate schemes, and implies that the forces of capitalist expansion influenced Brooklyn’s trajectory as well as the architects, inventors, and opportunists drawn to the place, Campanella largely eschews an analysis of Brooklyn’s place within its larger political-economy. Readers will encounter few actual workers, businesses, consumers, or class conflicts, and will find little about the ways in which Brooklynites from various backgrounds made their daily rounds, built businesses large and small, attempted to navigate the boom-bust nature of the changing market economy, or challenged the hegemony of the Brooklynites who built their fortunes on slavery, cheap immigrant labor, racial segregation and race-baiting, and red-lining based on both race and class. As such, while Campanella writes with verve, and general readers may consider some chapters enlightening and others amusing, those hoping to learn more about Brooklyn’s connections to issues of larger historical significance and contemporary concern will need to look elsewhere.[vi]

Jocelyn Wills is a Tow Professor of History at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Her most recent book, Tug of War: Surveillance Capitalism, Military Contracting, and the Rise of the Security State (2017), lifts the veil on a corporate world girded by powerful forces at the nexus of state, capital, and geopolitical power games, revealing the ways in which the neoliberal project turned satellites into a multi-billion-dollar commodity and outer space into a competitive, militarized zone. Her current research focuses on American boom-and-bust, and the everyday experiences of workers, consumers, and small business operators in post-Civil War Brooklyn.

[i] Thomas J. Campanella, Brooklyn: Once and Future City, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 467n1.

[ii] Ibid., 3-4.

[iii] Ibid., 78, 82, 95-105, 380-1.

[iv] Ibid., 124,

[v] Ibid., 331.

[vi] For a sample of some of the best book-length works written over the past two decades and employing Brooklyn as a site for serious scholarly inquiry, see Marc Linder and Larry Zacharius, Of Cabbages and Kings County (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), Craig Steve Wilder, A Covenant with Color (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), Richard Haw, The Brooklyn Bridge (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), Edwin Burrows, Forgotten Patriots (New York: Basics Book, 2010), Evan Hughes, Literary Brooklyn (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2011), Terry Hum, Making a Global Immigrant Neighborhood: Brooklyn’s Sunset Park (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014), Judith Wellman, Brooklyn’s Promised Land (New York: New York University Press, 2014), Michael Woodworth, Battle for Bed-Stuy: The Long War on Poverty in New York City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), and Melissa Meriam Bullard, Brooklyn’s Renaissance: Commerce, Culture, and Community in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Guest UserNovember 19, 2019Comment