On Saturday at 4 p.m. I was one of about a hundred people seated in the spanking-new auditorium of the Dr. S. Stevan Dweck Center for Contemporary Culture at the Grand Army Plaza Central Library to hear a riveting lecture, “The History and Future of Brooklyn,” by Mike Wallace, a distinguished professor of history at CUNY, chair of the Gotham Center for New York History and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.
Wallace discussed Brooklyn’s past and future in terms of three currents in the river of history: Brooklyn’s relationship with Manhattan, its macroeconomic base, and the demographic flows in and out of the borough.
As a colonial city, Brooklyn’s role was to feed the profit centers of the British empire, the sugar plantations of the Caribbean whose land was too valuable to use for crops to feed the slaves who worked there.
Primarily agricultural hinterlands, Brooklyn also served as the port to send food and other supplies – some manufactured here – to the West Indies and in return to get sugar and rum. (That explains why the Havemeyer’s Domino’s Sugar and Revere Sugar built huge operations in Williamsburg and Red Hook.) Back then, Brooklyn’s population was largely Dutch, English and African; slavery was widespread.
American independence cut off this trade was an economic catastrophe until Brooklyn found new trading partners in the Spanish Caribbean, primarily Cuba and Puerto Rico. As the Erie Canal opened up New York’s access to the agricultural Midwest, Brooklyn’s farms were replaced by major manufacturing, with ironworks and furniture factories.
The industrial revolution eventually brought renewed trade with England, which got much of the cotton for its textile factories from the American South via ships from the port of Brooklyn. The port boomed, and around the same time, Brooklyn Heights became America’s first suburb, a bucolic alternative to overcrowded Manhattan.
When Manhattan became the financial, entertainment and media capital of the nation, skyscraper office buildings proved more profitable than factories there, so manufacturers moved to Brooklyn with facilities like the innovative Bush Terminal, joining manufacturers with the port via its railway.
As Brooklyn became a major producer of beer and baked goods, it also served as home to a world-class resort, Coney Island, as well as baseball stadiums, movie palaces, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Prospect Park, the museum and other venues for industrial age leisure.
Brooklyn capitulated, Wallace said, to the 1898 annexation into Greater New York because it needed access to Manhattan money and its water supply.
By the start of the 20th century, a great demographic shift occurred as Jews, Italians, Norwegians, Syrians and other ethnic groups flowed across the new bridges into Brooklyn; Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant become magnets for African-Americans from the South; Puerto Ricans, U.S. citizens after 1898’s other big event, the Spanish-American War, also move into the borough in large numbers; and Brooklyn’s southern farms are broken up into suburban subdivisions, some as posh as Prospect Park South.
Foreign immigration is largely stopped by 1924’s restrictive, xenophobic law – opposed by young Brooklyn Congressman Emanuel Celler, who, as House Judiciary Chairman in 1965, would push through the 1965 immigration act that led to the waves of newcomers from all over the world who have replaced older residents who fled the borough for the suburbs and Sun Belt.
Wallace discussed Brooklyn’s important role in World War II and then its slow decline and deindustrialization as thousands of manufacturing jobs disappeared. Most of the older crowd in the audience, including myself, remember the nadir of the 1970s.
I can recall a primary challenger to the seeming borough president for life plastering Brooklyn with posters that read “Abe Stark, We Love You – BUT BROOKLYN IS DYING!” He didn’t win but nearly all of us agreed with his sentiments.
The “turnaround” of the 1980s with renewed gentrification was really very small-scale, Wallace said; for a good part of Brooklyn, the key economic engine was actually the illegal crack trade. Unemployment surpassed 10% as late as the early 1990s; AIDS and TB rates rose 700% in parts of Brooklyn; the old ethnic rivalries among Jews, Irish, Italians and Germans disappeared as they all became “white” and the new tensions were racial.
Wallace reminded the audience of the racial tensions of the era, from the 1968 teachers’ strike – we old-timers recall the name of Rhody McCoy, the most well-known Brooklynite of the day – to the 1991 Crown Heights disturbances and the racially-charged Bensonhurst murder of Yusuf Hawkins.Brooklyn’s recent revival is the result of the same forces that have always shaped its history, Wallace said: its relationship with Manhattan (as those who could no longer afford to live there moved across the river as gentrifiers), and more importantly, the foreign immigration which has brought the world here – so much so that Brooklyn is now the third largest Ecuadorean city in the world, after Quito and Guyaquil. — Richard Grayson