A Brooklyn You Might Not Know

Abstract

A Brooklyn You Might Not Know Ian Rocksborough-Smith (bio) Thomas J. Campanella, Brooklyn: The Once and Future City. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. xiv+ 533 pp. Maps, notes, selected bibliography, and index. $35.00. Thomas J. Campanella, Brooklyn: The Once and Future City. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. xiv+533 pp. Maps, notes, selected bibliography, and index. $35.00. The city of Brooklyn is often subsumed into popular depictions as one of the Big Apple's illustrious boroughs most often taken to represent the grittier aspects of New York, the "Gotham" of Batman DC Comics fame with its access to industrial waterways and suburban hinterlands. But Brooklyn has a unique regional history that sets it apart from its borough counterparts. From serving as the homeland to the Leni Lenape Algonquian peoples; to a verdant outgrowth of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam; through various periods tied to America's expansion as a modern nation (the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the industrializing late 19th to mid-20th centuries); to a world leader in urban architecture, reform, change and development, not to mention the erstwhile home of the Dodgers baseball team and various industries that served America's interests in World War II. Brooklyn, by Thomas J. Campanella, presents a rich tapestry of local and regional stories for any student of modern urban history to enjoy. Written with a personal gravitas, emboldened by familial attachments to a Marine Park and Italian American upbringing in the region, Campanella offers helpful historical nuance and well-cited research that allows for more sweeping analysis and bold claims about the enduring significance of what is arguably New York's most important borough. Few readers may realize how undervalued Brooklyn has been in America's urban history—despite featuring in tales of the Brooklyn Bridge, Coney Island, and gentrification of "Brownstone Brooklyn," as well as important histories of struggles to fight poverty and discrimination in Bedford-Stuyvesant (p. 2). In Brooklyn, Campanella seeks to recover elements of the most significant borough of New York in ways that are "unknown, overlooked, and unheralded" (p. 1). For example, as early as the American Civil War, Brooklyn had already passed better-known urban centers like Baltimore, Boston, New Orleans, and Cincinnati to "become the third largest city in America" (p.3). As the cover for Brooklyn suggests, the city is perhaps "America's most storied urban underdog" (cover jacket insert). And this book is not just one that challenges 20th-century [End Page 625] assumptions about Brooklyn's place in recent U.S. urban history; it is one that covers a great deal of ground from the colonial era through the present. The book features compelling vignettes of the city's modern history, such as how the Town of Gravesend was the first in the United States designed by a women; how Greenwood Cemetery was effectively New York's first public park; how Ocean Parkway became a Parisian-inspired boulevard; how racetracks, parks, and airports—all grandiose schemes of urban growth and development through the early 20th century—were also quintessentially Brooklyn phenomena. Ultimately, Brooklyn tries to chart a trajectory for the city that made it the center of "renewal" and urban development, led by giants in the field like Robert Moses, who helped unleash "the largest, most ambitious, and most devastating" projects that the country had ever seen (p. 2). Campanella argues that "Brooklyn's place spirit" formed over centuries and "around two principal fulcrums" (p. 3). The first revolved around Brooklyn's distinct landscapes and topography—a terminal moraine and outwash plain left behind by the previous Ice Age. The moraine provided elevated terrain for places like Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope, Bay Ridge, Crown Heights, and Ocean Hill. This geological depiction operates metaphorically for the author as well, because it allows one to "[m]ap the creative class in Brooklyn [and a] ghost of glacial history appear before your eyes. North of the moraine, a stone's throw from Manhattan, is the city of rapid gentrification, where elders and the poor are dislodged by implacable market forces—where even a tiny apartment now costs a king's ransom, and nothing, it seems, is not artisanal, batch...