Thomas Campanella, Cornell professor of urban planning, treats Brooklyn as a borough of missed opportunities. Jamaica Bay didn’t become a world-class seaport; Floyd Bennett Field is defunct; the canoe harbor at Marine Park never happened. Nevertheless, Brooklyn has a remarkable history when it comes to building, and much of it was built on dredged sand and reclaimed marshland. Unfortunately, Brooklyn was often treated as expendable.
Expendability, in Campanella’s extensive history of Brooklyn, is best illustrated in the chapter titled The Island of Offal and Bones. The place in question is Barrier Island, a deforested stretch of salt march where the city processed dead animals. Boatloads of dead dogs, cats, and rats, ended up there, along with circus animals, and trolley horses when they were too old to be of use. The non-unionized beasts of burden were shipped there to be skinned for leather, butchered for dog food (or even sausage, perhaps) and de-boned for fertilizer and glue. Needless to say, the overpowering stench, along with the waste dumped into the stagnant waterways, did little to improve the area.
The author devotes a full chapter to Brooklyn’s military contribution, long before the US entered the wars. Hundreds of pilots got their first lessons at Floyd Bennett Field, and it was a staging area for planes manufactured on the East Coast. Flying boats were staged in the area during WWII, in between sea patrols for German U-boats. However, both FBF and the Brooklyn Navy Yard illustrate another problem with the borough; both of them became obsolete after WWII, as the Navy Yard was too small, and the airfields were too short. Then the labor strikes crippled Brooklyn’s businesses, starting with the breweries, and it spread to other businesses as well. Industrialists packed their bags for states where unions were less favored by the government, or where land was cheaper. Then came urban renewal, which saw the American Safety Razor factory torn down and replaced by Metrotech. Goodbye factory, goodbye jobs.
Not much is given to modern Brooklyn, now the great American yuppie zone. In a funny twist on the “lost industry” problem, there’s Bob Rosensweig’s vintage lightbulb company that’s now all the rage. Bar and restaurant patrons prefer the warm, intimate light to the sterile flicker of today’s energy saver bulbs. However, in an equally ironic twist, some folks like to eat in dirty old restaurants, lit by the old-school fluorescent bubs that give the place an ugly greenish glow. I would like to read more about how the artistic crowd reclaimed Brooklyn, though it was profiled in an earlier book titled The Last Bohemia. There could also be a chapter on how Brooklyn is portrayed in literature and film. Some book portray the positives of the community (like Chaim Potok’s novels) while others give you the sleazy side (like Hubert Selby Jr) or a combination of the good, bad, and bohemian (like Paul Auster). However, I am reminded of a 1994 graphic novel, Box Office Poison, that takes place in Brooklyn. The hero (or perhaps, loser) of the story, Sherman Davies, is a recent Hunter College graduate, working in a dying old Mom & Pop bookstore, right before Barnes and Noble took over. He moves into a shared apartment in Carrol Gardens, and he sees how the neighborhood is very quiet and easygoing, and that’s how he wants it. While moving his books upstairs, he and his friends wonder “is Carrol Gardens going to be the new Seattle, or the new Des Moines?” Sherman responds with “the first flannel shirt I see, and I’m moving to Des Moines!” Not all young people want things to be “hip” or trendy.
I applaud Campanella for his extensive research and unbiased writing. It’s a treasure trove of history and a bag of dirty laundry at the same time. Some of his sources came from the New York Times, others came from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Brooklyn hasn’t had much in the way of daily papers, ever since The City Sun closed in 1996, and I suspect that The City Sun might’ve been a trove of history in itself (if the defunct paper has been archived, which I don’t know.) Whether Brooklyn will become a great community, or an unwanted backwater, or a place with a huge rich-poor divide, this book will be an indicator.
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