Brooklyn: The Once and Future City

Thomas J Campanella‘s tome is a skip stop tour of Brooklyn’s history, focusing on the built environment but full of rich sketches of the outsized personalities inhabiting and shaping the borough. A blurb from the publisher:

Spanning centuries and neighborhoods, Brooklyn-born Campanella recounts the creation of places familiar and long forgotten, both built and never realized, bringing to life the individuals whose dreams, visions, rackets, and schemes forged the city we know today. He takes us through Brooklyn’s history as homeland of the Leni Lenape and its transformation by Dutch colonists into a dense slaveholding region. We learn about English émigré Deborah Moody, whose town of Gravesend was the first founded by a woman in America. We see how wanderlusting Yale dropout Frederick Law Olmsted used Prospect Park to anchor an open space system that was to reach back to Manhattan. And we witness Brooklyn’s emergence as a playland of racetracks and amusement parks celebrated around the world.

I listened to the audiobook over the course of a few weeks this past February, mostly on a commute from central Brooklyn to midtown Manhattan. I took sporadic notes which do not yet have a focus:

• Katherine Stinson – aviator over the Brooklyn skies in the days of the Sheepshead Bay Race Track and other racing venues close to Coney Island. Later in life she moved to New Mexico and became an architect.

• The Brighton Beach Race Course – real estate developer William A Engeman “built the grandstands so it could easily be converted into a row of cottages if his investment failed”

• Deborah Moody and her founding of Gravesend (first a village, then ‘sleepy suburb’, now neighborhood)

• Ebbetts Field figures prominently in the book. The stadium was torn down and replaced with an apartment complex, but a plaque remains on the sidewalk, in the shape of home plate, stating “at this location on April 15, 1947 Jack Roosevelt Robinson integrated Major League Baseball”

• 1967 “Design-in” in Central Park (NYTimes article here).