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BROOKLYN WEEKLY, NOV. 3, 2019
BY KEVIN DUGGAN
Check out the Brooklyn
that might have been!
A new book examines
the alternative and forgotten
history of Kings
County. “Brooklyn: The
Once and Future City”
explores several ambitious
but never-built projects
proposed during the
decades after the vibrant
city of Brooklyn was controversially
folded into
New York City, according
to its author, who will
read from his book at the
Brooklyn Historical Society
on Nov. 7.
“What the Manhattan
expansionists saw in
Brooklyn was this fi eld
of dreams and there’s all
sorts of fantasies about
creating this super city
using Brooklyn’s unbuilt
terrain,” said Thomas
Campanella.
In his book, the urban
historian investigates
several projects the city
tried to undertake in the
borough after the Great
Mistake of 1898, many of
which were near his home
neighborhood of Marine
Park. The southern half
of the borough has been
largely ignored by historians,
according to Campanella.
“If northern Brooklyn
was in the shadow of
Manhattan, the southern
half of Brooklyn has been
in the shadow of both,” he
said.
One such plan was to
turn the shallow waters of
Jamaica Bay into a deepwater
port, following the
water trade boom that followed
the digging of the
Panama Canal.
“The hopes were there
was going to be a jump up
in seaborne trade and everyone
was trying to get
ready for that,” he said.
City planners wanted
to dredge and excavate the
shallow waters of the bay
for wharfs, and to build a
railway station to allow
for heavy manufacturing,
but then Parks Commissioner
and power-brokerin
the-making Robert Moses
sank the idea because
he wanted to preserve the
natural wetlands.
Not far away, in what
is now Marine Park, planners
wanted to pave the
wetlands of Gerritsen Inlet
and use the space for
a bicentennial celebration
of George Washington’s
birthday in 1932.
That plan eventually morphed
into the World’s Fair,
which Moses again strongarmed
the city into moving
to Flushing, Queens,
in 1939.
Another spectacular
project in Campanella’s
book is the Globe Tower, a
700-foot steampunk-looking
orb structure designed
to house an indoor amusement
park, dreamt up by
early 20th century inventor
Samuel Friede.
Friede convinced the
founder of the Steeplechase,
George Tilyou, to
erect the steel structure
on Surf Avenue, near the
current location of MCU
Park. Friede got people to
buy stocks in the project
— and then took off for Europe
with the money. It’s
hard to say now whether
he planned to swindle his
investors all along, or if
just got in over his head,
according to Campanella.
“It’s hard to say
whether Friede was planning
the scam all along or
whether he actually believed
in it,” he said.
These grand ambitions
were soon replaced
HARD TO PORT: City planners wanted to transform the shallow
Jamaica Bay into a deepwater port.
New York Public Library’s Buttolph Collection of Menus
by an inferiority complex,
said the author, in which
Brooklyn no longer felt
like an underdog competitor
against its Manhattan
rival, but like a lesser part
of the larger city.
“What consolidation
ultimately did, in my view,
in time it sucked the moxie
and ambition out of Brooklyn,”
he said. “That’s when
I start to see evidence of
this toxic self-loathing
in Brooklyn, ‘Woe is me,
we’re colonized terrain,
we’re the outer borough,
we’re a lesser place’ — it’s
a very different Brooklyn
from today.”
“Built and Never-Built
Brooklyn” at Brooklyn Historical
Society 128 Pierrepont
St. at Clinton Street
in Brooklyn Heights, (718)
222—4111, www.brooklynhistory.
org. Nov. 7 at 6:30
pm. $10.
The Brooklyn that never was
Author examines Kings County’s alternate history
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