Brooklyn

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Brooklyn sits at the westernmost tip of Long Island, separated from Manhattan by the East River, yet it holds more people than Los Angeles if you count it on its own. In the 2020 United States census, 2,736,074 people lived there, making it the most populous of New York City's five boroughs and the most populous county in all of New York State. Its official motto, written in early modern Dutch, reads Een Draght Mackt Maght: "In unity there is strength." That phrase appears on the borough seal and flag, and it hints at a story far more tangled than unity suggests. Brooklyn has been a Dutch farming village, an independent American city, a wartime shipbuilding colossus, a baseball heartland, and a global immigration crossroads, all before becoming the gentrified cultural shorthand it is today. How did a small settlement named after a Dutch bog town grow into a place that, had history turned out differently, would rank as the fourth-largest city in the United States? And why did its residents once call their own consolidation into New York City the "Great Mistake of 1898"?

• 2. A Name From the Bog

  ›

  Breuckelen on the American continent was established in 1646, and the name first appeared in print in 1663. The word traces back to the Dutch town of Breukelen in the Netherlands, and the root words tell you exactly what the original settlers found: broeck means bog or marshland, and lede means a small dug water stream, specifically in peat areas. Over roughly two millennia, the Dutch town's name had cycled through at least nine spellings, from Bracola to Broiclede to Broekclen before settling on Breukelen. The American version went through its own bewildering permutations: Breucklyn, Breuckland, Brucklyn, Broucklyn, Brookland, Brocklin, and Brookline all appeared in documents. So many variations circulated that some claimed the name meant "broken land", an interpretation the source explicitly sets aside as inaccurate. Kings County, the formal county name coextensive with Brooklyn, carries a different origin: it was named after King Charles II of England, who ruled from 1660 to 1685. The Dutch West India Company chartered the six original parishes of what would become Brooklyn beginning in 1645, when English followers of Anabaptist Deborah Moody settled Gravesend under Dutch patent.

• 3. War and the Prison Ships

  ›

  On the 27th of August 1776, the Battle of Long Island was fought in Brooklyn, the first major engagement of the American Revolutionary War after independence was declared and the largest battle of the entire conflict. British troops forced George Washington's Continental Army off the heights near what are now Green-Wood Cemetery, Prospect Park, and Grand Army Plaza. Washington, watching fierce fighting at Gowanus Creek and the Old Stone House from a hill near the west end of what is now Atlantic Avenue, was reported to have cried out: "What brave men I must this day lose!" The defeat looked catastrophic, but Washington's overnight withdrawal of all his troops and supplies across the East River in a single night is now regarded by historians as one of his most brilliant military achievements. The British then controlled New York Harbor for the remainder of the war, using the city as their military and political base in North America. They set up a system of prison ships in Wallabout Bay, off the Brooklyn coast. More American prisoners of war died on those ships than were killed in action across all of the war's battlefield engagements combined. The Treaty of Paris in 1783 ended British control, and New Yorkers celebrated the British evacuation into the 20th century. Fort Greene Park today contains the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument, a direct memorial to those who died in Wallabout Bay.

• 4. The City That Almost Was

  ›

  By 1810, Brooklyn's population stood at just 4,402 people. Twenty years later it had reached 15,396, and by 1834, when the Town and Village of Brooklyn merged to form the first City of Brooklyn, the population was 25,000. The city grew so fast that its police department on that same day comprised only 12 men on the day shift and 12 on the night shift; every wave of burglaries prompted officials to blame criminals from New York. A modern police force of 150 men was not created until 1855. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle began publication in the 1840s under a succession of publishers, eventually becoming the most popular and highest-circulation afternoon paper in America before closing in 1955 after a reporters' strike. Reliable steam ferry service turned Brooklyn Heights into a commuter town for Wall Street workers; the connection to Manhattan transformed the city's identity. By the mid-19th century Brooklyn had established itself as the third-most-populous city in America. The ironclad Monitor, which fought in the Civil War, was built in Greenpoint. The Brooklyn Navy Yard, established as a shipbuilding facility in 1801, employed 70,000 people at its peak during World War II and built both the Maine, whose sinking off Havana sparked the Spanish-American War, and the Missouri, on which Japan formally surrendered. Emma Lazarus's 1883 poem "The New Colossus," which appears on a plaque inside the Statue of Liberty, called New York Harbor "the air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame," naming Brooklyn and Manhattan as equals.

• 5. The Great Mistake

  ›

  Kings County was one of the twelve original counties established under British rule in 1683. For more than two centuries it developed its own institutions, its own newspapers, its own political machinery. In 1894, residents of Brooklyn and the surrounding counties voted by a slight majority to merge with Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island, with the consolidation taking effect on the 1st of January 1898. Many newspapers of the day labeled it the "Great Mistake of 1898". The opposition was real: Brooklyn had been an independent city with its own mayor since 1834, and losing that identity stung. The Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883, had already tightened the physical connection to Manhattan, which the progressives who championed consolidation used as an argument for completing the union. Seth Low, who had served as Mayor of Brooklyn from 1882 to 1885, later became the second mayor of the consolidated City of New York, serving from 1902 to 1903. As Brooklyn's mayor, Low had secured a degree of home rule from the state, introduced free textbooks for all students (not just those who had taken a pauper's oath), set aside $430,000 for new school construction, and introduced a competitive examination for hiring teachers. After consolidation, Brooklyn elected a Borough President in place of a mayor, a structure it has maintained ever since. Brooklyn has not voted for a Republican in a national presidential election since Calvin Coolidge in 1924.

• 6. Baseball's Birthplace

  ›

  The second recorded game of baseball was played near what is now Fort Greene Park on the 24th of October 1845. Brooklyn teams were the dominant force in the sport's earliest organized years; the Excelsiors, Atlantics, and Eckfords led from the mid-1850s through the Civil War, with dozens of neighborhood league teams competing at places like Mapleton Oval. According to the source, the first fastball, first changeup, first batting average, first triple play, first professional baseball player, first enclosed ballpark, first scorecard, first known African-American team, first black championship game, first road trip, first gambling scandal, and the first eight pennant winners all originated in or from Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Dodgers, named for "trolley dodgers," played at Ebbets Field. In 1947, Jackie Robinson was hired by the Dodgers as the first African-American player in Major League Baseball in the modern era. In 1955, the Dodgers won their only World Series, defeating the rival New York Yankees. Two years later, owner Walter O'Malley moved the team to Los Angeles in a realignment of Major League Baseball, a decision for which he is still vilified by Brooklynites who never saw the team play. After a 43-year absence, professional baseball returned to the borough in 2001 with the Brooklyn Cyclones, a minor league affiliate of the New York Mets, playing at MCU Park in Coney Island.

• 7. A Borough of Many Tongues

  ›

  As of 2010-54.1% of Brooklyn residents over the age of five spoke only English at home. The remaining 45.9% spoke a home language other than English, a statistic that reflects a borough shaped by successive waves of migration. Spanish was the first language for 17.2% of residents, followed by Chinese at 6.5%, Russian at 5.3%, and Yiddish at 3.5%. French Creole, Italian, Hebrew, Polish, French, Arabic, Indic languages, and Urdu each had communities in the tens of thousands. Over 600,000 Jews, particularly Orthodox and Hasidic, have concentrated in neighborhoods such as Borough Park, Williamsburg, and Midwood. Crown Heights is home to the Chabad world headquarters. Over 200,000 Chinese Americans live primarily in Sunset Park, Bensonhurst, Gravesend, and Homecrest; Sunset Park's growth as a Chinatown was spurred by the opening of the now-defunct Winley Supermarket in 1986. Brooklyn holds the largest community of West Indians outside of the Caribbean, concentrated in Crown Heights, Flatbush, and surrounding neighborhoods, with the West Indian Labor Day Parade taking place every Labor Day on Eastern Parkway. Brighton Beach, home to large Russian and Ukrainian populations, has been nicknamed both "Little Russia" and "Little Odessa". In 2014, there were 914 religious organizations in Brooklyn, the tenth highest count of any county in the nation. Bushwick's "Brewer's Row" once encompassed 14 breweries operating within a 14-block area in 1890; today Bushwick is Brooklyn's largest hub for its Hispanic American community, with nearly 80% of its population identifying as Hispanic.

• 8. Industry, Culture, and Reinvention

  ›

  Pfizer was founded in Brooklyn in 1869 and operated a manufacturing plant in the borough for many years, employing thousands of workers, before shutting the plant down in 2008. Jobs in the borough were traditionally concentrated in manufacturing, but since 1975 Brooklyn has shifted from a manufacturing to a service economy; in 2004, 215,000 residents worked in the services sector while 27,500 remained in manufacturing. The Brooklyn Museum, opened in 1897, holds a permanent collection of more than 1.5 million objects. The Brooklyn Children's Museum, the world's first museum dedicated to children, opened in December 1899 and maintains a permanent collection of over 30,000 cultural objects and natural history specimens. Brooklyn Technical High School, which opened in 1922 and was built between 1930 and 1933 at a cost of about $6 million, is the largest specialized public high school for science, mathematics, and technology in the United States. The Cyclone rollercoaster at Coney Island, built in 1927, is on the National Register of Historic Places. The rezoning of Downtown Brooklyn has generated over ten billion dollars of private investment and $300 million in public improvements since 2004. Since the 2010s, parts of Brooklyn have evolved into a hub for high-technology startup firms, postmodern art, and design. The Brooklyn Liberation March on the 14th of June 2020, a transgender-rights demonstration stretching from Grand Army Plaza to Fort Greene, drew an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 participants and was described as the largest such demonstration in LGBTQ history.