Brooklyn: The Once and Future City

by Thomas J. Campanella Narrated by William Hope

Overview

An unprecedented history of Brooklyn, told through its places, buildings, and the people who made them, from the early seventeenth century to today

America's most storied urban underdog, Brooklyn has become an internationally recognized brand in recent decades-celebrated and scorned as one of the hippest destinations in the world. In Brooklyn: The Once and Future City, Thomas J. Campanella unearths long-lost threads of the urban past, telling the rich history of the rise, fall, and reinvention of one of the world's most resurgent cities.

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.

Campanella also describes Brooklyn's outsized failures, from Samuel Friede's bid to erect the world's tallest building to the long struggle to make Jamaica Bay the world's largest deepwater seaport, and the star-crossed urban renewal, public housing, and highway projects that battered the borough in the postwar era. Campanella reveals how this immigrant Promised Land drew millions, fell victim to its own social anxieties, and yet proved resilient enough to reawaken as a multicultural powerhouse and global symbol of urban vitality.

Editorial Reviews

The Economist

"Mr. Campanella . . . aims to give an account of ‘the Brooklyn unknown, overlooked and unheralded—the quotidian city taken for granted or long ago blotted out by time and tide.’ He succeeds admirably . . . Brooklyn: The Once and Future City is a nuanced portrait of a diverse group of communities. Genteel farmland, then a byword for urban blight, and now the apotheosis of hipsterdom and gentrification—Brooklyn has seen it all. Mr. Campanella, a native Brooklynite himself, brings both love and scholarship to his writing, revealing the true spirt of this fractured land."

From the Publisher

Winner of the PROSE Award in Architecture and Urban Planning, Association of American Publishers

Finalist with Special Recognition for the Brendan Gill Prize, Municipal Art Society of New York

"Finalist for the On the Brinck Book Awards, The University of New Mexico"

Kirkus Reviews

2019-06-11
A lively biography of New York's second borough, "long lost in the thermonuclear glow of Manhattan" but eminently worthy of attention and affection.

One doesn't often think of New York City as a place where geology matters, buried as it is under all that concrete and steel. Yet, as Campanella (Urban Studies and City Planning/Cornell Univ.; The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World, 2008, etc.) observes, it's worth remembering that in Walt Whitman's day, Brooklyn was a place of "ample hills." Even today, the settlement patterns of the borough speak to the glacial past, with the creative class concentrated north of the ancient line of moraines and the till below the "dominion of immigrant strivers and working-class stiffs," sans hip boutiques and coffee shops. There was a time when Coney Island was once an island, a time before Robert Moses carved into the western confines of Long Island a new geology of roadbeds and tall bridges. Campanella delights in overturning received wisdom as he moves from place to place: George Washington made a "strategic error" in trying to defend New York "against Britannia's mighty clenched fist" when, after all, New York was a seaport and Britain the world's chief naval power, and when Brooklyn was loyalist—all good reasons, he suggests, for the disastrous Battle of Brooklyn to be one of those things not often mentioned in polite company, to say nothing of textbooks. Those who try to navigate the traffic from Brooklyn to anywhere nearby won't necessarily be cheered to know that people were complaining about "bridge crush" 120 years ago ("Brooklynites needed no trolleys to get to hell—they'd go a faster way"). Of particular interest are Campanella's concluding remarks on the nature of the gentrification now affecting so much of Brooklyn, which involves a stifling lust for authenticity: "Gentification kills the real McCoy," he writes, memorably, "to venerate its taxidermal remains."

Teeming with information, this is a must-read for fans of urban history.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173009142
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	09/10/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

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