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© 1999 by Philip Ernest Schoenberg, PhD
Brooklyn, across the East River, was an independent city in the northern quarter of Kings County. Brooklyn was the country's third largest city with a population of 300,000 people. The city of Brooklyn, chartered in 1834, then included Brooklyn Heights, downtown Brooklyn, Greenpoint, South Brooklyn, and Williamsburg. The City Hall, the Brooklyn Museum and the Brooklyn Academy of Music were newly opened public edifices. After the Civil War, the City Fathers hired Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux to design Prospect Park. The two designers considered this an even better park than Manhattan's Central Park because they felt they had learned from their experiences in constructing that recreational facility. Kings County was mostly rustic well into the early twentieth century. It had many other independent communities such as Flatbush and Gravesend. Between 1892 and 1898, the City of Brooklyn absorbed the rest of Kings County. My father, half a century after the time of Lincoln, remembered milking cows in the southern half of Brooklyn. I have friend who remembered picking strawberries on what is now Starret City!
Henry Ward Beecher, America's leading preacher, held forth in his fashionable Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn Heights. He was a powerful influence in attracting the rich to Brooklyn. Before speaking at Cooper Union in 1860, Abraham Lincoln took the two cent thirty-minute ferry ride from Manhattan to hear the anti-slavery pastor. Lincoln considered Beecher the greatest preacher in America.
Brooklyn had become a major manufacturing center and a leading port that had the chutzpa to challenge New York City as a major metropolis. Brooklyn competed to attract commerce, industry, and people from across the East River. Rheingold Beer, Squibb pharmaceuticals, Pfizer pharmaceuticals, Elias Howe sewing machines, and the Peter Cooper glue factory all called Brooklyn home. The Continental Iron Works built Brooklyn's biggest contribution during the Civil War: The Monitor. The Brooklyn Navy Yard employed 3,000 people before the start of the Civil War.
Walt Whitman, the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, predicted that some day Brooklyn would have more people than that Gomorrah across the East River, New York. He was right but then Brooklyn had given up its independence to become part of Greater New York.
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