Brooklyn: The Once and Future City

by Thomas Campanella

An unprecedented history of Brooklyn, told through its places, buildings, and the people who made them, from the early 17th 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 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.

PLEASE When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

Genres: History, New York, Nonfiction, American History, Urban Studies, Audiobook, Cities

Audible Audio

First published September 10, 2019

Reviews

[Pat Rapp · Rating 2 out of 5]

Selected Brooklyn construction, built or just planned, 1615 – present

With its voluminous footnotes and extensive index, Campanella’s “Brooklyn” is a respectable reference work. But, for a lay person interested in Brooklyn’s history, it leaves a lot to be desired, even aside from its disgusting Epilogue. The history of Brooklyn as a whole, in all its myriad facets, would fill many volumes; it’s obviously far too much material for a single-volume work. Campanella’s first footnote lists twelve worthy books on Brooklyn’s history; all of them have titles indicating a very narrow focus. Campanella’s focus is also very narrow: construction projects along the Atlantic shoreline take more than half the book, and other construction projects in downtown Brooklyn take most of the rest of it. Why did Campanella choose the all-encompassing title “Brooklyn”? Could it be for marketing reasons?

Campanella’s first footnote also rationalizes his focus on Brooklyn’s Atlantic shore: “With the exception of several superb books on Coney Island… this vast part of New York City has completely escaped scholarly scrutiny.” He’s certainly applied a corrective to that. He lives in Marine Park, a 4th-generation Brooklynite; in 1902 his great-grandfather moved the clan from Manhattan to Brooklyn, where he opened a popular barbershop on Coney Island. All Campanella’s great-uncles worked at Steeplechase. His homeboy love of grampa’s stories leads him to include long chapters about construction projects from Gravesend to Jamaica Bay, from Hudson’s “Half Moon” in 1609 up to about 1800. About half of those projects never came to fruition, most notably “The Steel Globe Tower” featured on the cover of the book. Nonetheless, each chapter is swamped with details about the prominent characters involved, each of whom gets a mini-biography, much of which has nothing to do with Brooklyn.

Not until Chapter 13, almost 300 page in, do we get to Brooklyn’s people, their numbers, origins, ways and quality of life. It’s now 1807, with Fulton’s steamboat providing reliable ferry service across the East River. Alas, a mere 35 pages takes us through WW II and the subsequent labor strikes. Then it’s back to more planning commissions and construction projects: the Civic Center, the Brooklyn Bridge terminus, Fort Greene houses, Robert Moses and his highways, Farragut Houses… 150 pages of construction planning. Very little life in there. Only at the very end of the book, in the last 10 pages of the last chapter, The Book of Exodus, does he get back to people, describing the bitter and violent racial troubles of the 1960’s and 70’s, and the ‘white flight’ out of Brooklyn.

Campanella should have stopped there. In his 8-page Epilogue, “Under a Tungsten Sun”, he shreds whatever respect he may have accumulated. The Epilogue is one long sneer at the people who moved into Brooklyn in the late 60’s and after. Aside from the earliest ones, the pure “children of Woodstock”, who “relished the borough’s working-class grit”, the rest of us were simply on a “fevered quest for authenticity”. “Today, people of privilege hunger for authenticity the way their class forebears yearned for status and luxury. Because most consumers are content with a simulacrum of the real thing (so long as the stage props are right), authenticity can be easily manufactured.” Consequently, “more than anything, the hipster quest for cool has been about consuming place.” This twaddle is ‘History’ ?!? People move for many reasons: lower costs, more space, better schools, proximity to a new job…. But, for authenticity?

He opens his Epilogue “Under a Tungsten Sun” with a quote from Pete Hamill: “Everything changes; the light of Brooklyn remains… long-shadowed horizontal light, revealer of form, Dutch light, the light of Vermeer….” He closes it with a personal investigation of light fixtures, based on his conviction that we soulless but moneyed newcomers prefer incandescent bulbs in our bars and restaurants. (The “tungsten” in the Epilogue’s title refers to the filament in incandescent bulbs.) Walking south on Flatbush Avenue, he sees no incandescent bulbs south of Beverley Road, marking the lower edge of his “Tungsten Sun”. His equating of Hamill’s “light of Vermeer” with differentiating light fixtures is bizarre, ludicrous on so many levels as to defy analysis.

The very last lines of the Epilogue, and the book: “If you seek the real New York, look beyond the warm light of vintage tungsten to the cold white glare of coiled CFLs and ceiling-mounted fluorescent tubes-- the harsh unflinching light of reality in our town, where life is still lived unposed and uncurated and close to the bone.” In other words, Campanella, in Marine Park, has the authentic authenticity. The rest of us can weep at our failure. Hey, Tom: three Bronx cheers for you!

[Edward Champion · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone who lives in Brooklyn should own this volume. This is such an invaluable, passionate, and well-written book that goes back to the very beginning. I learned how important the Quakers were to our city-turned-borough. (Not only did the first Quaker meeting in America take place here, but the Quaker mentality significantly influenced the perfect square street design of Gravesend.) Campanella covers nearly every facet of Brooklyn without too much overlap with Mike Wallace. He declares his love and passion and motivations at the very beginning and rolls up his sleeves admirably about the beginnings of Cadman Plaza, the Brooklyn Dodgers, the great Sheepshead Bay Speedway (which completely captured my imagination), and so much more. A Christgau style one paragraph review on Goodreads from a grumpy bald man in Brooklyn can't possibly convey how important and invaluable this wonderful book is. Get your mitts on it if you love Brooklyn as much as I do!

[Andrew Morin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Generally a fan, but not quite my style. Not a simple narrative but a tour around the borough, especially the two poles of brownstone Brooklyn Heights "out-wash" plain sweeping out towards Coney Island. I am not entirely sold on this structure: though I generally liked the focus of the chapters (especially in the second two-thirds of the book), jumping around chronologically and geographically was a bit confusing at times. The nicely labeled map certainly helps, though.

Further, I generally do like the scope, which is largely a mix of large borough-wide changes (Moses' roadways; early park developments; housing construction) and much more narrow stories on specific events, people, and places. The selection leaves some questions, however: so many of the most detailed depictions come from projects never actually built, while other landmarks and large parts and populations of the borough (the navy yard, Williamsburg, Jewish communities) are dispatched with rather quickly. It makes for an uneven, if interesting portrait of the city with little to explain how the borough ever managed its explosive growth or operated at its peak. I would've liked a few more throughlines or a little more comprehensive treatment.

Overall I enjoyed and learned quite a bit. It was also fun to be able to visit a few of the more central locations while reading, which contributed a lot to my experience with the book.

[Phil · Rating 4 out of 5]

A history of Brooklyn. I found the chapters to be hit and miss. For some reason, I was completely engrossed by the smelly history of Barren Island and the drama of city planning, and then much less interested in the earliest settlements of the 17th century. But there were more hits than there were misses. You could tell it was written by a lifelong resident with real passion. I was very happy that I read on an iPad where I could frequently switch back and forth from the Kindle app to the Maps app. I started it when staying in Boerum Hill. I just wish I could have finished it while still there.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

An exhaustively-researched history of Brooklyn, less through its social and demographic shifts than through the top-down lens of city planning -- incorporation, vying visions for street layouts and parks, real estate and development. It's a useful reference that gradually wanes in direct interest as we move from the earliest and least remembered settlements in places like Gravesend, through colorful accounts of the wasteland of Barren Island's rendering plants and corruption and graft surrounding the leisure grounds of early Coney Island, to, eventually, the drier threads of the 20th century boom and redevelopment. Maybe these are just too familiar, but I do feel like it gets lost in the bureaucratic details a little.

[Henry · Rating 5 out of 5]

A broad, fascinating and deliberate study of the history of Brooklyn that accounts for the entire borough—that takes Marine Park, the Sheepshead Bay race track and Floyd Bennett Field more seriously than Ebbets Field and the Brooklyn Heights Promenade (though thorough sections on both are included, as well as deep dives into Prospect Park, Green-Wood Cemetery, Steeplechase and so much more). Campanella is from the underserved "outwash plain," the flat, southeastern section of Brooklyn that's never been cool or well-linked to transit, and so he takes it seriously, examining the origins of European settlement there all the way up to twentieth-century ambitions to build a "Linear City." This is an unprecedentedly comprehensive history of everything that has ever made Brooklyn interesting, moving along a clear narrative of rise and fall (and something of a rise again) as it relishes surprising asides and fun facts. Campanella has a keen sense of what's interesting, and it's delightful to follow his tale about how modern Brooklyn was built—and about the many planned parts of it that ultimately weren't.

[Arthur · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed listening to this 25 hour audiobook.

[Oona · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really boosted my econ grade 🙏

[Ian Thomson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Managed to get through this 465-page tome in less than two weeks which is a good sign. Fascinating read overall with insight into some of Brooklyn‘s lesser known neighborhoods. Some great tales about the Battle of Brooklyn, Dutch origins, the Dodgers, horse racing, Coney Island’s glamour days, Barren Island, Robert Moses, Fred Trump, John Harvey Kellogg, Fort Greene Houses, etc. although it’s not light reading at times.

Loved the author’s test of “fluorescent authenticity” to wrap up.

[Julia Winn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dnf, read about a third, very little about Brooklyn’s people or culture, very focused on construction projects, which is just not a topic I want to spend hours reading about. “The Island at the Center of the World” was much more my thing.

[Sara Raftery · Rating 4 out of 5]

Less a comprehensive history of Brooklyn than a collection of episodes in Brooklyn history arranged in roughly chronological order. It's well written, and the stories are well told. I particularly liked the chapters about the failed port in Jamaica Bay, the building of the BQE, the "urban renewal" of Downtown Brooklyn, the building of the Fort Greene projects, and the postwar crash of the Brooklyn economy. I also appreciated Campanella's repeated emphasis on how virtually all trends in 20th century urban design were tried in Brooklyn, and his repeated illustration of how turn-of-the-20th-century xenophobia shaped every aspect of urban life, including in subtler ways.

A larger proportion of the book than I expected is given to "the outwash plain" of southern Brooklyn, I assume because that's where Campanella is from and because it's a part of Brooklyn that's often overlooked. I also found the book's racial analysis lacking, and it's hard not to look at Campanella's family history - which he shares openly - and conclude that a stronger racial analysis would have broadly implicated his ancestors in a way that is uncomfortable. I think he's trying to complicate often heavy-handed racial analyses of i.e. white flight, and that's reasonable and good, but he often seems to minimize the degree to which Brooklyn's white working class was animated by racism. I would also have liked to see more stories from the latter half of the 20th century, and more stories about non-white communities. The book basically ends with white flight, with a wink to revitalization and gentrification in the epilogue. There are of course thousands of stories one could tell about Brooklyn, and any selection will be lacking in some important respect. Nonetheless, it does feel that this is primarily a history of white Brooklyn.

That's not to say there are no people of color in the book. Campanella consistently highlights the presence of non-white communities in the places he's discussing. He makes a special point to discuss the Black community in Sheepshead Bay connected to horse racing, about which I knew nothing and was delighted to learn. And Campanella is certainly aware of the racism faced by Black people in Brooklyn and the ways their communities were marginalized. My point isn't that he sucks and the book sucks. It's just limited in some pretty important ways.

All that said, I enjoyed this a lot.

[Erik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not what I was expecting. Often overly focused on just the apparent favorite topics of the author, incl a huge aside on horse racing and airplanes, some odd comments on minorities bordering on racism, way too much on Fred Trump (the president's father), and jarring use of modern terms such as 'man cave' or 'blogging'. Here the author might have thought he was being clever but an historic novel should not take you out of the past while reading the book. Disappointing overall. My father was from Brookyln and I expected more.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

An exhaustive study of Brooklyn. There is very little of the usual stuff about accents and bad-but-lovable Dodgers, nor many of the other cliches.

Instead, the book goes into detail about settlements and farming and slavery and industry. It goes into the many failed attempts to turn Brooklyn into something more, including a major port, a home to a giant tower, a city of grand boulevards—the latter were begun and built in part but somehow abandoned before completion.

It tells of Barren Island, where carcasses of horses, dogs, and other animals were rendered and whose stench extended for miles, threatening the grand hotels and amusement parks of nearby Coney Island. It discusses industry which thrived for so long, then moved away in droves in search of cheap land, easier transportation, less congestion, and no unions.

Maybe the saddest chapter is about public housing, in particular the huge Farragut project. It was walking distance from downtown and from the Navy Yard. It replaced crowded old low-rise slums with high rise buildings holding many more people, but with open space around them. But a combination of design flaws, the unfamiliarity of new migrants, especially from the rural South, with urban living, diminishing job opportunities, and well-meaning but misguided policies which forced people out when their modest incomes rose a bit or which favored single working mothers over families with a man in the household, all contributed to high crime and vandalism.

And yet Brooklyn endures and thrives. Campanella remains hopeful for its future.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is really about urban planning, from projects fully realized to those partially completed to ones that never passed the planning phase, in Brooklyn from the colonial era through the mid-20th century. I was surprised that the first 330 pages or so focused almost exclusively on far-south Brooklyn, since neighborhoods like Gravesend and Marine Park are often forgotten about, but the author is from this area of the borough so I guess it makes sense. I think this book would be less interesting for a reader who doesn't know Brooklyn geography well, though I enjoyed looking up the locations of different developments and comparing the history to what I've seen there in my life, especially since I lived in far-south Brooklyn for a few years a while back. Overall it's a pretty good book, though I found the epilogue to just be a weird and stale rant against gentrification--and Edison lightbulbs, of all things. The author somehow fails to recognize that gentrification is just another phase of urban planning and development. He employs Sharon Zukin's wonky view on "authenticity," that if the neighborhood is mostly white people with disposable income, and there are businesses there that cater to their tastes and consumer habits, it can't possibly be the real Brooklyn. Does that mean that Brooklyn Heights has never once in it's history ever been authentic? I understand the need to wrap up a book like this with a chapter on something contemporary, but the epilogue's petty, value judgement tone just didn't leave me with a good taste in my mouth.

[Joe Lewkowicz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brooklyn: The Once and Future City is good, but
ultimately uneven.

The chapters seem to follow a loose chronological order, touring different neighborhoods in Brooklyn.
Some chapters are more interesting than others.
I found the long chapters often meander from the central point. For example, Chapter 17 starts by focusing on the failed Lower Manhattan Expressway, but takes a multiple page detour on industrial scale education before coming back to the expressway development.

This happens almost every chapter, where loosely connected ideas are explored in detail without a clear picture of where they are going or how they tie back to a central point. What could have easily helped this would have been breaking chapters into subsections - I am not why this easy fix wasn’t implemented.

Also, the author assumes the reader is as familiar with neighborhoods and specific street names as he is. I’m originally from Brooklyn, live in Manhattan, and still found myself checking Google Maps twice a chapter to get oriented. Inclusion of maps at the front and back of book would have been helpful.

In any event, the information is all good and well researched. The book just feels like a collection of topics the author was interested in rather than a cohesive narrative on the history of Brooklyn. I would only recommend reading this if you are VERY interested in Brooklyn/NYC history, otherwise it can be a slog to get through.

[Tom Hastings]

Brooklyn, once a proud city in its own right, finally gets a worthy history. Thomas Campanella provides a sweeping overview of the life of the borough. In 18 chapters Campanella moves from the 1600's and the Dutch up the 1960's. The author states in his introduction that writing the book was a labor of love and at points it reads like a love letter to a Brooklyn long gone. Along the way we are introduced to the Brooklyn that is / was off the beaten path, meet a colorful cast of characters, and villains, both the familiar and the not so-familiar. Campanella pays homage to the Brooklyn that was and that will never be again. In that regard it is a bittersweet book. A feeling that I appreciate as a life-long native New Yorker. So much of the city I knew growing up has changed, often for the better and sometimes for the worse. Campanella expertly captures that feeling. If you love Brooklyn, New York City, or just love urban history I highly recommend this book. If I have a quibble about the book it is that it does not really address the changes from the 80's on. I hope that Campanella is planning on the sequel to bring the story of Brooklyn into the modern day. This review is based upon an advance copy I received from the publisher at Book Expo America.

[Kaleb Stevens · Rating 3 out of 5]

A sweeping look at the plans, people, and processes that developed Brooklyn from a sleepy agrarian hinterland into an urban powerhouse.

The book is written by a city planner and very much seems tailored to a planning crowd. Each chapter focuses on a different civic project or movement that shaped the development of the city, from a look at the layout and origins of Gravesend in the 1600s to the explosion of industry and residential construction in the pre- and immediate post-war years to the urban renewal housing and transportation projects that fractured the city throughout the later 20th century.

This was not the book I anticipated: I was expecting a more person-focused history of Brooklyn that spoke maybe more to explaining the ‘soul’ and traditions of the city. While many chapters do speak to the demographic changes taking place at the community level and the effects that the city’s endless building projects confer onto its residents, it felt like overall throughout the book people took a backseat to building projects.

This book will be great to reference and flip back to chapter-by-chapter moving forward, but reading it straight through was an arduous task for me as someone with a planning degree

[Jeff Lewonczyk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anyone expecting a traditional, linear, comprehensive survey of Brooklyn history. But if you're open to a series of long, idiosyncratic essays that zero in on fascinating byways, sidetracks and cul-de-sacs of the borough's past - especially those involving big plans that never came to pass, or stories around Brooklyn's less storied southern "outwash plain" - you're in for a treat. Sure, this book covers some of the more iconic sights - Prospect Park, Green-Wood Cemetery, the BQE (well, "iconic") - but as a resident for 20 years, this is the first I'd learned about Brooklyn's role in the history of aviation, the religious non-conformers who founded Gravesend, the ill-fated attempt to turn Jamaica Bay into a world-class deep-water port, and so many others. I took my time reading it, just like Brooklyn took its time becoming the archetypal boom-bust-boom city it is today, and I was sad to see it finish.

[Shrike58 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although this history sprawls all over the place, the author has certain trends he wants to pursue; Brooklyn as Manhattan's alter ego, Brooklyn as a complex of neighborhoods, Brooklyn's search for its own monumental identity, Brooklyn's fall as a bastion of the working man, and subsequent reinvention as the hipster's promised land. You can learn something useful upon opening to any given random page, which is another way of saying that I think Campanella could have produced a more tightly-written book.

If I have a particular gripe, it's that I would have liked to have learned more about what the impact of Hurricane Sandy (and flooding in general) meant to Brooklyn, maybe as part of a consideration about rising seas might mean to the locality. This would have been better than the rather cutesy endpoint we get on the ups and downs of gentrification. Still well worth your time if you're interested in Brooklyn in particular, or U.S. urban history in general.

[Joe Liporace · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had a tremendous time with this book. I really appreciated how the book was structured as a series of vignettes that illustrated the forces that shaped Brooklyn, rather than a list of “xyz was mayor for this time period and he did this.” It made the stories seem as dynamic and ever-changing as I believe Campanella wished for me to understand the borough as being. Some characters are certainly recurring, but this definitely is not your standard a to b to c history book.

I think he is overly negative with today’s generations of Brooklynites (the “hipsters”). But, given that these mentions are few and far between, it didn’t impact my overall enjoyment of the book.

Lastly, Robert Moses continues to be one of the worst people in modern history and urban renewal may have been the most damaging movement in modern America. In Brooklyn, my hometown, and so many other destroyed cities across this nation.

[Erik · Rating 4 out of 5]

I agree with other reviewers who noted this book jumps around a bit. For the most part, that worked to its advantage. It picked fascinating stories and wonderful anecdotes to paint a colorful picture of the borough I’ve called home for the last 20+ years.

The epilogue was a departure, as others here have noted. I was ready to dislike it. But the ultimate point that Campanella makes in that final chapter is 100% correct: Brooklyn is way more interesting and more complicated than the gentrified areas indicate. All that this book details about what has come before can help us appreciate what those ungentrified areas are now. The ongoing story of Brooklyn, and NYC, are as much (or more!) about those areas than the gentrified parts. That’s where our future is.

Also: I will never forget the stories from the book about Barren Island! Or Coney Island!

[JAMES · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, an interesting history of Brooklyn. Each chapter can more or less be taken on its own, and IMO some have more relevance than others. One does get a sense of the expansion and urbanization of the borough's population, slowly for centuries, then very quickly. The author has an obsession with "hipsters," devoting an entire epilogue to their destructive influence on his native borough. It's strange to me that he doesn't see these people (if they even exist at all as he describes them -- I suspect they don't) as just another temporary and unusual step in the history of the place.

I thought the book was strongest when it was tracing the 20th Century history of Brooklyn, and connecting the social, political, and industrial arc of Brooklyn to what it is becoming today.

[Alex Stevens · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this, but would probably only recommend it to folks who are super nerdy about a) history; b) Brooklyn; or c) both.

At most times this reads like a history textbook in high school, and the author takes deep-ish dives on tangents that makes the overall style feel a bit too meander-y. Still, it does the job of illuminating the borough’s past in a very interesting way, drawing connections from its earliest pre-revolutionary war days to 60’s racial tensions in Bed-Stuy and so many urban projects and plans that were destined to fail.

[Kenneth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an interesting book about the history of Brooklyn and highly readable. It's episodic rather than comprehensive but this makes it a bit more readable. It's also relatively focused on Coney Island and that area because the author has a lot of personal connections to that part of Brooklyn. Still, it was very interesting to learn so much about my home borough and the book was never dull. I did wish it had been more comprehensive, I guess "The Power Broker" and "Gotham" have lulled me into a sense that all NYC histories are massive in scope and steeped in detail.

[Lynn · Rating 3 out of 5]

History of Brooklyn

This is a very thorough history of Brooklyn and contains some very interesting facts and photos. My problem with the book is that it isn’t written in a compelling way. I felt detached throughout and information I might have been absorbed in, was boring rather than interesting. I wish I enjoyed reading it more. I have read histories of cities or countries that drew me in but this book didn’t do it for me.

[Robert Stevenson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sorry couldn’t recommend this book, was given as a Christmas present, and initially it was interesting, the parts of 1500-1700, but sadly the book then follows a pattern of investigating all the weird tragic Brooklyn histories and seldom covers the promising, exciting parts of Brooklyn. A story told by someone outside, even though he was born here, his marvels are from an outsider perspective, looking at vintage light bulb uses to understand gentrification just misguided.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I was not a Brooklynite I might not give this book the fourth star. It is indeed a deep dive into the history of the city of Brooklyn but it seems to loose its way as the author gets lost in the battles of Robert Moses for the soul of the city. Of course his battle stretched all across the city not just in Brooklyn. Still there is much to learn from this book even if you grew up there.

[Ameya Warde · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting historically and as someone who loves NYC. There was also a surprisingly lot about city planning in here at one point which was enjoyable as I studied that in school and miss it. Near the end it trailed off into being a bit confusing and more boring, but I listen to the audiobook and there's always a chance i've fallen asleep during some part and woken up confused..

[Abbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was so well-written and covered topics that are not often covered when taking on Brooklyn as a topic. I enjoyed that the author, as a native, focused a lot on his own neighborhood in Marine Park, which is so rich in history, as I now I know, as well as Gravesend and Flatlands etc., which are often ignored.

[DW Rowlands · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much of this book was interesting, but I'm not sure it can be called a history of Brooklyn so much as a collection of essays about Brooklyn history: it jumps around chronologically and doesn't seem to have an overall thesis. Each chapter focuses on some specific topic, often an interesting topic, but it doesn't feel like it covers the whole history.