BROOKLYN

BROOKLYN, known as "Meryckawick" (sandy place) by its original Algonquin inhabitants, is one of the five boroughs of New York City. It is located at the southwestern end of Long Island, adjacent to but separated from Manhattan Island by the East River. The first European settlers in the region were the Dutch, who, through a total of some two hundred purchases, began settling Brooklyn in 1636. The flat, relatively low-lying lands of Brooklyn proved attractive to these settlers. Under Dutch rule, six mostly agricultural towns were settled. One of

these, Gravesend, was founded in 1643 by the controversial Lady Deborah Moody, who had been exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1664, the British challenged the Dutch for supremacy over their North American holdings and, by 1674, Brooklyn, along with the rest of what had been New Netherland, passed definitively into English hands and became part of the colony of New York.

Brooklyn long resisted consolidation with New York City. It was a slow but probably inevitable event. In 1834, Brooklyn was granted city status, over the opposition of New York City. But in 1857, the state combined Brooklyn's and New York City's basic health and safety services into joint boards. Through a series of charters dating from the late seventeenth century, Manhattan gained dominance over the region's waterways at Brooklyn's expense. Over the course of the nineteenth century, an extensive network of transportation links between the two areas was put into place. A Manhattan farmer began the first ferry service linking Brooklyn to Manhattan in 1642. In 1814, the introduction of the steamboat ferry provided the first regular and rapid transportation between Manhattan and Brooklyn; the trip took fifteen minutes. Bridges and tunnels were added, and, finally, the first subway line reached Brooklyn in 1908. Most significant to the consolidation process was the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883. On 1 January 1898, Brooklyn officially became one of the five boroughs comprising New York City.

Brooklyn's population has always been diverse. By the nineteenth century, Holland, Germany, France, and England were all well represented. In addition, there were significant numbers of both free and enslaved African Americans, as illustrated by the incorporation of Brooklyn's first black church in 1794. By 1855, almost half the population was foreign-born, and, by 1860, Brooklyn was the third-largest city in the United States (behind New York and Philadelphia). Its shift to manufacturing began in 1825 with the opening of the Erie Canal and encouraged a new wave of immigration, most notably by the Irish. However, soon after the end of the Civil War (1861–1865) and into the first quarter of the twentieth century, large numbers of Italians and Jews, among others, settled in Brooklyn to live and work.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, Brooklyn's fortunes and population declined as manufacturing plants deserted the area and the borough lost residents to nearby suburbs. However, new waves of immigrants, most notably from the West Indies, South America, and Asia, helped bring about a population resurgence. In addition, after the 1980s, many of Brooklyn's brownstone neighborhoods again became popular and were gentrified.

Brooklyn has produced numerous well-known artists, writers, singers, actors, and politicians. Among them are poet Walt Whitman, writers Bernard Malamud and Arthur Miller, politician Shirley Chisholm, and singers Barbra Streisand and Richie Havens. It is also home to such important entertainment and cultural institutions as the Coney Island amusement park, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Brooklyn Museum. Brooklyn was home to the much beloved Brooklyn Dodgers, established as a major league baseball team in 1884. From 9 April 1913 until the Dodgers abandoned Brooklyn for Los Angeles in 1957, the team played at the now-defunct Ebbets Field. In 1947, the Dodgers made history by signing on Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play in the major leagues.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Glueck, Grace, and Paul Gardner. Brooklyn: People and Places, Past and Present. New York: Abrams, 1991.

Snyder-Grenier, Ellen M. Brooklyn: An Illustrated History. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996.

Stiles, Henry Reed. A History of the City of Brooklyn. Reprint, Bowie, Md.: Heritage Books, 1993.

Weld, Ralph Foster. Brooklyn Village, 1816–1834. New York: Columbia University Press, 1938.

Faren R.Siminoff

Brooklyn , borough of New York City (1990 pop. 2,300,664), 71 sq mi (184 sq km), coextensive with Kings co., SE N.Y., at the western extremity of Long Island ; an independent city from 1834, it became a New York borough in 1898. Brooklyn has the largest population of the city's five boroughs. Among its manufactures are machinery, textiles, paper products, and chemicals; it is also a center of foreign and domestic commerce and has extensive waterfront facilities. The Brooklyn (1883), Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges span the East River, connecting Brooklyn with Manhattan; beneath the river are the Hugh L. Carey, or Brooklyn-Battery, Tunnel (vehicular) and subway tunnels. The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge connects the borough with Staten Island.

Neighborhoods and Points of Interest

Brooklyn is a borough of well-defined neighborhoods, from the gentrified brownstone communities of Park Slope and Cobble Hill to Bedford-Stuyvesant, the largest African-American neighborhood in the city. Brighton Beach has a large community of Russian Jews, and there are also neighborhoods of Caribbean blacks, Hispanics, Italians, Poles, Hasidic Jews, Arabs, Chinese, and others.

Among educational institutions in the borough are Brooklyn College of the City Univ. of New York, Polytechnic Institute of New York Univ., Pratt Institute, St. Joseph's College, and Long Island Univ. Near Prospect Park, scene of fighting in the American Revolution (see Long Island, battle of ), is the main building of the Brooklyn Public Library. Nearby are the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and the renowned, innovative Brooklyn Academy of Music.

In the "City of Churches," the Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims, where Henry Ward Beecher preached, is perhaps best known. Other points of interest include Coney Island , with its beach, amusement park, and New York Aquarium; Green-Wood Cemetery; and the Lefferts Homestead (1777). Fort Hamilton (1831) overlooks the Narrows of New York Bay. Marine Park and parts of Jamaica Bay are included in Gateway National Recreation Area.

History

The Dutch and English settled the area (previously home to the Canarsie) in 1636 and 1637; about nine years later Dutch farmers established the hamlet of Brueckelen, near the present Borough Hall. By 1664, six towns had been established: Breuckelen (later anglicized to Brooklyn), Bushwick, Flatbush, Nieuw Amersfoort (Flatlands), Gravesend, and New Utrecht. Kings county was established in 1683; the Brooklyn Ferry area was incorporated as the village of Brooklyn in 1816, and the entire town was chartered as a city in 1834. In the 1830s Brooklyn Heights became perhaps the first modern suburb, accessible to New York City by ferry.

Brooklyn steadily absorbed neighboring settlements. After annexing Williamsburg and Bushwick in 1854, it became the third largest city in the United States, and continued to absorb other towns, including Flatbush, New Utrecht, and Gravesend, until it became coextensive with Kings County in 1896. In 1898, when it became a New York City borough, its population was 830,000. Immigration doubled its population in the next twenty years.

The New York Naval Shipyard (popularly, the Brooklyn Navy Yard) was located on the East River from 1801 until its closing in the late 1960s, when Brooklyn was declining as a port. The Daily Eagle, published in Brooklyn from 1841 until 1955, had Walt Whitman as one of its early editors. The borough is also famed as home to the Brooklyn Dodgers (at Ebbets Field), until the baseball team moved to Los Angeles in 1957.

Bibliography

See H. C. Syrett, The City of Brooklyn, 1865–1898 (1944, repr. 1968); R. F. Weld, Brooklyn Is America (1950, repr. 1967) and Brooklyn Village, 1816–1834 (1932, repr. 1970); D. W. McCullogh, Brooklyn (1983); E. Willensky, When Brooklyn Was the World (1986); K. Jackson, The Neighborhoods of Brooklyn (1998); M. Linder and L. S. Zacharias, Of Cabbages and Kings County (1999).

Brooklyn, borough of New York, on the southwestern part of Long Island, was an independent city until 1898. First settled by Dutch farmers during the early 17th century, Brooklyn had become an important city by the time of the Revolution, when it was occupied by the British following the battle of Long Island (1776). Whitman and H. W. Beecher are prominent figures in its cultural history. Now a great manufacturing center and place of residence, in its eastern section it includes Brownsville, formerly a Jewish immigrant neighborhood, warmly described by Alfred Kazin in A Walker in the City. Brooklyn was long noted for its U.S. navy yard. It is the site of the amusement park zone of Coney Island. The first ferry across the East River was begun in 1642, and Whitman's poem has immortalized the Brooklyn Ferry, but Brooklyn is now connected with Manhattan by tunnel, subway, and by the Williamsburg, Manhattan, and Brooklyn bridges. Brooklyn Bridge, the earliest, was designed by J.A. Roebling, who began the work in 1869, and was completed by his son, W.A. Roebling, in 1883. A suspension type, it carries motor and pedestrian traffic, has a span of 1595 feet, and at the center is 133 feet above the water. Authors born in or associated with Brooklyn and who have often written about it include Hart Crane, Daniel Fuchs, Joseph Heller, David Ignatow, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, Wallace Markfield, Norman Podhoretz, Hubert Selby, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Ronald Sukenick.

BROOKLYN, BROOKLYNESE. An informal name for the dialect of the people of Brooklyn, one of the five boroughs of NEW YORK City. Originally a Dutch settlement, Brooklyn is currently both residential and industrial, as well as a centre of transport. The dialect has been stereotyped as artificial, especially in films. A typical feature is the vowel of earl, pronounced/əɪl/, a pronunciation found also in New Orleans and other parts of the South. In some varieties, oil has the same vowel, a pronunciation once common in other forms of English, so that the two words are identical in sound. In stereotypical Brooklynese, the pronunciation of the words is reversed, so that earl is ‘oil’ and oil is ‘earl’. See NEW ORLEANS.

Brooklyn Borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County in sw Long Island; it is connected to Manhattan and Staten Island by bridges, underground railways and ferries. First settled in 1645, it became a borough in 1898. It is the home of Coney Island. Industries: shipbuilding, warehousing, brewing. Area: 184sq km (71sq mi). Pop. (2000) 2,465,326.

Brooklyn ♂, ♀ Modern coinage, apparently an adoption of the American place name from a district of New York city, originally named by Dutch settlers as Breukelen. The choice of the name by David and Victoria Beckham for their eldest son (b. 1999) will no doubt have increased its popularity.

Brooklyn, New York/USA A borough of New York City settled in 1645 and named by a Dutch farmer who named it after his home village of Breukelen in the Netherlands. It experienced many different spellings before the present version was adopted towards the end of the 18th century.

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