Brooklyn

Until 1898 Brooklyn was a separate city and the third largest in the United States, behind New York and Chicago. It had its own mayor, its own newspaper, its own baseball team and a strong sense of not being Manhattan. Consolidation passed in a referendum by 277 votes out of some 130,000, and there were people who never forgave it.

So a great many photographs catalogued under New York are in fact of a different municipality, made while it still was one.

The Brooklyn Bridge dominates, reasonably. It opened in 1883 after fourteen years of work that killed John Roebling before construction started and left his son Washington disabled by caisson disease — he directed the remainder from a window overlooking the site while his wife Emily carried instructions to the engineers and became, in practice, the chief engineer.

Prospect Park was designed by Olmsted and Vaux after Central Park, and both of them thought it the better work. They had learned from the first one and the site let them do what they wanted. Photographs of the Long Meadow show why they said it.

Coney Island was three competing amusement parks running at once — Steeplechase from 1897, Luna Park from 1903, Dreamland from 1904. Dreamland alone carried a million electric lights. It burned in 1911 and was never rebuilt. Photographs of it at night are among the strangest images of the period, because nothing else in America was lit like that.

The Brooklyn Navy Yard built warships from 1801 to 1966 and employed seventy thousand people at its peak. The Monitor's engines were made nearby; the Maine and the Arizona were both launched here.

The 1897 bird's-eye view of Brooklyn — made the year before consolidation — is worth singling out. It is a portrait of a city that was about to stop existing as one.

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