The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn: An American Story

The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn

An American Story

Stuart M. Blumin and Glenn C. Altschuler

Three Hills

an imprint of Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

In memory of

Faye and Harry Blumin

and

May and Herbert Altschuler

First- and second-generation Americans

… a gathering into one place of multiple dissimilarity, each culture to its own cloth and style and tongue and gait, each culture and the earth itself with commonlode center and variable surface.

—A. R. Ammons, Sphere: The Form of a Motion

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Prologue: America’s Brooklyn

1. Brooklyn Village

2. The City of Brooklyn

3. On the Waterfront

4. Toward a New Brooklyn

5. Newcomers

6. Transformation

7. Acceptance, Resistance, Flight

Epilogue: Brooklyn’s America

Notes

Index

Illustrations

Frontispiece. They Don’t Grow in Manhattan!

1.1. New York City and Brooklyn in 1767

1.2. Francis Guy, Winter Scene in Brooklyn

1.3. Hezekiah Beers Pierrepont

1.4. Nineteenth-century mansions and row houses in Brooklyn Heights

1.5. St. Ann’s Protestant Episcopal Church, Washington Street

1.6. First Presbyterian Church, Cranberry Street

2.1. New York City and Brooklyn in 1834

2.2. Aerial view of the Atlantic Basin in 1846

2.3. Nineteenth-century townhouses in South Brooklyn

2.4. Brooklyn City Hall

2.5. The consolidated City of Brooklyn in 1856

2.6. Green-Wood Cemetery

2.7. The Brooklyn Academy of Music, Montague Street

2.8. Anniversary Day in nineteenth-century Brooklyn

2.9. Church of the Pilgrims, Remsen Street

2.10. Richard Salter Storrs

2.11. Plymouth Church, Orange Street

2.12. Henry Ward Beecher statue, Cadman Plaza

3.1. Steam ferry entering South Ferry slip

3.2. Ground-level view of the Atlantic Basin in 1851

3.3. Workers’ houses near the South Brooklyn waterfront

3.4. Weeksville house, Ralph Avenue

3.5. Brooklyn’s Sanitary Fair, 1864

4.1. Brooklyn Bridge opening celebration, May 24, 1883

4.2. Brooklyn’s transportation system

4.3. St. Mark’s Place, Bedford, in 1893

4.4. The Manhattan Beach Hotel, Coney Island

4.5. Brooklyn and the Kings County towns, 1884

4.6. Plan for Prospect Park, 1871

4.7. James S. T. Stranahan statue, Prospect Park

4.8. Ocean Parkway in 1896

4.9. The Montauk Club, Park Slope

4.10. The Brooklyn Tabernacle

4.11. Anthony Comstock

5.1. Havermeyers & Elder sugar refinery, Williamsburg

5.2. The waterfront below Brooklyn Heights in 1906

5.3. The Gowanus Canal

5.4. Congregation Baith Israel synagogue, Boerum Place

5.5. Thomas McCants Stewart

5.6. The Brooklyn transit strike of 1895

6.1. The Williamsburg Bridge

6.2. Jewish women and girls praying on the Williamsburg Bridge

6.3. Apartments above stores, Pitkin and Saratoga Avenues, Brownsville

6.4. Townhouses in Dyker Heights, 77th Street and 12th Avenue

6.5. Italian immigrants on Ellis Island

6.6. Business Is Booming

7.1. Beautiful Words

7.2. William Sheafe Chase

7.3. Charles Ebbets

7.4. Flyer advertising Margaret Sanger’s Brownsville birth control clinic

7.5. Margaret Sanger and Fania Mindell in the Brownsville clinic

7.6. Adults and children in line to see unmoral muck-raking films

7.7. Rowhouses in Sheepshead Bay, East 23rd Street below Avenue W

7.8. Newspaper advertisement for homes in Jackson Heights, Queens County

8.1. Madison Grant

8.2. Horace Kallen

Acknowledgments

This book originated in discussions with our colleague Ralph Janis, a native of Brooklyn and the long-time director of the Cornell Adult University. Trained as an urban historian at the University of Michigan, Ralph has a special interest—and expertise—in architecture, the character of residential and commercial neighborhoods, and the impact of transportation on migration and urban population growth. The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn ventures into other areas of Brooklyn’s history, but it was Ralph who came up with the topic and gave us this title. We are grateful for this and his many other suggestions.

Several friends contributed as readers and discussants. Carol Berkin and Margery Mandell were ideal readers who helped us shape and sharpen our argument at many turns. Jerry Heinzen, David Glaser, Patrick Burns, Jed Horwitt, Robert Summers, and the late and much-missed Isaac Kramnick offered ideas while expressing (or feigning) interest in our own. Thomas Campanella, a historian of city planning and the urban built environment at Cornell (and another Brooklynite), gave us a preview of his superb book, Brooklyn: The Once and Future City, and shared information, insights, and bibliographic suggestions about his project and ours. Two anonymous readers of our draft manuscript for Cornell University Press suggested revisions that have significantly improved the book.

We are grateful to the staffs of the Center for Brooklyn History (formerly the Brooklyn Historical Society), the New-York Historical Society, the Cornell University Library, and in particular the Brooklyn Public Library, which digitized copies of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the newspaper of record for Brooklyn’s history during much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and provided a free database of issues from 1841 to 1955. We are indebted as well to Arianna Gonzalez, a Cornell undergraduate, who translated articles published in Il Progresso from Italian into English; and to Beth Beach, one of the world’s greatest administrative assistants, who found primary and secondary sources about Brooklyn, picked them up at the Cornell University Library, ordered them on interlibrary loan, and sent us digitized texts. Michael McGandy, our editor, who knows quite a lot about Brooklyn, never stopped trying to make this book better.

We close with an acknowledgment—and celebration—of a collaboration that has now produced three books. More than collaborators, we are friends. We doubt that we have another book in us, but we intend to spend lots of time together, gossiping about Cornell University, talking about American politics, the Boston Red Sox, and the Buffalo Bills, eating good food, and most of all, sharing the benefits of a long-standing and genuine friendship.

Prologue

America’s Brooklyn

Brooklyn, New York, is a place like no other. There is hardly a city in America, or even a large section of a city, that is not, like Brooklyn, ethnically, racially, economically, and culturally diverse. But the mosaic of Brooklyn’s sections and neighborhoods—scores of them—many with names and identities known well beyond the borders of this outer borough of New York City, seems different from other places. Coney Island, Prospect Park, the long-lost Dodgers (dem Bums), the breathtaking views of lower Manhattan—these too lend a distinctive identity to the borough. And a striking stereotype of Brooklyn and its inhabitants endures through many years and changes, including the flood of up-and-coming artists and well-heeled professionals that has gentrified old neighborhoods. The stereotypical Brooklynite would not be from any other place. If challenged about the prospect of Brooklyn’s becoming something unrecognizably new—perhaps even ordinary—this dyed-in-the-wool Brooklynite might well respond in the borough’s once-distinctive language: Fuhgeddaboudit!

Brooklyn’s uniqueness stems in no small measure from the borough’s location just across the East River from Manhattan, New York’s only inner borough and the center of America’s most powerful metropolis. The dominance of Manhattan has been a constant in Brooklyn’s history and an ongoing annoyance to boosters who point out that by 1855, when it absorbed neighboring Williamsburgh—which in the process dropped its concluding h—Brooklyn had become the nation’s third largest city; that by 1930, thirty-two years after Brooklyn joined Greater New York City, its population exceeded Manhattan’s; and that Brooklyn’s East River piers and basins had long been the real center of the Port of New York. But for all that, Brooklyn grew up as and has remained a satellite of Manhattan—a town across the river, even to the point where the first bridge that finally spanned that river, though a Brooklyn-based initiative, was ultimately named from the point of view of Manhattan (as was the East River itself). It is the Brooklyn Bridge, the bridge that leads to Brooklyn, not the other way around. True, a Manhattan Bridge was built some years later, but with much less fanfare and no discernible contribution to American urban legend. The Manhattan Bridge awaits its Hart Crane, its Joseph Stella, and its David McCullough. No one will try to sell it to you.

America has many towns across the river—Somerville and Cambridge across the Charles from Boston, Camden across the Delaware from Philadelphia, Covington across the Ohio from Cincinnati, East St. Louis across the Mississippi from, well, St. Louis, to name a few. But none is as large, as complex, and as significant as Brooklyn, and none has so interesting a history. Brooklynites will hate reading this, but the uniqueness of their town across the river does reflect the uniqueness of that place on the other side. Only New York could have created Brooklyn.

The Brooklyn it did create is known for that mosaic of neighborhoods within which ethnicity and race have been the primary modes of local identity. Williamsburg and Brownsville were known for their Jews; Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst for their Italians; Sunset Park for its Norwegians (and then its Chinese); Bedford-Stuyvesant for its African Americans. The boundaries between such places are not always clear, and many ethnic and racial transitions—and conflicts—have occurred within areas once clearly associated with a particular population. The banker Nathan Jonas, who grew up in Williamsburg, recalls that the Jewish boy in Brooklyn was more than ordinarily likely to get into a fight.¹ In Gravesend, which was predominantly Italian in the 1920s, but with an adjacent Jewish community north of Avenue U, the Protestant memoirist Lionel Lindsay tells us, there were Italian kids who were willing to accept me for being not Jewish, and Jewish kids who warmed up to me because I was not Italian. For many, the path between ethnic hostilities was not so easy to navigate. Lindsay’s father, ironically enough the neighborhood’s Dutch Reformed minister, was known as the false-priest to his Catholic neighbors, many of whom crossed the street to avoid walking by his false-church. One can imagine how much more difficult it was for the Jews (morte-christas) and Italians (swartzers) of Lindsay’s Gravesend to get along with each other.²

How—and whether—Brooklyn’s ethnic groups got along is an important subject of this book. Here we merely note that the familiar story of massive ethnic migrations from Manhattan’s Lower East Side does not capture the whole of the history of this town across the river. Far less well known is another story, of a Brooklyn vast and vanished, yet hidden in plain sight; of a new and rapidly growing city and suburb of busy wharves and waterside factories, wealthy brownstone neighborhoods and middle-class streets of brick and frame single-family homes, boulevards and parks, open spaces and not-yet-leveled hills, and above all proliferating churches, many of them grand, and built of stone in then-fashionable neo-Gothic styles.

Even before it received its city charter in 1834, and throughout the nineteenth century, Brooklyn was the City of Churches. To Brooklynites, this sobriquet was far more than a booster’s slogan and more than a way of contrasting the new city with the Sodom across the river (though it was certainly both of these things). And it was more than a census of steeples. Brooklyn did indeed have more churches in proportion to its population than Manhattan, but that often-repeated boast only began to express the meaning of City of Churches. Above all, it signified the dominance of a New England-style Protestantism, still Calvinist in spirit if not in the letter of old New England ecclesiastical law, that permeated the Presbyterian and Congregational churches formed in Brooklyn Heights and other neighborhoods during the early days of village and city growth, and that deeply affected Episcopal, Methodist, Baptist, Reformed, and other churches rooted in different Protestant traditions. To be sure, there were also Roman Catholic churches from the earliest periods of Brooklyn’s growth, and somewhat later a small number of synagogues. But these served far less influential populations. The understood elision from City of Churches—the part written in invisible ink—was Protestant.

Rooted in social class as well as religious thought and practice, Protestant dominance extended to the politics, economy, society, and culture of the new city to the east of Manhattan. Although the term defies precise measurement and is revealed more in outcomes than in explicit expressions of intent, hegemony, defined as a preponderant influence or authority over others, is not too strong a term for the nature and force of Protestantism—particularly Yankee Protestantism—in nineteenth-century Brooklyn. We use it in this book to refer to the extension and power of certain religious norms beyond the church to the shaping and control of Brooklyn’s secular institutions, public space, values, and discourse. This Protestant cultural hegemony was by no means absolute in its reach; it was repeatedly challenged as Brooklyn grew from a small village to one of the nation’s largest cities. But it was notable for its endurance in the face of these challenges, especially the growing ethnic and religious diversity that finally overcame its influence. The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn describes a nineteenth-century city that contrasted markedly with the borough that succeeded it and tells the story of the transformation from one to the other.

That transformation was far from complete in 1905, when the Tammany Hall ward boss George Washington Plunkitt, seated comfortably at the bootblack stand of the New York County courthouse, and surrounded by his Manhattan-based cronies, dictated a series of very plain talks on very practical politics to the newspaperman William L. Riordon. Riordon’s popular volume reporting (and no doubt embellishing) these lectures includes Plunkitt’s dismissive account of the hayseeds of Brooklyn, who can never become real New Yorkers:

And why? Because Brooklyn don’t seem to be like any other place on earth. Once let a man grow up amidst Brooklyn’s cobblestones, with the odor of Newtown Creek and Gowanus Canal ever in his nostrils, and there’s no place in the world for him except Brooklyn. And even if he don’t grow up there; if he is born there and lives there only in his boyhood and then moves away, he is still beyond redemption.³

Plunkitt offers as proof of his contention the story of just such a Brooklyn native, discovered as a young boy, nurtured by Plunkitt in the art of New York City politics, and sent eventually to the State Assembly from a Manhattan district. You’d think, asks Plunkitt, he had forgotten all about Brooklyn, wouldn’t you? I did, but I was dead wrong. The young assemblyman showed no interest at all in Manhattan’s political affairs and was eventually caught by his mentor trying to hide a Brooklyn newspaper. To Plunkitt this was the final indignity:

Jimmy, I’m afraid New York ain’t fascinatin’ enough for you. You had better move back to Brooklyn after your present term. And he did. I met him the other day crossin’ the Brooklyn Bridge, carryin’ a hobbyhorse under one arm, and a doll’s carriage under the other, and lookin’ perfectly happy.⁴

To Plunkitt, Brooklyn had already developed a special magnetism, at least for the hayseeds who were born there, and we are again invited to believe in the uniqueness of the place, even before the crowding in of ethnic and racial communities in the twentieth century. Not identified with any ethnic group, Jimmy migrated to New York well before the unraveling of the Protestant domination that characterized his native city. Should we be convinced that Brooklyn, even then, don’t seem to be like any other place on earth? Perhaps, but we would point to something else about Plunkitt’s description of the liberated Jimmy: the hobbyhorse and doll’s carriage he so happily carried home to his children. The Jimmy we see on the Brooklyn Bridge was a young husband and father, and his traipse across the bridge was most likely that of the metropolitan suburbanite. Rather than some sort of mystical magnetism of place, that little scene evokes one of the most American of experiences, the family lives of the men, women, and children who moved into or were born and raised in the emerging suburban neighborhoods that surrounded every nineteenth-century American city. Brooklyn, more specifically Brooklyn Heights, has been called America’s first suburb, a claim not only of its uniqueness, but also of its participation in what would become a far more widely shared phenomenon.⁵

This broader perspective should include Greater Brooklyn, for as Manhattan continued to grow, so did its largest town across the river, as a suburb of New York and of its own expanding urban center. Nineteenth-century Brooklyn did become a city, and not just in its form of local governance. As the maritime and canal-borne commerce of New York dramatically increased, so did the demand for new wharves and warehouses, many of which were built on the Brooklyn side of the East River above and below the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The new Atlantic Basin in the South Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook became the main destination for upstate and Midwestern grain shipped through the Erie Canal and down the Hudson to the metropolis. The new port facilities also attracted manufacturing firms to the Brooklyn waterfront. This added to the demand for dockside and industrial workers who settled in Williamsburg and parts of South Brooklyn, having neither the need nor the means to ferry across the river to New York. Banks, insurance companies, newspapers, and a downtown to house these and other businesses were the secondary and tertiary effects of industrial and commercial growth. And as urban Brooklyn grew, so did suburban Brooklyn, well beyond the Heights, first to nearby South Brooklyn and toward Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, then, relentlessly into the farmland of Kings County, eventually consuming it all. It may be true that no other American city developed in quite this way and that Brooklyn really was a place like no other. But all the elements of its growth, urban and suburban, were the same as those that drove and defined other American cities and suburbs.

The same developmental pattern applies to Protestant hegemony in the City of Churches. Its various manifestations—rigid Sabbatarian laws, an active temperance movement, resistance to the presence of theaters and other morally threatening amusements, a public discourse that revolved around expressions of Christian piety and moral correctness, proliferating Sunday schools and an annual Sunday school celebration—all but the latter were present in cities and towns all over New England and across a wide swath of the northern United States, especially in upstate New York and the upper Midwest, where New Englanders had migrated in force. Brooklyn’s Protestantism may have been peculiarly strong, but it was not peculiar.

Nor, as we have said, was Protestantism’s power absolute. Opposition, particularly to its strictures on drinking and Sunday entertainments, came from a variety of sources familiar to readers of nineteenth-century American history: Irish Catholic workers from the docks and dockside factories, Germans (Protestant and Catholic alike) who cherished the conviviality of their beer gardens, restive young bucks from the best native Protestant families. Nineteenth-century Brooklyn was not a social or cultural monolith, but a fairly diverse city in which an atypically large middle- and upper-class suburban population gave extra force to that population’s Protestant traditions and values.

That force receded during the early decades of the twentieth century with the settlement in Brooklyn of vast numbers of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. Increasingly, elegant suburban neighborhoods were hemmed in by miles of tenements and apartment buildings inhabited by working-class Jews and Catholics. Erasmus Hall, the great high school that once prepared Protestant boys for college, taught a decidedly different clientele. The newcomers expressed their own ideas about the meaning of Americanization. And many Protestant families decamped for greener, more homogeneous pastures on Long Island and in other distant suburbs. Albeit in different ways, at different times, and with a different scale and scope, these developments occurred in many other places besides Brooklyn. As our subtitle suggests, this book in all its dimensions tells an American story.

Even as we depict Brooklyn as a lively laboratory for changes that swept across much of the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we are in no sense surrendering our claim that the County of Kings don’t seem to be like any other place on earth. In this book, we have tried to capture the special character of this special place and the unique as well as representative ways in which Brooklyn experienced the cultural, social, and political power of native-born Protestants and the eventually overwhelming challenge to that power posed by waves of immigrants who claimed no descent from Pilgrim Fathers.

Chapter 1

Brooklyn Village

From the beginning, Breuckelen enjoyed the advantage of location over the other five European settlements—four Dutch, one English—on the western end of Long Island. Breuckelen’s farmers and husbandmen sent produce, meat, and cattle directly across the tidal strait to New Amsterdam, a trade made more reliable in 1642 by the establishment of a ferry located just south of where the eastern tower of the Brooklyn Bridge stands today. Unlike the great bridge, the ferry was a modest affair, a small skiff whose departures were announced by the blowing of a horn that dangled from a nearby tree. But it helped secure an advantage that strengthened with the years, long after New Amsterdam became New York City and Breuckelen became Brooklyn.¹

If this was a New World success story, however, it was a long time coming. For nearly a century and a half Breuckelen/Brooklyn remained a small country settlement of scattered farms, centered if at all around the Dutch Reformed Church located a mile inland from the ferry landing. When a new minister arrived in 1660 to take charge of this church, he found only 134 inhabitants.² And yet this tiny community of Europeans had already largely replaced the native Lenape, Munsee-speaking members of the Delaware nation, who for countless years had hunted, fished, and farmed from a number of communal sites in what would later become Kings County. Armed conflicts, including the ruinous war against the natives pursued by New Netherland governor Willem Kieft in the early 1640s, along with the spread of smallpox and other European diseases, devastated the Lenape population in Breuckelen and beyond. Hard-pressed survivors moved away. Daniel Denton, a co-founder of the nearby town of Jamaica, wrote of the Lenape in 1670: It is to be admired how strangely they have decreast [sic] by the hand of God … for since my time, when there were six towns, they are reduced to two small villages.³ These remaining villages did not survive. By the 1680s all but a handful of natives were gone from the hilly, forested land that had long been their home.

European expansion into former Lenape land was slow, even with the significant assistance of African slaves in the clearing and cultivation of new farms. A full century after the initial Dutch and English Kings County settlements, a 1738 English census recorded only 547 free inhabitants in Brooklyn along with 158 slaves.⁴ These are hardly impressive numbers, even as they call attention to the role of slave labor in Brooklyn’s mostly rural economy. The substantial involvement in the slave trade of Manhattan-based merchants in both the Dutch and English eras made New Amsterdam/New York and its hinterland a major center of African habitation in the northern American colonies. Many slaves who were brought to Manhattan remained in the city to perform diverse tasks essential to an urban economy. But neither were those who were carried across the river to Kings County subjected to the gang labor increasingly characteristic of the rural South; rather, they toiled along with white families and perhaps one or two other slaves on small and medium-sized farms. Partly because of this dispersal their numbers remained small, in absolute if not relative terms.⁵ Even with the injection of enforced labor into Brooklyn, this largest and most commercially connected of the townships of western Long Island increased at an unremarkable pace during its first century of European (and African) settlement.

A 1767 map of Brooklyn shows an emerging village in the area surrounding the ferry landing, and in 1785 a number of inhabitants of this village thought their collection of wooden houses, barns, taverns, workshops, and stables large (and vulnerable) enough to warrant the formation of a fire company. Three years later the state legislature recognized the landing area as an official fire district.⁶ Nonetheless, only about 350 people lived in the village and some 1,600 in the township as a whole.⁷ The village and rural populations, moreover, were by no means distinct. Many of the villagers were butchers and produce dealers who slaughtered cattle and took in farm produce for sale in New York City’s markets.⁸ In Brooklyn before the last years of the eighteenth century, the more things changed the more they stayed the same.

Figure 1.1.

New York City and Brooklyn, 1767 (cartography by William L. Nelson).

By the waning of the century, however, men appeared with new ideas for themselves and the town. Two in particular, Joshua Sands and Hezekiah Beers Pierrepont, had important effects on Brooklyn’s future; to tell their stories is to gain a glimpse not only of the city and suburb that flourished during the coming years, but also the close connection between the individual entrepreneurship and the communal religiosity of Brooklyn’s Yankee leaders. Sands and Pierrepont were the vanguard of a larger cadre of New England-born or New England-descended businessmen and professionals who endeavored to build their own fortunes (material success, according to age-old Puritan doctrine, was an outward if imperfect marker of God’s grace) and at the same time shape Brooklyn as a moral community, subject to the will of its Protestant leaders.⁹ In ways they themselves may not have fully realized, they were builders of Brooklyn’s Protestant hegemony.

Joshua Sands was born in Cow Neck, now in the village of Sands Point, on the North Shore of Long Island, in 1757. Though a New Yorker by birth, Sands came from a family with New England roots. James Sands, his great-great-grandfather, migrated from England to the Pilgrim colony at Plymouth in 1658 before moving again with several other families to Block Island off the coast of Rhode Island (claimed at the time by the colony of Massachusetts Bay). This was one of several migrations of New England Puritans southwestward toward and into Long Island, a migration sustained by James’ son John who moved in 1691 to Cow Neck, the family base for the next two generations.¹⁰

Cow Neck lay a good deal closer to Manhattan than to Boston, Plymouth, or even Block Island. When Joshua Sands came of age during the early years of the American Revolution, he became an officer in New York’s Fourth Regiment, and like many young men gravitated to New York City after the war, forming a mercantile partnership there with his older brother Comfort in 1783. The brothers soon looked back across the East River to the little village of Brooklyn. In 1784 they purchased 160 acres that lay along the river from just above the ferry landing. This tract had been the estate of John Rapalje, a Dutch-descended Brooklynite who had sided with the British during the occupation, and the Sands brothers bought it from the commissioners of confiscated Loyalist property. When old Mrs. Rapalje refused to leave her house, which had been in the family for generations, the sheriff had her carried to the street in her armchair.¹¹

She might have sat there a long time, as the Sands brothers were not in a great hurry to improve their investment. Comfort did not leave Manhattan for Brooklyn, but in 1786 Joshua moved his family into a new frame house, the largest in the village. And then, in cooperation with his brother, he did two novel things. First, he divided the old Rapalje estate into building lots, gave the area the grand name City of Olympia, and proceeded to sell many of the lots. The City of Olympia was not officially recognized, and its aspirational name seems not to have lasted much past the end of the century. But Sands did introduce the idea of planned urban development to the village emerging along the river and the lower ferry road.¹² He was convinced that with the end of the Revolutionary War, and New York and its East River harbor certain to flourish, Brooklyn would grow rapidly. And grow it did. From the 1,600 or so inhabitants in 1790, the township increased to 4,400 in 1810, and more than 15,000 in 1830. Five years later, the state census tabulated 24,529 residents in the newly incorporated City of Brooklyn, nearly 15,000 of whom lived in the downtown wards where Sands had once promoted the City of Olympia.¹³

The second initiative was even more closely tied to New York’s (and the Sands brothers’) commercial prospects. Soon after moving to Brooklyn Joshua built a rope factory (in the language of the day a ropewalk) to supply rigging and cordage for the ships owned by the brothers’ mercantile firm.¹⁴ The first of many such projects, it proved a stimulus to the development of other manufacturing enterprises along the Brooklyn waterfront.

Among the people who purchased lots from Sands were maritime tradesmen who in 1798 fled a yellow fever epidemic in the coastal town of New London, Connecticut. Their arrival helped fulfill Sands’ idea of Olympia as a center of trades and industries supporting maritime commerce. Around the same time John Jackson gave this idea a further boost by building a shipyard and more ropewalks on land he had bought where Sands’ land ran eastward toward Wallabout Bay. Jackson named his smaller development Vinegar Hill to honor the latest futile rebellion against English rule in Ireland. This helped him attract Irish workers, and Vinegar Hill soon became Brooklyn’s first Irish neighborhood. At the turn of the new century Jackson sold land that abutted Wallabout Bay to the US government, giving rise in 1801 to the Brooklyn Navy Yard.¹⁵

Joshua Sands may have considered these developments the seeds of a real city on the Brooklyn side of the East River. When a City of Brooklyn did emerge, the long-forgotten City of Olympia, along with Vinegar Hill, became its downtown district. But Sands’ vision was, in contemporary terms, more suburban than urban. In the late eighteenth century suburb did not convey the middle- or upper-class bedroom community of more recent times but described instead an often unattractive and even foul-smelling urban fringe of cattle yards, slaughterhouses, tanneries, and various proto-industrial activities, along with the shanties and other cheap houses of workers who toiled in such places. Hospitals, insane asylums, poorhouses, and prisons were also built on this noxious periphery, where land was cheaper and the places themselves less visible to the urban population. While merchants’ docks and warehouses along the waterfronts were located as closely as possible to the banks, exchanges, and merchants’ homes of the urban core, shipyards, iron foundries, and ropewalks were built at more distant landings. The City of Olympia and Vinegar Hill might well have formed the emerging core of urban Brooklyn, but they were in a prior sense part of the suburbs, properly understood, of New York City.

Brooklyn became a suburb in the more modern sense as well, and it is here that we encounter the contributions of Hezekiah Beers Pierrepont.¹⁶ Pierrepont sprang from a New England family with long ties to the civic and religious life of Massachusetts and Connecticut. John Pierrepont arrived in Massachusetts around 1640, purchased land in Roxbury, and served as a town officer and a delegate to the General Court (Massachusetts Bay’s colonial legislature). John’s son James rose still higher. Ordained as a minister in 1685, he soon moved to New Haven where he helped found and then served as a trustee of what became Yale College. James married three times, all to daughters of New England clergy, the third time to the granddaughter of Thomas Hooker, principal founder of the colony of Connecticut. His daughter by this third marriage married New England’s most notable divine, Jonathan Edwards. James was no doubt the most distinguished of the colonial era Pierreponts and the most influential within the church. But the family lost no luster during the next two generations, which produced Hezekiah, an impatient Yale student who promised his father that he would ask for no further financial support if he were allowed to leave the college to seek his fortune. Granted that permission, he trained for a mercantile career in several firms and the New York Custom House, and in 1793 formed a partnership with his cousin William Leffingwell to engage in trade with France. As a young merchant in revolutionary Paris his adventures included watching Robespierre mount the guillotine. Pierrepont was quite successful, but the loss to a French privateer of a ship loaded with goods from the Far East cost him his fortune. He returned to New York in 1800 determined to regain it. Marriage to the daughter of one of New York’s wealthiest landowners (who gave him a wedding present of half a million acres of upstate land) enabled him to purchase a distillery on the Brooklyn waterfront.¹⁷ In 1804 the Pierreponts moved to Brooklyn, settling on the long, high bluff south of the village, and into its most elegant home, named Four Chimneys, which they expanded and surrounded with an estate of sixty acres. Pierrepont’s distillery was successful for a time, but profits eventually lagged. In 1819 he abandoned it and turned his attention to the land around him on that high bluff.¹⁸

The Lenape called it Ihpetonga, the English Clover Hill, and it would soon become Brooklyn Heights. It could not have been more unlike Sands’ City of Olympia, which rose more gently from the river and was more easily developed as a productive waterfront and densely inhabited village. South of the village, across from the road that leads to the ferry landing, the land rises rapidly into a long ridge overlooking the river, Manhattan, the bay, its islands, and distant New Jersey. It was a grand place to establish a country home. There were old woods of oak, chestnut, sycamore, and cedar, a few substantial eighteenth-century houses surrounded by orchards and vegetable gardens, spectacular