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By Root 7750 0

in 1835, set up a board of trustees to manage itself, built large wharves along its stretch of the East River, and started a new ferry to Peck Slip (over the strenuous opposition of New York). In 1836 a company of gentlemen purchased a farm and estate traversed by the present Grand Street. There they erected fourteen first-class model homes for a planned model city, which they trumpeted in lithographic property maps as a great investment opportunity. The population jumped. Merchants established residences along the shore. And just to Williamsburgh’s north, the village of Green Point experienced a similar heightening of expectations. In 1832—34, Neziah Bliss, a Connecticut Yankee ironworker who married into one of the original Dutch families, bought up farmland, had the area surveyed, and laid out streets and lots.

Activity was equally frenzied below the City of Brooklyn’s southern border of Joralemon’s Lane. Two and a half miles from the ferry lay Hoyt’s (or Prospect) Hill, where Charles Hoyt had planted streets back in 1826. By 1833, amid a marketing blitz of lithographic maps and auction sales, Hoyt was harvesting his speculative profits. At the same time, the hills, marsh meadows, and mill ponds of Red Hook were fetching astonishing prices: one ten-acre patch went for forty-seven thousand in 1833. In 1834 the old Van Dyke lands were transmuted into the Red Hook Building Company, which issued stock on Wall Street. In 1835 poplars, cedars, locusts, and sassafras were hatcheted down. Hills were tossed into marshes, and old mill ponds, like that on which Nicholas Luquer had raised oysters and ground grain for Pierrepont’s distillery, passed into history. The Red Hook Building Company’s ambitions outpaced its abilities, however, and in 1835 it was taken hold of by Messrs. Voorhees and Stranahan, who organized the Atlantic Dock Company, which in the next decade would construct an engineering masterpiece.

Still farther south, across Gowanus Bay, the land rose again toward the wooded Heights of Gowanus. It was here, in 1832, that Henry E. Pierrepont proposed to build a city of the dead. Pierrepont had been inspired by a visit to Mount Auburn Cemetery, the country’s first rural, parklike necropolis, which had opened in 1831 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was also inspired by a vision of the fortune he could make importing corpses from Manhattan.

New York had banned burials south of Canal Street, and by 1830 several enterprising businessmen had opened New York Marble Cemetery as a profit-making venture. The city’s first nonsectarian cemetery—its 156 underground vaults were open to the wealthy of any faith—was situated on a half-acre plot just west of Second Avenue between Second and Third streets. An inscription blazoned on its east wall read PLACE OF BURIAL FOR GENTLEMEN. It was so successful they opened a second one, a block east, in 1832. Further annexes were ruled out the following year by the real estate boom, which drove the value of downtown lots to such heights that the City Council extended the ban on new interments north to 14th Street. Pierrepont saw an opportunity here and, once Brooklyn had become a city, proposed creation of Green-Wood Cemetery, a plan that would come to fruition in the next decade.

Below the Heights of Gowanus, Brooklyn rolled south to the sea. Here the landscape of scattered farms and villages was largely untouched by the 1830s boom, with one exception. At its southwestern rump, across the Narrows from Staten Island’s easternmost extension, federal defense spending catalyzed new development. On June 11, 1825, the cornerstone was laid for Fort Hamilton, commencing a seven-year, half-million-dollar construction project. Wharves rose along the shore for landing supplies. Fort Hamilton village, also known as Irishtown, grew up on the bastion’s northwestern side. Its shacks housed construction workers, many of them recent immigrants, and the Irish women who did laundry and opened small stores. By the mid-1830s stage service connected the fort with New Utrecht, two and a half miles away, and from