Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [572]
Brooklyn was also a tax haven: its promoters publicized it as an offshore financial refuge from Manhattan. This in turn generated some proposals for annexation, the solution Philadelphia authorities embraced in 1854 to recapture runaway taxpayers. (One New York state senator proposed physically uniting the two islands by filling up the East River with gravel and covering the cost of the enterprise by selling the newmade land at high prices.) But it was Brooklyn, not New York, that resorted to annexation. Absorbing neighboring Williamsburgh and Bushwick in 1855, it became the nation’s third most populous city. Brooklyn not only bolstered its status as an independent municipality but emerged as a credible competitor to Manhattan itself, complete with its own imposing City Hall; construction, halted by the panic, had recommenced in 1845 and been completed by 1849.
Though most of Brooklyn’s newly rich merchants and financiers joined old established families on the Heights, more venturesome types pioneered other exclusive locations. Just to the south lay the Heights’ fashionable offshoot of Cobble Hill, where in short order the assessed value of houses almost matched those of its progenitor. To the east lay “the Hill,” where General Greene’s Fort Putnam—renamed Fort Greene in the War of 1812—had been replaced by Washington Park, thanks largely to a campaign waged by Eagle editor Walter Whitman.
Those who found the Hill too close to the Navy Yard could opt for Bedford Corners. A sleepy Dutch village as late as 1850, it first became accessible via the Long Island Rail Road along Atlantic Avenue. Then, after 1854, the Brooklyn City Railroad Company began running forty-passenger horsecars along the recently opened Fulton Avenue (now Street) and Myrtle Avenue. Large rural landowners like the Lefferts and the Lotts began to sell off property to speculators, who subdivided it for individuals or small developers. Ads in the New York Times soon proclaimed the availability of “villa plots” and residences complete with stables, gardens, and “all modern improvements,” just thirty minutes from downtown Brooklyn.
Farther than this uppertens seldom went. Developers in the 1850s tried promoting Fort Hamilton, Bushwick, and East New York as suburban retreats—promising trees, parks, nuisance clauses, minimum plot sizes, an escape from city taxes and dirt, and a good investment to boot. But these were too far away, scattered amid small farming communities like Flatbush, Flatlands, New Lots, New Utrecht, and Gravesend. Cannier developers, like Park Slope’s Edwin Litchfield, patiently accumulated property and bided their time.
Brooklyn did have one Downing-type suburb, which griddish New Yorkers liked. The spectacular if belated success of Green-Wood Cemetery proved that while they didn’t want to spend their lives in such locations, they had no objection to spending eternity there. With its landscaped terrain, pastoral winding paths, weeping statues, and plots enclosed by iron railings, Green-Wood was a romantic suburb for the deceased. Indeed early suggestions that it be called the Necropolis had been rejected precisely because the word would have conveyed “an idea of city form and show.” The quick as well as the dead flocked to Green-Wood. On pleasant days hundreds of carriages headed for the Hills of Gowanus, taking the Hamilton Avenue ferry that Henry E. Pierrepont had started up in 1846, then crossed Gowanus Creek over the Hamilton Avenue toll bridge. By the early 1850s Green-Wood had become, in effect, the preeminent park for both Brooklyn and Manhattan.
In the summertime, uppertens pursuing relief from city heat would press on farther still. Their carriages headed south—often on Sundays, to