Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [743]
Other developers, encountering similar resistance from the well-to-do, tried to attract people of more moderate means. They tried to pull buyers from downtown Brooklyn or Williamsburg, both of which were rapidly changing into immigrant industrial or commercial districts, and to attract middle-class Manhattanites, who were being priced out of New York by escalating rents and land prices. Developers of Windsor Terrace had some success enticing buyers to streets stretching from Prospect Park’s southwestern border down to Green-Wood Cemetery. But Kensington’s developers did less well, while those who purchased large tracts south of the park around Ocean Avenue did downright poorly. Similar difficulties plagued Charles S. Brown, who bought land way to the east of the park, a place he immodestly christened Brownsville. Brown hadn’t really imagined his domain becoming a middle-class suburb, what with the unpleasant smells wafting up from the marshes and bone-boiling plants of Jamaica Bay, but even working-class customers proved scarce.
Oil Refineries on Newtown Creek, from Harper’s Weekly, August 6, 1881. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
Brooklyn’s bosses and boosters, like those promoting uptown Manhattan, believed that poor transportation was the source of their city’s problems, and they set about rectifying the situation.
Boss Tweed’s Brooklyn counterpart was Boss Hugh McLaughlin, master of the Kings County Democratic Party. McLaughlin, whose parents had come from Ireland early in the century, had worked, variously, as whip boy in a ropewalk, waterfront gang leader, fishmonger, and master foreman in the Navy Yard before becoming a full-time professional politician. McLaughlin looked a bit like Tweed—he was almost as tall and fat—and he too concentrated on facilitating public improvements, then profiting from insider information about the direction of the path of progress. Real estate deals would make him a millionaire, but, unlike Tweed, he would avoid ostentation and continue to dress “like a Canarsie clam baker.”
McLaughlin’s chief colleague was William C. Kingsley, Brooklyn’s most prosperous contractor. Kingsley made a fortune paving streets and installing sewers, then branched out into dealing in lumber and granite. He bought real estate, forged close ties to the Fulton Street banks and insurance companies, became publisher of the Brooklyn Eagle, and emerged as a major power in the city.
McLaughlin, Kingsley, and other boosters like J. S. T. Stranahan had been delighted with the Prospect Park Commission’s work. Kingsley’s companies did a great deal of the park’s construction business, and Boss McLaughlin managed to buy up land where Vaux and Olmsted intended to place their grand plaza at the park’s Flatbush Avenue entrance. But when the park failed to galvanize Brooklyn’s interior development they refocused their attention on the transport problem.
Viewed by night from one of Brooklyn’s lofty lookouts, the harbor sparkled romantically with the gaily colored lights of ferries plying their way back and forth from Atlantic Street to South Street, from Wall to Montague, from Fulton to Fulton. And Whitman’s masterpiece “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” was an exuberant hymn to its daytime glories. But practical men saw the system as a bottleneck, not a marvel, and the icy winter of 1866-67, which crippled river traffic, only underscored the problem.
A bridge over the East River at its narrowest point seemed the obvious solution. It would help farmers and brewers get their wares to market, perhaps even attract customers to Fulton Street shops, and, above all, allow Manhattanites to live in Brooklyn and work in New York. But would-be bridgebuilders confronted formidable