Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [968]
For all the rejoicing, mutters and imprecations could be heard in many quarters. The road to Consolidation Eve had not been an easy one. Some Brooklynites felt like victims of an imperial expansion they had tried and failed to halt. Tammany Hall was exceedingly ambivalent, despite the fact that Croker and company would control the new colossus, thanks to Van Wyck’s triumph in the recent mayoral election; the pols couldn’t help being suspicious of an enterprise so largely engineered by their Republican and reformer enemies. And even consolidation’s sponsors, the businessmen and professionals over at the Chamber of Commerce and the Citizens Union, were lukewarm about their creation and apprehensive about the future. This melange of mixed feelings was the legacy not only of the previous decade of struggle but of two centuries of interurban rivalry.
ANNEXATION AND ITS ENEMIES
Manhattan had first gained dominance over Brooklyn when the Dongan Charter (1686) and Montgomerie Charter (1730) granted it domain over the East River and its ferry traffic, effectively depriving Brooklyn of control over its own waterfront. When Brooklyn pursued city status in the early 1830s, New York resisted, to maintain its lucrative privileges and because (as Manhattan officials argued) constituting a “distinct and rival commercial community” would lead to “contentions, inconvenience and other calamities.” Besides, Brooklyn was obviously destined to be folded into the larger and wealthier city, and making it a separate polity would only impede the inevitable. Brooklyn community leaders successfully demanded independence, insisting that “between New York and Brooklyn, there is nothing in common, either in object, interest, or feeling—nothing that even apparently tends to their connexion.”
In 1857 the two cities were subjected to something of a shotgun wedding when the state combined their police, fire, and health departments into joint metropolitan boards. There were those who hoped the merger of functions might evolve into a more thoroughgoing consolidation, and indeed it was from one of these supra-boards that conglomeration’s strongest champion emerged. It was in the course of pursuing Haussmannesque authority for the Central Park Commission—allowing it to plan and develop bridges, roads, and sewers on both sides of the Harlem River—that Andrew Haswell Green first developed the arguments he would promote for the next forty years. And it was in the course of convincing uptown and Westchester property owners that comprehensive development was in their mutual interest that Green began to assemble a constituency powerful enough to translate his ideas into action.
In 1868, when Green was proposing that Manhattan should annex the portion of the mainland just across the Harlem River, he alluded to what for him was the obvious end point of such an initiative: formation of a metropolitan totality out of the discrete political entities grouped around the harbor. It was, he asserted, desirable to bring “the City of New York and the County of Kings, a part of Westchester County and a part of Queens and Richmond, including the various suburbs of the City, under one common municipal government, to be arranged in departments under a single executive head.”
In 1870 Green’s plans seemed to have been short-circuited by Tweed’s city charter, which abolished the state boards and deprived Green of his power base. But Tweed, in his own way, was a master planner too. Following Green’s logic, he gave his new Department of Public Parks the