Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [973]
But if Green was hopeful, he wasn’t smug. There were no guarantees that “the scheme of civilization, even in the hands of the Caucasian race, is beyond the hazards of deterioration.” Faulty government—and tribal (read: Tammany) divisions—jeopardized progress. New York unfortunately still had “our Sachems” who, clinging to traditions of barbaric times, “seek to preserve their clans and clanships.” Only through struggle could evolutionary destiny be attained, Green exhorted: “The encounter is one between the retreating forces of the tribal system and the coming forces of the cooperative system, between barbaric tradition and educated aspiration, to which there can be but one result, when the frontier lines of the Manhattan, the Montauks and the Raritans shall be obliterated, and New York, Brooklyn, Long Island City and Staten Island shall be one politically as they are already in every other relation.”
Finally, in the Rooseveltian spirit of the times, Green urged New York to recognize and grasp its imperial destiny. He realized there were carpers who believed his unification project was irrational, a lusting after magnitude for its own sake. But magnitude was already there, its real dimensions hidden but not erased by the sham separation into contending municipalities. New York had become, in fact, the second city in the world but was refusing to claim its title. It should do so, joyously. “Cities are the crowns, the signs, the factors of empire,” Green proclaimed, and “the imperial city has won an honorable renown throughout the world which all her colonies may proudly inherit and which they cannot avoid accepting.” For all his upbeat assertions—and in the case of such impolitic references to Brooklyn’s secondary status, precisely because of them—Green’s cosmic vision was about to collide with local realities.
IMPERIUM OR COLONY?
Green and his Greater New York commissioners now proceeded to map out the precise dimensions of their proposed super-city. They included all New York State territories fronting on the harbor, added enough of Queens to embrace potential rival ports such as Jamaica and Little Neck bays, and threw in enough of Kings and Westchester counties to provide housing for uncounted future generations.
Next Green and his colleagues pushed for legislative authorization of a merger. This smoked out the opposition: upstate Republicans, who feared creating a monster metropolis; Tammany politicians, who shuddered at the thought of trying to organize such a vast territory; northern Manhattan and North Side (Bronx) developers, who dreaded a diversion of resources to Canarsie and Flatlands. But the most obdurate opponents came from Brooklyn itself. More precisely, they came from the old Anglo Protestant community centered in Brooklyn Heights.
These worthies had a peculiar relationship with Manhattan. They were well aware that Brooklyn was fundamentally dependent on New York: part bedroom suburb, part industrial hinterland, part agrarian supplier, part commercial backup. Yet they also maintained and treasured a separate identity, organized in large part around their difference from and presumed superiority to the metropolis. Protestant middle-class Brooklynites liked to think they embodied New England virtues, seasoned, mildly, with a dash of Dutch character. Theirs was a “city of homes and churches.” It was free from millionaires and the fashionably wicked ways of Fifth Avenue; free from the huddled immigrant masses and the squalor of Five Points or Hell’s Kitchen; free from the sordid pleasures of the Tenderloin and the Bowery; free from the corruptions of Tammany ward heelers; and free from the fast pace of scurrying big-city life. Yet, withal, it was not provincial. The town prided itself on its modern cultural appurtenances: parks, opera houses, clubs, educational institutions, newspapers, a historical