Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [974]
This was, however, a badly overstated case. It is true that the big rich stayed mainly in Manhattan, though the Pratts, Lows, and Pierreponts were no pikers. But the percentage of non-Protestants in each city, while different (52.7 percent in New York to 40 percent in Brooklyn), hardly justified such sweeping characterizations. The workingclass Irish around the Navy Yard, the Germans of Williamsburg, the Italians of Red Hook, the Jews of Brownsville, the African Americans of Fort Greene may have been out of sight (from the perspective of the Montauk Club or the Church of the Pilgrims) but they were hardly out of power, as repeated failures to impose a Dry Sunday attested.
There was, moreover, still another Brooklyn to contend with, the developmental powerhouse centered in the commercial section around City Hall. Montague Street’s residential buildings had given way to banks, real estate offices, insurance companies, and law firms (like Gaynor’s). New public buildings were everywhere—most strikingly a Hall of Records and a huge Romanesque Revival post office. Fulton Street by 1893 was crowded with hotels, warehouses, newspaper offices, theaters, and stores. Real estate values had zoomed to such levels that the downtown mercantile district was flowing farther from the piers, a development fostered by the traffic funneling in over the Brooklyn Bridge. A new satellite commercial district had emerged between City Hall and Flatbush Avenue, thick with Romanesque department stores, power stations, fire headquarters, libraries, and churches.
Yet the piers remained crucial to this booming Brooklyn—the thriving termini of great transatlantic fleets, vessels from South and Central America, domestic coastal freighters. In one week in 1886, the ships along Brooklyn’s wharves and piers had carried a combined cargo of roughly 45,000 tons, compared to the mere 12,000 or so tons’ worth tied up at New York during the same seven days. By 1897 an average of four thousand ships unloaded cargoes annually.
Manufacturing and the processing of agricultural commodities reached record levels. Half the sugar consumed in the United States was refined in Brooklyn; almost all the oil for the Atlantic seaboard was refined in Williamsburg and Long Island City (along with plants in New Jersey). Bakeries and breweries drew from grain elevators with four times the capacity of Manhattan’s, and its myriad ironworks and factories made Brooklyn the fourth largest industrial city in the country.
The economic expansion that had commenced with the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge had pulled in a huge workforce—the city’s population had gone from 570,000 in 1880 to 800,000 by 1890, and in 1894 it was approaching 900,000. This demographic explosion had in turn generated a frenzied building boom. Construction of genteel housing was rampant from Brooklyn Heights to Fort Greene, to the newly (at last) fashionable Park Slope. Williamsburg was thriving, and Greenpoint’s population had tripled (from twenty-three to seventy-five thousand) between 1880 and 1890. New Utrecht, only recently a farming town, had been transformed by the arrival of the Second Avenue Trolley, and thousands of houses were going up in real estate developments named Bensonhurst, Blythebourne, Bay Ridge Park, and Van Pelt Manor.
Most of the people presiding over this Brooklyn, and the spectacular run of prosperity it had been enjoying, craved consolidation because without it—they knew—it was all going to come to a halt. Roused to action by a William Gaynor speech at the Montauk Club, promerger merchants, bankers, real estate developers, large retailers, warehousers, lawyers, speculators, manufacturers, hotel proprietors, and streetcar company presidents came together, at a public meeting in the Real Estate Exchange, and organized the Brooklyn Consolidation League (BCL, 1893) to fight for ties with Manhattan. Launching a massive propaganda campaign,