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By Root 7540 0

about to be in short supply. Development to date had required immense expenditures on roads, lighting, sewer mains, and the like, but Brooklyn would soon be unable to afford any of these. In 1884 New York State—in line with the post-Tweed fiscal clampdown engineered by, among others, the tight-fisted Andrew Haswell Green—had forbidden cities or counties from incurring a debt greater than 10 percent of the assessed value of its property. The postbridge expansion had been very costly for Brooklyn; apart from its layouts for basic infrastructure, it had assumed obligations for the $1.2 million purchase of Wallabout Market from the U.S. government, and it was about to be burdened with the debts of several Kings County towns. As a result, Brooklyn was bumping up against its debt ceiling. Some banks had already rejected its bonds, the depression was not helping its revenues, and it seemed that rather than expanding city services Brooklyn would have to contract them, laying off clerks, teachers, policemen, firemen, and other employees. The gloomiest observers talked of impending bankruptcy.

The problem, most agreed, was Brooklyn’s narrow revenue base, composed essentially of residential housing. In 1891 Brooklyn’s population was fully half that of New York’s, but it had only a fourth as much taxable property. New York was home to the big corporations—even railroads and steamship companies that did business in Brooklyn paid taxes in Manhattan—and it housed their offices too: in one year a single New York skyscraper paid more taxes than five hundred homes in Brooklyn.

In 1894, accordingly, New York was still fifty-five million dollars below its debt limit and it could sell its bonds for a negligible 3.9 percent. Brooklyn, meanwhile, had been forced to curtail its per capita spending, which was down to $9.75 a head, compared to New York’s $22.46, while raising taxes steadily: Brooklynites paid an average of $2.85 per hundred dollars of property to Manhattanites’ $1.82. To irate citizens who said the wealthy could well afford still higher taxes, the BCL counterargued that owners would invariably pass such increases on to renters, cutting demand, slowing building, and in the end mainly hurting construction workers, tradesmen, clerks, and shopgirls.

Consolidation, on the other hand, would allow construction of yet another crossriver pipeline, this one to Wall Street’s capital pool. The resultant money flow would fertilize bridges, tunnels, waterworks, parks, roadways, rapid transit, and jobs. It would also lower taxes for property owners, with the slack picked up by underassessed Manhattanites—as lawyer Edward C. Graves pointed out in a winning BCL pamphlet called “How Taxes in Brooklyn Can Be Reduced One-Half.”

Finally, to those concerned with moral order and good government, the league argued that unification would not bring what one paper called the “horde of plug-ugly politicians that control New York” streaming across the bridge; rather, the combination of the virtuous of Brooklyn with the best men of Manhattan would overwhelm the politicos. Greater New York would be so immense that no Ring could possibly control it. And to those who feared the evils of Manhattan’s slums and costs of welfare, Edward Bradford of the BCL wrote that there was no escaping such ills in any event. A man might “withhold charity, but he cannot dodge taxes swelled by crime and pauperism,” and every breeze was freighted with tenement-spawned germs.

THE GREAT DEBATE

In March 1893, William Gaynor led a two-hundred-man BCL delegation on board a charter train to Albany, where they presented all these weighty arguments to the legislature, only to see the measure killed by Brooklyn’s representatives, who took their orders from Boss McLaughlin. At this the BCL plunged into politics, merging with that fall’s Good Government, anti-McLaughlin, anti-McKane crusade. Both causes triumphed together, and the new delegation of Brooklyn’s representatives was solidly behind consolidation. When Andrew Haswell Green submitted a bill in February 1894 that called for submitting