Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [978]
In Queens, over 60 percent of the electors voted for consolidation, with the greatest tallies being registered in the urbanized areas closest to Manhattan. Long Island City, in particular, was counting on reaping such benefits as a Blackwell’s Island bridge, a bevy of new streets, and the assumption by Manhattan of its substantial debt, product of both honest construction and blatant thievery. Such resistance as there was in Queens came from its sparsely settled periphery, though only Flushing failed to cast a majority in favor.
On Staten Island, the results were crisply clear: 5,531 for consolidation, 1,505 against.
In the eastern districts of the Bronx: Mount Vernon declined, by a large majority; Westchester said no, but only by one vote; Eastchester, Pelham, and the remainder of the territory said yes, convinced of amalgamation’s benefits by the flurry of improvements that had begun in 1890, when the state transferred development oversight from the Department of Parks to a local group, the Department of Street Improvements of the Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth Wards. This body had gotten lots of streets paved and sewers built and had extended the grid throughout the area’s irregular terrain. The new North Side Board of Trade (1894) pushed successfully for consolidation to keep the process in motion.
The referendum passed in Brooklyn too, but by less than the proverbial whisker. The final tally was 64,744 for merger and 64,467 against—a winning margin of 277 out of 129,211. Ironically, it was the newly conquered colonies of Gravesend and New Utrecht that, in voting heavily for consolidation, overcame the negative majority in Brooklyn’s imperial center.
A benevolent “Father Knickerbocker” welcomes “Brooklyn” to the family of Greater New York after the 1894 referendum. Another two years would pass, however, before opposition to consolidation on both sides of the East River had been finally defeated. (Brooklyn Historical Society)
The result emboldened opponents, who immediately after the election organized a League of Loyal Citizens, assembled their own roster of bankers, merchants, landlords, reformers, and clergymen, and launched a campaign to block consolidation at the state level. In pamphlets, circulars, leaflets, and a weekly bulletin called Greater Brooklyn, the Loyal Leaguers attacked Manhattan as a social and political failure (citing Jacob Riis to good effect); expressed doubts that a Manhattan-dominated Greater New York would ever dispense Brooklyn its fair share of anything; reiterated its objection to being swamped (as the Rev. Dr. Storrs of the Church of the Pilgrims put it) by a flow from Manhattan to Brooklyn of the “political sewage of Europe”; and expressed a desire not to “vote away our religion” and to remain “a New England and American city.”
The Loyalists appealed as well to traditions of local self-government and against a centralizing state, rather as had the Antifederalists a century earlier. They also sought to rouse middle-class ire against big developers on both sides of the East River. Thus Eagle editor St. Clair McKelway declared that in Brooklyn, every plain citizen was “the political peer of every capitalist or of every lot boomer,” that they preferred homes to tenements and houses to mansions, and that as residents of a “manly city” they would not “sell their rights or dodge their responsibilities for dirty money, no matter how high it be heaped.”
Finally, Loyalists appealed to municipal patriotism, wrapping themselves in the flag of Brooklyn, recalling with St. Clair McKelway the glorious days when “Washington’s army saved the Union’s life and afterward were able to beat the consolidation attempted against American liberty.” Seeking to tap popular levels of affection for Brooklyn, they denounced those consolidationist-minded gentlemen as being people who (in Storrs’s opinion) considered the city as a mere convenience on the order of a trolley car.
A disgusted