Brooklyn | History, Neighborhoods, Map, & Facts | Britannica

History

The first settlement in the area by Dutch farmers in 1636 was soon followed by other settlements in Flatlands, Wallabout, the Ferry, Gravesend, and, in 1645, Breuckelen—also spelled Breucklyn, Breuckland, Brucklyn, Broucklyn, Brookland, and Brookline; the present spelling became fixed about the close of the 18th century. Later settlements included New Utrecht (1650), Flatbush (1651), Bushwick, and Williamsburg (1660). The American Revolutionary War Battle of Long Island was fought in Brooklyn on August 27, 1776, with remnants of the American army retreating to Brooklyn Heights overlooking the East River. Early in the 19th century, Brooklyn became the world’s first modern commuter suburb, and Brooklyn Heights was transformed into a wealthy residential community. The most populous section of Brooklyn was incorporated in 1816 as a village and in 1834 as a city. Williamsburg and Bushwick were annexed to it in 1855. Other communities were absorbed until the city of Brooklyn became conterminous with Kings county (created 1683).

By the 1880s Brooklyn had become one of the country’s most important manufacturing centres, and its busy port was handling more tonnage than its counterpart in Manhattan. Sugar refining was the city’s largest single industry, but Brooklyn was also the site of ironworks (the ironclad battleship Monitor of Civil War fame was constructed at the Continental Iron Works in Greenpoint), petroleum refineries, slaughterhouses, and many factories. Clocks, cigars, beer, insulated wiring, electrical signs, packaged coffee, and even teddy bears were all produced in Brooklyn, which did not begin declining as a manufacturing hub until the 1950s, when manufacturers began relocating to less expensive locales.

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Ranked among the most populous cities in the United States during the last four decades of the 19th century, Brooklyn had its own Academy of Music (1859) and Historical Society (1863). In the late 1860s Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the architects of Manhattan’s Central Park, designed a system of parks and parkways for Brooklyn on a scale theretofore unseen in the United States. Parkways (the term coined by Olmsted and Vaux) radiated from 526-acre Prospect Park (1870s), stretching southward as far as Coney Island. Grand Army Plaza, featuring the John H. Duncan Memorial Arch, was later added as the park’s primary entrance. Notwithstanding these civic milestones, the construction of John Roebling and Washington Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan (completed 1883) effectively doomed Brooklyn’s independent existence, as business interests craved closer ties to the metropolis. Overcoming the opposition of the local Democratic machine, Brooklyn accepted consolidation by a margin of only 277 votes and became a part of Greater New York in 1898.

Yet despite their economic and political subordination to Manhattan, Brooklynites maintained a fiercely independent identity that was buttressed by pride in their hometown Major League Baseball team, the Dodgers, who played in intimate Ebbets Field and whose Jackie Robinson broke the Major League’s colour barrier. (Significantly, Brooklyn had also been a magnet for Black Americans relocating from the South during the Great Migration.) The departure of the Dodgers for Los Angeles in 1957 was a huge blow to civic pride that coincided with the onset of the decline of the local economy as the United States began transitioning to the postindustrial era. Between 1954 and 1990 manufacturing output in Brooklyn was cut in half. Moreover, the Brooklyn dockyards fell into disuse, and in 1966 the Brooklyn Navy Yard was shuttered.

In the meantime, once-thriving neighbourhoods decayed and slid into poverty. A particularly low point for Brooklyn came in July 1977, when a New York City-wide power outage occasioned rioting, arson, and looting that resulted in widespread damage that was especially destructive in the Bushwick neighbourhood. Although the 1970s and ’80s were tumultuous in Brooklyn, by the 1990s the borough had begun to experience a turnaround. Neighbourhoods such as Brooklyn Heights, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, and Park Slope were revitalized as young professionals and families looked to Brooklyn as a more affordable low-key alternative to living in Manhattan. In the process, Brooklyn’s industrial, largely working-class character began undergoing a significant transformation. In north Brooklyn an influx of artists turned Williamsburg into a hip bohemian enclave. Technology-based enterprises replaced factories. Neighbourhoods throughout Brooklyn became increasingly upscale.