Brooklyn Timeline

1604 — First European settlement in NEW ENGLAND established at St. Croix Island in what is now the state of Maine by a French party including Samuel de Champlain, and called Acadia.

1609, Fall — Henry Hudson, an English navigator sailing for the United Provinces of the Netherlands, enters the harbor of what will be New York and finds and sails up the Hudson River, claiming the land for the Dutch who will name it New Netherland.

1620, September 6 (Old Style; September 16, New)—The English “Pilgrims,” “Separate” from the Church of England because of their Puritan Calvinist opposition to that Church’s retention of hierarchical government and bishops, and for the past decade in uneasy exile in the bishop-free Protestant United Netherlands, debark in Mayflower from Dartmouth, England in order to settle in Virginia, already colonized by the English in 1607. They are leaving perilously late in the year because on their first two attempts in August, their second ship, a possibly overmasted veteran of the 1588 Armada fight named Speedwell, kept leaking dangerously and twice forced their return after a day or two at sea. Mayflower will make it alone, reaching landfall on Cape Cod on a cold November 9 (Old Style; November 19, New).

1620, December 11 (Old Style; December 21, New) — The English separatist Pilgrims land in Cape Cod Bay, legendarily at Plymouth Rock, after rounding Cape Cod in search of Virginia. They choose present-day Plymouth, Massachusetts, as a settlement site, and name it “Plymouth” after their embarkation port in England, but will live aboard their anchored ship until March 21. Within a few years, they establish the first sizable settlement in what English colonists will call NEW ENGLAND. (The 1877 painting below shows them landing on a rock instead of a beach and handing a woman out first, things no 17th-century European sea captain has so far been known to have attempted.)

1621, November — The “first Thanksgiving,” a traditional harvest festival for the Pilgrims’s first harvest (made possible by Wampanoag help) and also the celebration of an alliance at the new colony of Plymouth in Massachusetts Bay in NEW ENGLAND, between the Pilgrims and about 90 Wampanoag people under Ousemaquin (Massasoit). After a winter of high mortality, the Pilgrims had been taught survival skills such as corn planting by Tisquantum (Squanto) and other Wampanoags. Their alliance is against the Narragansett people, neighbors to the west, who have not been decimated by the recent years of epidemic disease, as the Wampanoags have been. The village of Plymouth will survive and grow and in a couple of years will look something like this 20th-century historical recreation now on the site.

1622 — The Province of Maine first named in an English land patent issued to Sir Ferdinando Gorges for settlements in what is now Portland.

1623 — William and Edward Hilton form a permanent settlement at present-day Dover, New Hampshire, on a grant from the Abenaki people, establishing the NEW ENGLAND colony of New Hampshire.

1624 — Peter Minuit of the Dutch West India Company establishes the colony of New Netherland by “purchasing” the island of Manhattan from the Lenape people and naming it Nieuw Amsterdam. He will go on to be the first Director of the Dutch colony (1626–1631). In 1638, he will be drowned at sea in a hurricane off the West Indian island of St. Kitts while trying to deliver a shipload of tobacco to finance the other American colony he founded—New Sweden.

1636, November 5 — A Dutch West India Company administrator announces in a letter the [once famous] “‘purchase’ of Manhattan from Native Americans for 60 guilders — an amount [which will be] translated in the 19th century to an infamous $24.” The Manhattan Native American ancestors of the Lenape, who agreed to this—“who likely would have gone by another name, such as the Muncie or the Delaware—would have understood the agreement as a defensive alliance and an acknowledgment of the right to habitation. As for the 60 guilders, the Lenape would have seen that not as the price for the land, but gifts to seal the deal” (New York Times).

398 years later, in 2024, Brent Stonefish, a Lenape language coordinator for a community in Ontario, Canada, will help organize a letter signed by the chiefs of the Ramapough Munsee Lenape Nation and the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation in New Jersey and the Munsee-Delaware Nation in Ontario—a letter that will end with the Lenape words: “íiyach ktaphina,” meaning “We are still here” (New York Times).

1628 — Puritan (English Calvinist Protestant Christian) stockholders establish the colony of Massachusetts Bay with claims to all the territory now called NEW ENGLAND plus territory in its latitude west to the Pacific Ocean. Puritans and others come to Massachusetts Bay in large numbers in the 1630s, including resisters against the would-be absolutist regime of King Charles I. One of these, Hugh Peter, will return and assist at King Charles’s execution by the Puritan Parliament in 1649.

c. 1630 — NEW ENGLAND first appears on a Dutch map (right). Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon Blaeu’s map of Nova Belgica (New Netherland) and Anglia Nova (New England) shows New Amsterdam with Leni Lenape dwellings (and canoes), and Massachusetts with Wampanoag dwellings, but not Brooklyn.

1636 — Roger Williams is exiled from Massachusetts Bay for religious dissidence, establishes the colony of Providence Plantations on land granted him by the Narragansett people. It will become the religiously tolerant NEW ENGLAND colony and state of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.

1637 — Anne Hutchinson is tried for heresy in Massachusetts Bay. Convicted and exiled from Massachusetts, she will move with her 15 children and other followers first to Rhode Island and then, leaving NEW ENGLAND altogether, to New Netherland near the River now named for her in what is now The Bronx.

1638 — Theophilus Eaton and others establish the NEW ENGLAND colony of New Haven (absorbed in 1664 by Connecticut).

1638 – The Pieter Claesen Wyckoff House is estimated to have been built on Long Island on the land the Lenape people call Canarsie (now BROOKLYN), one of the first structures built by Europeans on the island and the oldest surviving Dutch saltbox frame house in the U.S. Only a small section remains from 1638-1652.

1639, January 24 — Connecticut Fundamental Orders adopted, by which the NEW ENGLAND colony of Connecticut establishes itself on Massachusetts Bay territory.

1640 — English colonists from NEW ENGLAND begin settling along the north shore of Long Island. The town of Southold is founded on land bought from the Corchaug people by Theophilus Eaton, Governor of the colony of New Haven (eventually part of Connecticut) and will be chartered by New Haven in 1658. The Southold hamlet of Cutchogue (or “principal place” in the Algonquian language of the Corchaug) now has the oldest English house in New York State, dated to 1699.

1643 — A 1643 deed grants 200 acres of land near Coney Island to Anthony van Salee, the first known person of Muslim origin to settle in America. (The document can be found at the Center for Brooklyn History, formerly the Brooklyn Historical Society.)

1643, May — NEW ENGLAND Confederation (a.k.a. United Colonies of NEW ENGLAND) is formed by the colonies of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, New Haven, and Connecticut. It will last until King James II tries to revoke colonial charters in the 1680s.

1644, February 22 — Deputy-Governor John Endicott writes to Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay concerning the recent application of Lady Deborah Moody (1586–1659), a religious dissident, to return to NEW ENGLAND from BROOKLYN, to which she has emigrated the year before.

SALEM, the 22d of the 2d mo., 1644. SIR, since I wrot my Lettre, Mr. Norrice came to mee, to tell mee, that hee heard that the Lady Moody hath written to you to give her advice for her returne. I shall desire that shee may not have advice to returne to this Jurisdiccion, vnless shee will acknowledge her ewill [evil] in opposing the Churches, & leave her opinions be hinde her, for shee is a dangerous woeman. My brother Ludlow writt to mee, that, by meanes of a booke she sent to Mrs. Eaton, shee questions her owne baptisme & it is verie doubtefull whither shee will be reclaymed, shee is so farre ingaged. The Lord rebuke Satan, the aduersarie of our Soules.” (James W. Gerard, Lady Deborah Moody: An Address delivered before the New York Historical Society, May, 1880, New York: F. B. Patterson & Douglas Taylor, Printer, 1880, p. 25)

In 1643, Moody had left the home in NEW ENGLAND (Lynn, Massachusetts), that she had had built upon coming to Massachusetts Bay, probably sailing across Long Island Sound to BROOKLYN, in New Netherland, where there was “free libertie of conscience according to the costome and manner of Holland.” She had settled in Lynn upon coming to Massachusetts Bay as the widow of a landed English baronet in 1640, the year King Charles I closed Parliament, setting the stage for the Puritan Revolution.

Moody’s application to return to NEW ENGLAND is denied by Endicott and Winthrop and in 1645 she will settle in a village chartered by New Netherland as Gravesend, north of Conyne [Coney] Island in the region that will become BROOKLYN. Gravesend’s first town plan, dated 1645, will be drawn up by Moody who will run the place as a religiously tolerant haven for Anabaptists (Protestant Christian opponents of infant baptism) and other dissidents. As a landed resident she will vote for town magistrates, becoming the first woman known to have voted in a New York election.

1646 — New Netherland colony authorizes the purchase of land from the Lenape people on Long Island across the East River from Nieuw Amsterdam to found “Breuckelen” (now BROOKLYN), named for the town of Breukelen in the Province of Utrecht in the United Provinces of the Netherlands. It is a Dutch village, but it will have a growing number of English residents, most of them from NEW ENGLAND.

1655 — English colonists from NEW ENGLAND continue settling along the north shore of Long Island. The town of Setauket, Long Island, is sold by Algonquian-speaking Setalcott people to land speculators who will settle it with NEW ENGLANDers from across Long Island Sound. Later called Brookhaven, its oldest surviving structure, the Brewster House, dates from 1665. The town of Huntington, Long Island, founded in 1653 by migrants from neighboring Oyster Bay who were themselves emigrants from Connecticut, will vote to become a part of Connecticut rather than New Netherland in 1660.

1657, December 27 — Flushing Remonstrance sent from the New Netherland village of Vlissengen (Flushing, now in Queens, New York) to the government of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, requesting religious toleration on the Dutch model. Signed by the English settlers in a Dutch town in behalf of the Quakers and other religious dissidents in Flushing, Jamaica, and Gravesend (which later merged with BROOKLYN), the Remonstrance protests Governor Peter Stuyvesant’s 1656 edict that banned all religious practice except Dutch Reformed. Stuyvesant prosecutes the signers, but the Remonstrance will remain a landmark document in the history of religious liberty in America and the West.

1658-1676 — Massachusetts Bay colony in NEW ENGLAND absorbs the Gorges settlements in Maine by purchase and legal maneuver. Maine will be part of Massachusetts until 1819.

1660 — Governor Peter Stuyvesant follows orders from his superiors at the Dutch West India Company to “‘experiment’ with a consignment of enslaved people” which “pave[s] the way for New York to become a center of the slave trade.” (New York Times).

1664, September 6 — Peter Stuyvesant, the last Governor of Dutch New Netherland, is forced to surrender the colony without a fight to the English fleet that entered Nieuw Amsterdam harbor at the end of August. Under the authority of James, Duke of York, the fleet’s commander, Richard Nicolls, becomes the first Governor of the now English colony of New York and issues a code of laws including religious toleration (even for Catholics like the Duke). Back east from its ferry landing, Breukelen (BROOKLYN) is open country with scattered farms. The rest of Long Island is much the same, with mostly English farmers and fishermen.

1664 — The last of the several individual town colonies in southern NEW ENGLAND, including New Haven, submit to being annexed by the chartered colony of Connecticut, but NEW ENGLAND claims to Long Island settlements are rendered moot by the English capture of New Netherland.

1665 — Thomas Mayhew’s NEW ENGLAND islands colony (consisting of Martha’s Vineyard, the Elizabeth Islands, and Nantucket) south of Massachusetts Bay, purchased by Mayhew in 1641 from its original grantees, is included in a grant to the Duke of York, who has just acquired New York from the Dutch. Mayhew will continue to rule Dukes under a 1671 dispensation, and the islands will be set up as Dukes County in the Province of New York, in 1683, only to be returned to Massachusetts Bay in 1691 (after James, still Duke of York in 1683, but King of England in 1685-88, has been deposed and exiled by the Glorious Revolution).

1671 — Wading River, on the north coast of Long Island west of Riverhead in Suffolk County, is settled by eight NEW ENGLAND families from across the Sound.

1675-1676 — King Philip’s War. Pumetacom (a.k.a. Metacomet or King Philip), son of Ousamequin (Massasoit) and his Wampanoags (together with allied Nipmucks and Narragansetts) are defeated and massacred by the English colonists of Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, and Connecticut in NEW ENGLAND, together with those of Long Island, New York. Roger Williams’ Rhode Island legacy of equality of Native Americans with European immigrants is spent.

1686 — Dominion of NEW ENGLAND is set up under Governor Edmund Andros to include every English colony from Maine to New Jersey. It lasts until 1689, one year more than its author, King James II (formerly Duke of York), who was deposed in 1688 by the Glorious Revolution. For these three years, at least, all New York, including BROOKLYN, is officially part of NEW ENGLAND.

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1700s — New York colony prospers. BROOKLYN becomes a largely English village with some Dutch inhabitants on the East River with a rowboat ferry landing and a hinterland of farms (including the property of merchant Philip Livingston on BROOKLYN Heights), many of which export food to the islands of the West Indies to feed the slaves who grow sugar cane there on land too valuable for growing anything else.

1742-1743 – Rev. James Davenport (1716–1757), first in the class of 1732 at Yale in NEW ENGLAND, and in 1738, principal minister at the Congregational (Puritan) church in Southhold, Long Island, New York, having been convinced by the Great Awakening to become an itinerant revival preacher, stages an old-fashioned “bonfire of vanities,” chiefly a book-burning of “worldly” books, with a church congregation back across Long Island Sound in NEW ENGLAND (New London, Connecticut). On March 7, 1743, luxurious clothing, including (says one source) the preacher’s own pants, is thrown on the pyre. Davenport will be censured by his church and by the government of Connecticut, required to make a public apology, and sent back to Long Island. There is a priceless contemporary account given to, and recorded by, Dr. Alexander Hamilton (not the Framer):

I went home att 6 o’clock, and Deacon Green’s son came to see me. He entertained me with the history of the behaviour of one Davenport, a fanatick preacher there who told his flock in one of his enthusiastic rhapsodies that in order to be saved they ought to burn all their idols. They began this conflagration with a pile of books in the public street, among which were Tillotson’s Sermons … and many other excellent authors, and sung psalms and hymns over the pile while it was a burning. They did not stop here, but the women made up a lofty pile of hoop petticoats, silk gown, short cloaks, cambrick caps, red heeld shoes, fans, necklaces, gloves and other such apparrell, and what was merry enough, Davenport’s own idol with which he topped the pile, was a pair of old, wore out, plush breaches. But this bone fire was happily prevented by one more moderate than the rest, who found means to perswade them that making such a sacrifice was not necessary for their salvation, and so everyone carried of[f] their idols, again, which was lucky for Davenport who, had fire been put to the pile, would have been obliged to strutt about barearsed, for the devil another pair of breeches had he but these same old plush ones which were going to be offered up as an expiatory sacrifise. (Dr. A. Hamilton, “Journal,” Gentleman’s Progress, (n.d.), in Page Smith, ed., Religious Origins of the American Revolution, Missoula, MT: Scholars Press for American Academy of Religion, 1976, p. 136. The date, March 6, is assigned by Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: A Brief History with Documents. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008)

1776, March 17 —George Washington, in command of the Continental Army in NEW ENGLAND (Boston) after the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775, relieves the British siege, and decides to move the Army from NEW ENGLAND to BROOKLYN, New York, commanding New York harbor. The British decide to move their own army from NEW ENGLAND to New York City, which they consider the “keystone of the arch” of the American colonies because of its river connections north to Lake Champlain and west past the Appalachians to the Great Lakes, and its ability to control Long Island Sound and so much of the ocean approach to rebellious NEW ENGLAND. Emerging British military strategy seeks to divide the northern from the southern colonies.

1776, July 2 — The Continental Congress votes yes on the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on report of a Committee of Five: Ben Franklin of Pennsylvania, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, John Adams of Massachusetts, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, and Robert R. Livingston of Clermont, New York. The New York colony remains divided on independence and Livingston will not be there to vote for it or sign it; but Robert Livingston’s cousin, Delegate Philip Livingston of BROOKLYN, New York whose property will become BROOKLYN Heights, votes aye and, unlike his cousin Robert, will sign the Declaration when it is engrossed and presented to Congress on the 4th of July. The first public reading of the Declaration will be to the troops of Washington’s Continental Army encamped in BROOKLYN in August.

1776, August 27 — Battle of BROOKLYN, the biggest battle of the American Revolution. British naval forces earlier deployed some 300 ships around Staten Island and debarked a British army estimated at from 20,000-32,000 men in Gravesend Bay, BROOKLYN, on August 22nd. General William Howe sends it against the Continental Army, commanded from BROOKLYN Heights by General George Washington. The British outflank the Continentals east of what is now Prospect Park and drive them back to BROOKLYN Heights.

1776, August 29 — Battle of BROOKLYN ends—won by the British. Covered by night and fog, Washington orders his NEW ENGLAND boatmen, most from the port of Marblehead, Massachusetts, to evacuate his defeated forces across the East River to Manhattan, beginning a long fighting retreat out of New York City to New Jersey. The British will occupy New York, including BROOKLYN and Long Island., until the Revolutionary War ends in 1783.

“Nearly 12,000 men and women of diverse nationalities were captured by the British in the aftermath of the Continental Army’s retreat. Detained on prison ships in Wallabout Bay, these patriots were subjected to dire conditions, succumbing to disease, fatigue, and malnourishment” (Fort Greene Park Conservancy). In fact, more American soldiers will die on these prison ships than in all of the Revolutionary War’s battles combined (Smithsonian Magazine). A harrowing 1778 report from the Connecticut Gazette on the conditions in these prison ships reads:

The heat was so intense that [the 300-plus prisoners] were all naked, which also served the well to get rid of vermin, but the sick were eaten up alive. Their sickly countenances, and ghastly looks were truly horrible; some swearing and blaspheming; others crying, praying, and wringing their hands; and stalking about like ghosts; others delirious, raving and storming, all panting for breath; some dead, and corrupting. The air was so foul that at times a lamp could not be kept burning, by reason of which the bodies were not missed until they had been dead ten days. One person alone was admitted on deck at a time, after sunset, which occasioned much filth to run into the hold, and mingle with the bilge water…(Smithsonian Magazine)

1777 — Battle of Setauket. A revolutionary battle is fought on the village green in Setauket, Long Island, between the Loyalist town militia and a small army of Whigs from Fairfield, Connecticut across the Sound in NEW ENGLAND. The battle is a draw, and the Whig force will withdraw after it, but the Culper Spy Ring will be founded in Setauket in 1778 and will successfully pass information to General Washington about the plans and movements of the British forces occupying New York until 1781.

1777, January 15 — Vermonters with land grants from New Hampshire establish the independent Vermont Republic (a.k.a. the Republic of New Connecticut), overcoming opposition from those who received grants of land there from New York. The Republic abolishes slavery and grants the vote to free men 21 and over, with or without property, making it the first democracy in America and the first in the West since Athens. On August 16, Vermont militias will help foil British General Burgoyne’s advance on New York at the Battle of Bennington. In 1791 Vermont will become the last of the NEW ENGLAND states to join the United States.

1780 — British army occupying New York City builds Fort BROOKLYN. The estate on BROOKLYN Heights of Philip Livingston (who has died while attending Congress in 1778) is occupied by British forces from August 1776 to August 1783.

1783, 25 November — Evacuation Day. The British leave the new United States from New York City, leaving a Union Jack flag nailed to a greased pole, and empty fortifications in BROOKLYN. Many British sympathizers, “Tories” or “Loyalists,” leave New York for Canada and England; much of their land and property is sold or confiscated and given to US sympathizers. The day’s bicentennial was celebrated in BROOKLYN in 1983.

1786 — Erasmus Hall Academy is founded in Flatbush, BROOKLYN. This, the first high school to be chartered by the New York Board of Regents, will be donated to the public school system in 1896, and closed in 1994 in order to be turned into the Erasmus Hall Educational Campus of five separate schools.

1789 — The first United States Congress under the new Constitution holds its first session in City Hall, New York City. It counts the votes of the Electoral College and declares the election of George Washington as President and John Adams of NEW ENGLAND (Quincy, Massachusetts) as Vice-President. It will vote to move the capital from New York City to Philadelphia and eventually south to the new District of Columbia, in exchange for the votes by Congressmen from Virginia and the South for the financial plan of Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton of New York, involving federal assumption of states’ debts, the funding of federal debt, and a Bank of the United States.

1790 — The first U.S. census finds 4,549 people living in BROOKLYN.

1794 — A small Methodist Episcopal congregation purchases the land on the BROOKLYN waterfront (on which they have held open-air services) from Joshua Sands. Sands, who is an Anglican, not a Methodist, owns a lot of land along the East River in BROOKLYN where the Navy Yard will be—lands he had bought from New York after New York had confiscated it from the Dutch Tory Rapelje family during the Revolution. The new congregation will build a small church named Sands Street Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal Church. The congregation “consists of Caucasians, free Negroes, and ex-slaves.” Black seceders from it will found the African Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal Church in BROOKLYN in 1817-1818 (cf. Bridge Street Church history).

1795 — Joshua Sands (1757–1835) and his wife Ann Ayscough (they were married in 1780), who reside on the coast of BROOKLYN north of the ferry landing, reorganize, rename, and reincorporate the Episcopal church of which they are patrons as St. Ann’s Episcopal Church this year. The church is named for Saint Ann (Hannah), mother of Saint Mary and grandmother of Jesus, and also honors Queen Ann of England (a major benefactor of the Church of England in New York during her lifetime) and Ann Ayscough Sands for her contribution to the church’s founding. Saint Ann’s will move to BROOKLYN Heights (probably from the East River shore) in the 19th century, will build the church later occupied by Packer Academy, and will, in 2019 as the Church of Saint Ann and Holy Trinity, occupy the church building built by Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in BROOKLYN Heights. Saint Ann’s Church will found Saint Ann’s School in 1965 and the Saint Ann’s Warehouse theater company now in Williamsburg, in the 1980s.

Joshua Sands was born in Cow Neck, Long Island (now Sands Point, Port Washington, Nassau County) to one of the three families who began European settlement on Cow Neck. The Sands family of Cow Neck had come there from Block Island, Rhode Island, in NEW ENGLAND, where Captain James Sands, who had emigrated from England to NEW ENGLAND (Plymouth, Massachusetts), in c. 1658, was among the men who took/bought Block Island from the Narragansett people in 1660. Joshua Sands will be elected to represent BROOKLYN as congressman from New York’s 2nd District in 1796, 1802, and 1824.

1799 — New York State passes the Gradual Emancipation Act intended to abolish slavery in stages, with slaves born after 1799 turned into indentured servants serving their mother’s owner until the age of 25 for women or 28 for men. The unattractive compromise will be followed by another in 1817, a law freeing all slaves born before 1799 in 1827. Except for those born after 1799, all adult slaves will be fully emancipated as of July 4, 1828. BROOKLYN’s slaves, most of whom worked on farms, were more numerous than New York’s. The freed blacks of BROOKLYN will form communities, or join the ones already existing, at the ferry landing, modern DUMBO, Vinegar Hill, and Weeksville.

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1800, May 9 — John Brown, future abolitionist insurrectionist, is born to Owen and Ruth Brown in NEW ENGLAND (Torrington, Connecticut). The Browns are both members of Torrington Congregational Church, center of a recent evangelical awakening led by the Rev. Alexander Gillett, whom John’s father Owen believes sets the standard for judging revivals.

1812-1815 — War of 1812. The British make an attempt to establish naval supremacy in the Atlantic over the French and Americans, and to regain the territory west of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi, that was ceded in 1783 to the rebellious colonies. Delegations of NEW ENGLAND states, upset at losing trade relations with Britain, meet in Hartford, Connecticut, to discuss seceding from the U.S. over the war policy. Washington, DC, is briefly captured by the British but the cities of BROOKLYN, New Orleans, Boston, and New York are not.

c. 1810 — Hezekiah Beers Pierrepont (formerly Pierpont), born in NEW ENGLAND (New Haven, Connecticut), who emigrated to BROOKLYN in 1802 after going bankrupt in the China trade, becomes a land developer. He buys 60 acres that include parts of Philip Livingston’s “Clover Hill” estate on present-day BROOKLYN Heights, including Livingston’s distillery below the Heights near the foot of present-day State and Joralemon Streets. Legendarily the first distillery in New York, if not America, it produces a popular brand, Anchor Gin. In 1819, Pierrepont will sell the distillery and use the proceeds to buy more land in BROOKLYN Heights.

1814, May 10 — The first trip by the steam-powered ferry Nassau between Fulton Street, BROOKLYN and Wall Street, New York City and back. Hezekiah Beers Pierrepont has made reliable daily commuting possible between the two cities in order to properly develop his BROOKLYN properties, in partnership with Robert Fulton (an inventor who was patronized by Robert Livingston). As commuting builds, BROOKLYN will explode as the “first suburb of New York City,” or indeed of America. Hezekiah and his son Henry will continue buying land, laying out streets, and developing much of what is now called the BROOKLYN Heights neighborhood.

1816 — BROOKLYN officially becomes a Village. The third U.S. census in 1820 will find 11,187 people there, roughly double the population of 4,549 people living in BROOKLYN in 1790.

1818, January 12 — The first African Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal Church is incorporated in BROOKLYN by African-American seceders from The Sands Street Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal Church in BROOKLYN (itself founded in 1794 with an integrated congregation of whites, free blacks, and ex-slaves). The church sends a delegation to Philadelphia to affiliate with Bishop Richard Allen and his new African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church.

1825, October 26 — The State of New York opens the Erie Canal, first proposed in the 1780s, providing New York City and BROOKLYN with access to the Midwestern grain and other commodities. New York City will soon be established as the leading trading center and later as the leading manufacturing center in the U.S. Still agricultural, BROOKLYN will also expand almost as much as New York City. The U.S. census will find BROOKLYN doubling its population between the 1820 census and the 1830, and doubling it again between 1830 and 1840.

1827, July 5 — Rev. Nathaniel Paul (1775–1839) Delivers “An Address, Delivered on the Celebration of the Abolition of Slavery, in the State of New York”

1831 — Horace Greeley (1811–1872), born in NEW ENGLAND (Amherst, New Hampshire), comes to New York City to seek his fortune. He will found the New York Tribune in 1841, which will become the highest-circulating newspaper in the U.S., promoting the Whig Party (and later the Republican Party), socialism, vegetarianism, agrarianism, feminism, and temperance; and will hire many ace newspaper writers, among them Karl Marx. He will die during his presidential campaign as candidate of a third party, the Liberal Republican Party, against incumbent Republican Ulysses Grant.

1832 — Charles Bennett Ray (1807–1886), of African, Native American, and English descent, born free in NEW ENGLAND (Falmouth, Massachusetts), who has farmed for his grandfather in Westerly, Rhode Island and then apprenticed as a bootmaker in Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts, enrolls at Wesleyan, (Middletown, Connecticut) as its first Black student. White students protest and he leaves after 2 months, moving from NEW ENGLAND to New York City and opening a boot and shoe shop. Ordained a Methodist minister in 1834, he will be installed as Congregational pastor of Bethesda Congregational Church in New York City in 1846 and serve over 20 years. As a political activist in New York, he will become co-founder of the Society for the Promotion of Education Among Colored Children, co-founder and director of the New York Vigilance Committee, and a member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, helping runaway slaves escape via BROOKLYN’s Plymouth Church. Ray wrote of the Underground Railroad:

This [rail]road had its regular lines all the way from Washington. … It had its depots in Philadelphia, New York, Albany, Troy, Utica, Syracuse, Oswego and Niagara Falls. New York was a kind of receiving depot, whence we forwarded to Albany, Troy, sometimes to New Bedford and Boston, and occasionally we dropped a few on Long Island, when we considered it safe so to do. (North Country Underground Railroad Association)

In 1838 Ray will co-found The Colored American (begun as The Weekly Advocate in February, 1837), becoming its sole editor in 1839 and folding it in 1842. He will join the abolitionist Liberty Party in 1840. Ray will be buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery in BROOKLYN (Wikipedia; Charles B. Ray, “Colored Churches in This City [NYC],” The Colored American, 28 March, 1840, in Milton C. Sernett, Ed., African American Religious History: A Documentary Witness (1985) Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2nd ed., 1999).

1834 — BROOKLYN officially becomes a City. Seth Low (the Elder, 1782–1853), descendant of China traders from NEW ENGLAND (Essex County, Massachusetts), becomes one of the city’s incorporators and an Alderman.

1834 – Charles Goodyear (1800–1860), born and raised in NEW ENGLAND (Naugatuck, Connecticut), having been bankrupted in 1829, is living in an abandoned “India rubber” factory on Staten Island and fishing to feed his family. He visits the Manhattan storefront of the Roxbury India Rubber Company of NEW ENGLAND (Boston) and is shown their smelly stock of decomposing rubber life vests. He begins to devote his life to finding a process to prevent India rubber (the natural latex of a tropical tree) from melting in the summer and cracking in the winter. In February, 1839, while living in the abandoned Eagle India Rubber Company factory in NEW ENGLAND (Woburn, Massachusetts) and feeding his penniless family on half-grown potatoes dug by his children, he will discover by accident the combination of sulfur and heat that makes rubber chemically stable. He will patent it as “vulcanization” and establish the Naugatuck India-Rubber Company flagship factory in his NEW ENGLAND hometown in 1843-44. Successful at last, but unable to defend his patent against competitors, Charles Goodyear will die in a hotel in New York in 1860.

Goodyear’s stuff will turn out to be perfect for making bicycle tires—the solid rubber ones patented by Clement Ader 8 years after Goodyear’s death and especially the air-filled “pneumatic” tires, invented by John Dunlop another 20 years later—which will make bicycles ubiquitous and automobiles feasible. In 1898, the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company is founded in Akron, Ohio, by Frank Seiberling and given the “Goodyear” name to honor the inventor of the vulcanization process.

1838 – Thomas and Harriet Truesdell, leading abolitionists in NEW ENGLAND (Providence, Rhode Island) move to a house at 14 Hicks St., BROOKLYN Heights (since destroyed to build the BQE), as the last of New York’s slaves are freed by law and the port of New York becomes a center of abolitionism (and anti-abolitionism). Harriet Truesdell (1786–1862) has just served on the organizing committee of the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women that convened in Philadelphia this year. She has also been the treasurer of the Providence Ladies Anti-Slavery Society (aka the Providence Female Anti-Slavery Society). Thomas Truesdell (1789–1874) has been a founding member of the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society (attending its convention in 1836). Slavery has just finally been abolished in New York and the Truesdells are friends of abolitionist businessman Lewis Tappan of BROOKLYN and of William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison will be the Truesdells’ guest in BROOKLYN in 1840 between his attendance at the divisive American Anti-Slavery Society convention in New York, and his attendance in the World Antislavery Convention in London.

In 1851, the Truesdells will move into a house built between 1847 and 1850 on 227 Duffield Street (which will still stand in 2020, up for Landmarks designation, on what will have been renamed “Abolitionist Place” in Downtown BROOKLYN). In 1850 the new federal Fugitive Slave Act will have just allowed private persons to apprehend those they suspect of being escaped slaves, without due process, and require that all escaped slaves be returned to their owners, making any person accused of aiding an escaped slave subject to imprisonment and fines. After the Truesdells move to Duffield Street in 1851, people will begin to say that their house is a stop on the Underground Railroad that hides escaped slaves heading through New York’s transportation hub to Canada. Extensive research and physical analysis have not confirmed the verbal accounts, but the Truesdells will live there under suspicion of breaking the law until Harriett’s death in 1862. (In Pursuit of Freedom: Resources / Abolitionist biographies)

1838, September — Frederick “Johnson,” born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, a slave in Maryland, just arrived as an escapee in NEW ENGLAND (New Bedford, Massachusetts), takes the name Frederick Douglass from Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake. He had escaped by rail and ferry earlier this month, arriving in New York City, where he had married Anna, who escaped later, in a wedding blessed by the Congregational minister and escaped slave, Rev. James W. C. Pennington of BROOKLYN, who was educated at Yale. On the advice of these New York City Black abolitionists, Douglass had moved the same month to New Bedford, and here he will settle, joining about 300 fugitive slaves and perhaps another 500 free “colored” among a population of 11,000+ who work mostly in the city’s lucrative whaling industry. In the following two years he will become a laborer, a father, and a staffer with the African Methodist Episcopal Church near New Bedford’s busy docks, which renews his practice of public speaking.

1840, December 25 —Young New Yorker Herman Melville, in NEW ENGLAND (New Bedford, Massachusetts), signs on to the whaling ship Acushnet, on which he will depart for the South Seas in January, and learn about Mocha Dick, the destructive white whale he will rename Moby Dick in 1851. Young Frederick Douglass is living and working near the docks, but there is no evidence that Melville and Douglass met.

1840-1850 — There being no federal immigration law, Irish refugees from famine and German refugees from a failed 1848 revolution arrive in tens of thousands, a source of cheap labor. Combining a labor supply with plentiful available land, growing capital stock and advanced banking, a superb harbor, and access to the interior of the country via the Hudson River and the Erie Canal, and to the Atlantic basin by sea, BROOKLYN booms a manufacturing center, producing everything from sugar and beer, to ships and pencils, and transshipping cotton from southern producers to mills in upstate New York and NEW ENGLAND. Many of these manufacturers come to BROOKLYN from NEW ENGLAND, which has the skills and technology, but not the land, the harbor, the labor, or the capital that the twin cities of BROOKLYN and New York can provide together. Their population expands spectacularly along with other cities along the Erie Canal route. The U.S. census will find BROOKLYN, its population doubled between the censuses of 1820 and 1830, and doubled again between 1830 and 1840, is tripled in the decade from 1840 (47,613) to 1850 (138,822).

1840 — Cyrus Porter Smith (1800–1877) who became Mayor of the City of BROOKLYN in 1839 when he was chosen by the Board of Trustees, becomes the first Mayor of the City of BROOKLYN to be elected by the voters. He will be reelected in 1841. Born on a farm in NEW ENGLAND (Hanover, New Hampshire), he had worked his way through Dartmouth College there and read law in Connecticut before emigrating to BROOKLYN in 1827. He will be defeated for reelection in 1842 by BROOKLYN-born Henry Cruse Murphy, who, since his grandfather had emigrated from Ireland to New Jersey, has a claim to being BROOKLYN’s first Irish Mayor.

1841 — Frederick Douglass gives, at age 23, one of the first speeches of his long career at the meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in NEW ENGLAND (Nantucket, Massachusetts). Eventually settling in Rochester, New York, Douglass will give at least 11 speeches in BROOKLYN: at the Odeon in Williamsburgh in 1859, at the African Methodist Episcopal Church on Bridge Street east of City (now Borough) Hall and in Weeksville in 1863, at the BROOKLYN Academy of Music once in 1863 and twice in 1869, in Bedford Stuyvesant’s Myrtle Avenue Park in 1865, at the Clinton Street Baptist Church in 1886, at the Union League in Crown Heights in 1893, and two speeches in 1866 in BROOKLYN Heights: one in May at the Academy of Music, and the other in December at Plymouth Church. Both of these will give rousing approval of the interrupted Reconstruction policy of the assassinated Lincoln and a devastating indictment of President Andrew Johnson’s bad character and his attempts to scuttle the Radical Republican program of Reconstruction against the will of Congress.

1841 — Lewis Tappan, who moved with his brother and fellow businessman Arthur from NEW ENGLAND (Northampton and Boston, Massachusetts) to New York City in 1826, is in daily attendance at the first trial of the La Amistad slave-ship mutineers held in NEW ENGLAND (New Haven, Connecticut), and is reporting it for the NEW ENGLAND paper, The Emancipator. 1844 and 1856 city directories show Lewis living at “68” Pierrepont Street in BROOKLYN Heights (though all 20th-century sources say he lived at “86” Pierrepont Street—the same house, renumbered “86” in the great Brooklyn renumbering of 1870). Lewis and Arthur were founders and funders of the American Antislavery Society in 1833, and in 1840 of the new American and Foreign Antislavery Society, Lewis eventually moving from promoting the freeing of African slaves and their “colonization” in Africa, to advocating the freeing of “Colored” Americans by any means necessary and their intermarriage with White Americans. (Terms like European- and African-American were not used in his time.) The Tappans were targets of the violent 1834 Anti-Abolition riots and other such actions in New York City and BROOKLYN, even though the brothers considered Blacks inferior to whites and discriminated against them in employment. Lewis will be a member, with other immigrant NEW ENGLAND Congregational Protestants, of Plymouth Church in BROOKLYN Heights (History.net, Abolitionist Brooklyn: A Sanctuary City Before Its Time).

1842 — Thirty-five surviving slaves from La Amistad, freed in their appeal to the Supreme Court argued by former President John Quincy Adams of NEW ENGLAND (now representing Massachusetts in Congress), are returned to Africa from detention in NEW ENGLAND (Connecticut), aided by funds raised by the United Missionary Society, a Black group founded by abolitionist James W. C. Pennington, a fugitive Maryland slave who came to BROOKLYN, New York, in 1828, went to Yale College (School of Theology) in NEW ENGLAND (without being carried on the rolls until Yale named him its “first black student” in 2016, or being allowed to graduate) and has since become a Congregational minister to churches in both New York (Queens and Manhattan) and NEW ENGLAND (Hartford and New Haven, Connecticut). He officiated at the marriage of fugitives Frederick and Anna Douglass in New York City in 1838, and he has just published The Origin and History of the Colored People (1841), now generally believed to be the first history of African Americans.

1842 — Henry (son of NEW ENGLANDer Hezekiah) Pierrepont’s New York and BROOKLYN Steam Ferry Company makes the first cut in its 4-cent fare for travel across the East River between BROOKLYN and New York City. Competing ferries must follow suit, but some go bankrupt and will be bought out by Pierrepont, who will continue the price war until 1850.

1843, April 11 — Joseph Sprague is elected Mayor of the City of BROOKLYN. Born in 1783 in NEW ENGLAND (Leicester, Massachusetts), Sprague emigrated to New York in his 20s, first as a schoolteacher, later as a manufacturer. He married Maria De Bevoise of Bedford (bordering the Village of BROOKLYN), moved in 1819 to 115 Fulton Street, BROOKLYN, became a founder of the First Presbyterian Church there in 1822, and was elected President of the BROOKLYN Village board of Trustees in 1827, ’28, ’29, ’30, ’31. Sprague was one of the movers behind the charter that incorporated the City of BROOKLYN in 1833. As Mayor, Sprague, a Mason and Jacksonian Democrat, will soon order the Whig members of the City Council arrested for misdemeanor for boycotting Council meetings in hopes of stalling legislation by denying a quorum. Mayor Sprague’s grandson, also Joseph Sprague, will be the pitcher for the BROOKLYN Eckfords baseball team through 2 consecutive championships in 1862-1863—but this Joseph Sprague was born in BROOKLYN.

1843, July 4 (July 10?) — Sojourner Truth is in Huntington and Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. The former Isabella Van Wagenen, a Dutch-speaking upstate New York slave free since 1828 and a Millerite postulant and ex-subject of the “Kingdom of Mathias,” has changed her name to Sojourner Truth and left NYC on the ferry, “crossing over to BROOKLYN, L.I.” on June 1 (Narrative of Sojourner Truth) with the mission of preaching her newfound evangelical faith. After Huntington and Cold Spring Harbor, she will take a boat (perhaps at Port Jefferson, Long Island, NY) to NEW ENGLAND (Bridgeport, Connecticut), then walk to New Haven, Connecticut, and preach there. Then to Bristol, then Hartford, Connecticut, and eventually to Northampton, Massachusetts, where she will first sing and then preach to quell a riot at a moonlit open-air evangelical revival meeting where there were other preachers. She will join the Northampton Association, an evangelical utopian experiment, for several years before leaving for the West.

1844 — James Frothingham (1786–1864), born and raised in NEW ENGLAND (Charlestown, Massachusetts), settles in BROOKLYN. He was an itinerant painter—trained by Gilbert Stuart and made first drafts for some of Stuart’s works. Moving to New York City in 1826 he will become, in BROOKLYN as of 1844, the semi-official portraitist of our City’s Mayors. His portraits of Joseph Sprague (Massachusetts-born Mayor of BROOKLYN, 1843–44), Francis B. Stryker (Mayor, 1846–48), Edward Copeland (Mayor, 1849), Samuel Smith (Mayor, 1850), George Hall (Mayor, 1855–56), and Samuel S. Powell (Mayor, 1857-60) will still hang in Borough Hall in 2019.

1845, October 10 — The first ever published report of a baseball game, in the New York Morning News and True Sun, describes an unnamed club from BROOKLYN defeating the New York City Knickerbockers Ball Club at the Union Star Cricket Grounds in BROOKLYN by a score of 22 to 1. BROOKLYN‘s rise to baseball championship begins.

1846 – Walt Whitman, editor of the BROOKLYN Daily Eagle, begins to advocate for the creation of a park and crypt to honor those who perished aboard the British prison ships during the Revolutionary War (Fort Greene Park Conservancy).

1847 — Worst year of An Drochshaol, “The Bad Life” in Ireland, resulting from the potato blight famine. Peak of Irish emigration to the Americas, 5 million to the United States, including BROOKLYN and NEW ENGLAND (especially Boston); however, Irish immigrant statistics for BROOKLYN, a separate city from New York until 1898, seem still not to have been properly investigated. In the U.S. at large, Irish-Americans still form the second-largest immigrant-descent group, second to German-Americans (and not counting English-Americans).

1847 — The first NEW ENGLAND Society is founded in New York.

1847 — Henry Ward Beecher, born in NEW ENGLAND (Litchfield, Connecticut), the son of Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher of New Haven, East Hampton, Long Island, and Litchfield, becomes minister of Plymouth Church, BROOKLYN Heights—a bastion of NEW ENGLAND Protestant immigrants to BROOKLYN—where he will advocate the abolition of slavery, preach to visiting presidential candidate Lincoln in 1860, and survive an alienation-of-affections suit brought by his leading vestryman. He will live at 176 Columbia Heights, BROOKLYN, and serve until his death in 1887.

1847 — Henry Chadwick (1824–1908) immigrant to BROOKLYN directly from (old) England, plays his first “base ball” game in Elysian Fields, NJ. He will devote his life to the new game, becoming the first U.S. baseball editor at New York Clipper, then edit for 50 years at the BROOKLYN Eagle, where he will be first to use the word “diamond” to describe the infield, and coin “base hit,” “base on balls,” “single,” “chin music,” “fungo,” “error,” “double play,” “goose egg,” and “left on base.”

1849, April — A democratic and republican revolution in Germany that began in March 1848 is scotched by the King of Prussia, precipitating a flow of radical immigrants to the United States, many to stay in its port of entry, New York City (Lower East Side, Yorkville), and others to BROOKLYN. German immigrants to New York City will reach a peak of 1/3 of NYC’s 1 million population in 1875. By the end of the 19th century, 5 million Germans will have arrived, the majority of them Catholic, a large minority of them Jewish, many staying in BROOKLYN, helping forge the internationally known “BROOKLYN accent,” electing German-Americans to the mayoralty, eating German-style processed meats, and fostering a German institution, the open-on-Sunday beer hall, which does not please temperance-minded Protestants (some of them NEW ENGLAND immigrants to New York) who favor Sunday blue laws. The cultural appropriation of the delicatessen, and eventually the frankfurter sandwich (“hot dog”) will follow.

1850 — Henry Pierrepont’s Fulton Ferry Company of BROOKLYN lowers its fare to 1 cent. This predatory pricing will sweep up the remaining competing ferries, and the resulting company, renamed the Union Ferry Company, will raise its fare to 2 cents, infuriating commuters.

1850 – Sojourner Truth publishes her dictated autobiography, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave. The following year she will deliver an oft-cited speech at the first state Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851. Although the published account of the speech a dozen years hence includes her asking “Ar’n’t I a woman?” it is unlikely she spoke these words using the southern dialect that she, illiterate, whose earliest language was New York Hudson Valley Dutch, probably never used. By 1857 she will make her way to Harmonia, a Spiritualist community in Battle Creek, Michigan, whence she will venture in 1879 to accompany freed slaves to Kansas. She will die in Battle Creek on 26 November 1883 (Cynthia Greenlee, “The Remarkable Untold Story of Sojourner Truth“).

1850, August — Herman Melville (1819–1891), 3rd of 8 children of Alan Melvill (1782–1832) of the NEW ENGLAND (Boston) Melvills, and husband of Elizabeth Shaw (1822–1906) of the NEW ENGLAND (Boston) Shaws, moves from New York City to NEW ENGLAND (Pittsfield, Massachusetts) in the Berkshires near Lenox, where Nathaniel Hawthorne of NEW ENGLAND (Salem, Massachusetts), is vacationing, befriends him, and writes Moby-Dick about a New Yorker named Ishmael who joins a whaling crew sailing out of NEW ENGLAND (Nantucket, Massachusetts), and becomes the sole survivor of his ship’s attempt to kill a giant white sperm whale in mid-Pacific. The novel is a critical failure. He will return to New York City in 1863, still writing, but the reception and sales of his subsequent books will not provide a decent living, so he will find government work in the U.S. Custom House. A meditator like Moby-Dick’s protagonist on the shores of the East River, Melville is not known to have taken any ferry across it to BROOKLYN, and probably never met his near-exact contemporary, the poet Walt Whitman, who meditated on the opposite shore.

1851 — William Beard, an immigrant to BROOKLYN from Ireland at 19 who has previously been in the railroad-building boom, begins building the Erie Basin. The expansion of the port of BROOKLYN will culminate with this man-made extension of New York Harbor, a series of protected piers and docks, at Red Hook, BROOKLYN. “The BROOKLYN Docks below the Heights, and the Atlantic Docks in South BROOKLYN were already developed. Beard and his partners bought land and got permission to build around the bend in Red Hook. His shipping basin would be called the Erie Basin, because this was where the canal boats finished their journeys. This was not only the end of the Erie Canal; it was also where ships from all over the world docked” (Brownstoner.com).

1854, January 9 — Winston Churchill’s mother, Jenny Jerome, daughter of Leonard Jerome, a descendant of French Huguenots who will found the Coney Island Jockey Club, is born in her father’s house, very likely at 426 Henry St., Cobble Hill, BROOKLYN (or 197 Amity Street [then numbered 8], per the New York Times, or 154 Amity Street, per the Encyclopedia of New York City). She will marry her first husband, Lord Randolph Churchill (Winston’s father) in 1874.

By the way, I cannot help reflecting that if my father had been American and my mother British, instead of the other way around, I might have got here on my own.
—Winston Churchill, Address to the U.S. Congress, December 26, 1941

1855 — Walt Whitman (1819–1892), brought to BROOKLYN as a small boy in 1822-23 by parents who descended from NEW ENGLANDers who had settled in Huntington, Long Island, publishes 795 copies of the first edition of Leaves of Grass on a press near what is now Cadman Plaza but written at what is now 99 Ryerson Street in downtown BROOKLYN. The copyright is dated 15 May.

1855 — BROOKLYN Circuit Court finds that Elizabeth Jennings, arrested and tried for riding in a “whites-only” city streetcar, is not guilty. Her lawyer is young Chester A. Arthur, born in NEW ENGLAND (Fairfield, Vermont), who will serve as Collector of the Port of New York from 1871-1878, succeed Garfield as President of the United States in 1881, and preside at the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883.

1855 — Williamsburgh and Bushwick are incorporated into the City of BROOKLYN, and will be called BROOKLYN’s “Eastern District” as opposed to the “Western District” from City Hall to BROOKLYN Heights.

1856 — Frederick C. Havemeyer, Jr. moves the Havemeyer sugar refinery business from New York City to South 3rd Street, BROOKLYN (Williamsburg). The Yellow Sugar House refinery will open there is 1858 and survive the 1863 Draft Riots to double in size in 1868. Rebuilt with steel and electric lighting after a devastating 1882 fire, it will become the central factory of the American Sugar Refining Company, a.k.a. the Sugar Trust, a giant national sugar refining monopoly (“Domino,” “Jack Frost”) formed by Frederick Jr.’s son, H. O., in 1887. Frederick C. Havemeyer, Jr. is the son of German immigrant Frederick, who with his brother William had founded the firm in New York City in 1805. None of the Havemeyers have resided or will ever reside in BROOKLYN (until Frederick Jr.’s great-great-grandson William E. in the 1980s). Frederick Jr.’s brother William Frederick (1804–1874) had been Democratic Mayor of New York City in 1845 and 1848, and will be Mayor a third time in 1874, when he will die in office. Frederick Jr.’s son, H. O., will fund the Havemeyer impressionist art collection, much of which ended up in the Metropolitan Museum. The refinery will be closed down by Domino Sugar’s successor company, American Sugar Refining, in January, 2004, but some say the sweet smell still lingers over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

1856, February 9 — The East River is bridged by ice between BROOKLYN and New York City (BROOKLYN Daily Eagle). The union of the two cities is still 42 years away, but the BROOKLYN Bridge will open in 26 years.

1857 — The Greenpoint Eckfords baseball team is formed by the shipwrights at the Eckford Yard in Greenpoint, BROOKLYN. They play at Union Grounds near Lee Avenue @ Rutledge Street, Williamsburg, and will win back-to-back championships during the Civil War, including an undefeated season in 1863. (The Dodgers do not descend lineally from the Eckfords.)

1858, October 28 — R. H. (Rowland Hussey) Macy, born in NEW ENGLAND (Nantucket, Massachusetts), in 1822, who had crewed on a whaler at age 15, opens his store selling dry goods on 6th Avenue @ 14th Street in New York City (after his earlier stores in Haverhill, Massachusetts and Marysville, California, had closed). Opening day revenue is $11.08 (hundreds of today’s dollars). Macy’s will become iconic in the burgeoning retail sales business that is becoming a New York City specialty.

1858, November — Edwin D. Morgan (1811–1883) born and raised in NEW ENGLAND (Massachusetts and Connecticut) and buried there (Connecticut), who has been Chairman of the National Committee of the brand-new Republican Party since its founding in 1856, is elected New York State’s 21st Governor. He will lead the state in the Civil War, as Governor until 1862 and Senator from 1864-1869.

1859, May 12— The 9th National Woman’s Rights Convention this year is held at Mozart Hall, presided over by Lucretia Coffin Mott (1793–1880). This is the third time (of five) that the convention is held in New York City. Lucretia was born to the Quaker Coffin family of NEW ENGLAND (Nantucket, Massachusetts), and was a graduate of the Quaker Nine Partners School in Dutchess County, NY. She taught there after graduation, married another Nine Partners teacher, James Mott, became a Quaker minister in 1821, and a founding activist for the abolition of slavery and soon after for the rights of women.

1860 — BROOKLYN Excelsiors Base Ball Club team does a National Association winning tour of New York State and neighboring states, defeating, among others, the BROOKLYN Atlantics, which nevertheless win the National Association championship in a best-of-three-games series. They pioneer the wearing of a long-visored, snug-fitting, button-crowned cap which will eventually be called “BROOKLYN-style” but which is now called a “baseball cap.” Neither the Excelsiors nor the Atlantics is a lineal ancestor of the Dodgers.

1861-1865 — CIVIL WAR: BROOKLYN manufacturing prospers on providing war materials for the Union. The BROOKLYN Navy Yard builds warships by the score, including the first of the three named “BROOKLYN.” Some of the boats of BROOKLYN‘s Union Ferry are conscripted for naval activities. The ironclad gunboat Monitor, built at Bushwick Inlet, Greenpoint, BROOKLYN, to the revolutionary design of John Ericsson (immigrant to New York from Sweden and England in 1839), defeats the Confederate Merrimac for control of the harbors on Chesapeake Bay.

1861-1865 — CIVIL WAR: The New York Union soldiers play pickup baseball as “base ball” abandons the rules of the game as played in NEW ENGLAND and is called “the New York Game.” The New York Union troops spread New York City’s child-friendly myth of Sant Niklaas (Santa Claus), while the NEW ENGLAND Protestant churches still ban the celebration of Christmas on biblical grounds. BROOKLYN poet Walt Whitman volunteers as a nurse in Washington.

1861 — Lola Montez, former scandalous mistress of “Mad” King Ludwig of Bavaria, dies and is buried under her real name, Eliza Gilbert, in Green-Wood Cemetery, BROOKLYN, NY, where she had been born.

1862 — The BROOKLYN Excelsiors Base Ball Club (a distant precursor of the Dodgers) comes to NEW ENGLAND (Boston, Massachusetts), and defeats three good Massachusetts clubs in a row: the Bowdoin Club 41-15, then a picked nine from the Tri-Mountain Club, and the Lowell Club 39-13. The Tri-Mountain Base Ball Club, organized in Boston, Massachusetts, in June, 1857, had been the first NEW ENGLAND club to adopt the rules of the “New York Game.” In 1858 the Tri-Mountains had withdrawn from the Massachusetts Association of Base Ball Players (soon to be the NEW ENGLAND Association) at its Dedham, Massachusetts, meeting because they would not adopt the NEW ENGLAND rules for “round ball” or “town ball” as the Massachusetts game is called. In 1859 Tri-Mountain had even added the rule allowing the catching of fly balls. The conversion of the Boston clubs to the “New York game” will become a landslide.

1863 — 1863 opening of the New York headquarters of the United Order of Tents, a black organization founded in Norfolk, VA, in 1848, which sponsored the Underground Railroad and abolitionism. The United Order’s Eastern District No. 3 headquarters at 87 MacDonough Street, Bedford-Stuyvesant, BROOKLYN, will be bought by the Order in 1945 (New York Times; see also Brownstoner.com).

1863 — CIVIL WAR: One of BROOKLYN’s three volunteer regiments, the 23rd Regiment, New York Volunteers (23rd BROOKLYN) is sent west from BROOKLYN to mount a defense of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, against Lee’s 1863 invasion of the north. The defense succeeds, since Lee never gets further north than Gettysburg. Ordered to cut off Lee’s retreat before he can re-cross the Potomac to Virginia, the 23rd is a few hours too late. Detached with New York’s other regiments to return to New York to put down the draft riots in New York City and BROOKLYN, it arrives a day too late to do that. Its officers are feted and the Regiment will be paraded with the 14th BROOKLYN (formed by abolitionists) and the BROOKLYN–recruited 5th Heavy Artillery, under Grand Army Arch with its statue of Gouverneur Warren of the 5th New York Infantry, who saved the Battle of Gettysburg at Little Round Top and whose daughter Emily Warren will marry veteran Washington Roebling and end up supervising the completion of the BROOKLYN Bridge.

1863, July 13-16 — Draft Riots in New York City and BROOKLYN bring out opponents of the new Civil War military draft law, mostly working-class Irish and German immigrants who will not be the sort of citizens who, under the new law, can afford to pay a substitute to do military service for them, and who see freed slaves as competitors for work. The rioters, especially in Lower Manhattan, turn violent, looting, burning, and killing, targeting especially the cities’ “colored” citizens and their institutions. New York Regiments fighting in the Gettysburg campaign are ordered home to put down the riots. A “Merchants Committee” formed to bring relief to the victims will report in September having found these consequences in BROOKLYN:

On the Monday succeeding the riot, we visited Weeksville [in BROOKLYN], a settlement of colored people, situated some three miles from the ferries, where we found a large number of refugees from the City of New York, and many that had been driven out from their homes in BROOKLYN, the inhabitants having furnished them such shelter as they were able, with their limited means and small facilities for accommodating several hundred strangers thrown upon them. We found not only Weeksville, but Carsville, New BROOKLYN, and the whole vicinity extending to Flatbush and Flatlands, had more or less refugees scattered in the woods and in such places as they could find safety and shelter. All being thrown out of employment and the means of support, your committee immediately made arrangements for furnishing them with daily supplies of food . . . (Report of the Merchants’ Committee for the Relief of Colored People Suffering from the Late Riots in the City of New York, Library of Congress)

1863, October 9 — BROOKLYN, Bath and Coney Island Railroad (a.k.a. West End Line), opens for passenger service between Fifth Avenue at 36th Street at the then-border of the City of BROOKLYN and the village of Bath Beach in the Town of Gravesend. It is BROOKLYN’s oldest city or suburban rail line. The age of the trolley dodger begins, and over the next 50 years BROOKLYN—and to a lesser extent, Queens—will develop as “streetcar suburbs.”

1865, February 15 — Abraham & Wechsler (later Abraham & Straus and then Macy’s in 2005), opens in downtown BROOKLYN (BROOKLYN Daily Eagle). “Abraham” is Abraham Abraham, 22, born to German Jewish immigrants in New York City, later resident at 800 St. Mark’s Avenue, BROOKLYN, and funder of the BROOKLYN Jewish Hospital, which merged with St. John’s Episcopal to form the Interfaith Medical Center in 1983.

1865 — Rev. Richard Harvey Cain (1825–1887), pastor of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Bridge Street Church in BROOKLYN since 1861, moves to Charleston, South Carolina, as superintendent of the AME missions in the just-defeated South. In Charleston he will pastor, rename, and rebuild “Mother Emanuel,” the oldest AME church in the South, founded in 1816-18 but burned down in 1822 after one of its founders, Denmark Vesey, accused of organizing a slave revolt, had been secretly tried, convicted, and executed along with 5 other black men. Cain will be elected to the South Carolina Senate in 1868 and to the United States Senate in 1872, before the termination of Reconstruction. He was born in West Virginia, raised free in Ohio, and is not known to have visited NEW ENGLAND, but until further investigation, may be plausibly called BROOKLYN’s first U.S. Senator, predating Charles Schumer and Bernie Sanders.

1865 — Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903), an abolitionist Civil War veteran born (1822) and raised in NEW ENGLAND (Hartford, Connecticut)—who had been prevented by a childhood disease from going to Yale, and is now residing on a farm on Staten Island, New York, that he had emigrated to in 1848—submits in partnership with Albert Vaux his landscape design for a large public, egalitarian, city park to the City of BROOKLYN. On opening in 1867 (completed in 1873) it will be called Prospect Park. It is only the second landscape design for a city park by Olmsted and Vaux. Their first had been submitted to the City of New York in 1858, executed after the Civil War and called Central Park. Olmsted will later design public parks in NEW ENGLAND (New Britain, Connecticut’s Walnut Hill; Boston’s “Emerald Necklace”; and Forest Park in Springfield, Massachusetts) and many other cities, including Buffalo, New York; Chicago, Illinois; Detroit, Michigan; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and St. Catherines, Ontario, Canada. Dying in 1903, he will be buried in his old hometown of Hartford.

1866 — Olmstead, Vaux, and Company are hired to transform 585 acres of BROOKLYN into what will become Prospect Park. Though officially opened in 1867, construction continued for seven more years. As the Prospect Park Alliance writes, it was an immediate success: “An 1868 report to the Brooklyn Park Commissioners noted that in July alone there had been more than 100,000 visitors to the incomplete park.”

1866 — George Huntington Hartford (1833–1917), a BROOKLYN Catholic who was born in NEW ENGLAND (Augusta, Maine) and started in retail there (Boston) is promoted to cashier of A&P where he has been a clerk since 1861. Hartford will move from BROOKLYN to Orange, New Jersey in 1868 on the strength of his cashier’s salary (Wikipedia). The A&P was founded by George Gilman as Gilman & Company on Vesey Street, New York City in 1859. Renamed the Great American Tea Company, and in 1870 The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, it will own 67 stores in 1876, and its management will pass to Gilman’s partner Hartford on Gilman’s retirement in 1878. In 1912 Hartford will open A&P’s first “economy store,” a standard-layout retail grocery called A&P Economy Store in Jersey City, New Jersey. Two years before Hartford’s retirement in 1917, A&P will count 1,600 stores, and will have become the paradigmatic “chain” retailer, the iconic target of small retailers for its consolidated pricing power and the cynosure of consumers for its low prices (Wikipedia).

1866 — Eliphalet Williams Bliss (1836–1903), veteran of the Union Army’s 3rd Connecticut Volunteers, moves from NEW ENGLAND (Meriden, Connecticut) to BROOKLYN. In 1867 he will found several machine shops in BROOKLYN which he will consolidate as the E. W. Bliss Company (which will produce tools for the construction of the BROOKLYN Bridge), and the United States Projectile Company (which will produce the Bliss-Leavitt torpedo for the U.S. Navy in 1904). His factory will be called the world’s largest in 1884. Bliss will also be VP of the BROOKLYN Heights Railroad (lessor and operator of all the streetcar [trolley] lines of the BROOKLYN Rapid Transit Co.) as well as a Director of BROOKLYN Gas Fixture Company and of the Kings County Trust Company. He will leave his Bay Ridge property to be bought by New York City and turned into a park, now Owl’s Head Park. Bliss’s big Machine Works Building survives at Plymouth Street between Adams and Pearl, much as it looked in 1915 below.

1867, summer — “Candy” Cummings of BROOKLYN Excelsiors pitches what many claim to be the first curve balls in baseball.

1867 — Twenty years after Walt Whitman’s advocacy, landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, designers of Central and Prospect Parks, were engaged to prepare a new design for Washington Park (now Fort Greene Park) in BROOKLYN (NYC Parks). By 1873 a stone crypt was built in the heart of the park, and the bones of prisoners that had been buried elsewhere were re-interred in the crypt; a small monument was erected on the hill above the it (Fort Greene Association).

1867 — Ebenezer Butterick (1826–1903), a tailor, and his wife Ellen, a shirtmaker who had the idea in 1863 of making sized paper clothing patterns, move from NEW ENGLAND (Fitchburg, Massachusetts) to BROOKLYN and build a large factory at 192 Broadway, New York City, to make the patterns that Ellen had invented to be sold by the millions to families to make clothing at home using the new mass-produced Howe sewing machines (Holbrook, The Yankee Exodus: An Account of Migration from New England, NY, 1950, pp. 324–5).

1867-1869 — Earliest and most likely of three dates (cf. 1874, 1889) for the invention by Charles Feltman (1841–1910)—immigrant from Frankfurt, Germany who peddled pies from a wagon at Coney Island, BROOKLYN—of the frankfurter sandwich (the “Coney Island red hot” or “hot dog”). According to what seems to be family lore, Feltman had a BROOKLYN wheelwright named Donovan (his first name still lost to history) who had built him a pie-wagon, put a stove in the wagon at Donovan’s shop at the corner of East New York and Howard Avenues in Crown Heights, BROOKLYN. The first two Frankfurt-style sausages on long buns were made on the spot and eaten by Donovan and Feltman.

1869 – Thomas Adams (1818–1905), using the tropical gum chicle, is unable to follow in Goodyear’s footsteps and make the substance suitable for tires, toys, rain boots, or other commercial products. Instead, he founds the worldwide chewing gum industry with Adams & Sons’ Company in BROOKLYN. The company’s first products were sold in drugstores for a penny a piece. In 1888, Adams & Sons’ introduced the Tutti-Frutti flavor, the first gum to be sold in vending machines, and in 1899 introduced Chiclets, named after its ingredient, chicle.

In 1899, Adams’s company will be folded into a chewing gum producers monopoly, but BROOKLYN will be so associated with his chicle chewing gum—especially after US GIs introduced it to Europe in World War II—that the Perfetti candy company in Lainate, near Milan, Italy, will produce “BROOKLYN Chewing Gum” and sponsor the internationally famous BROOKLYN bicycle racing team from 1970 to 1977.

1871 — Anthony Comstock (1844–1915), New York City dry goods clerk born in NEW ENGLAND (Canaan, Connecticut) and raised as a Protestant Congregational, founds the NY Society for the Suppression of Vice and moves to 354 Grand Avenue, Williamsburg, BROOKLYN. (He will die there in 1915.) As special agent of the U.S. Post Office Department for control of obscene mail, he will secure a federal law in 1873, called the Comstock Act, banning interstate trade in “any article whatever for the prevention of conception” as obscene. Among many responses to Comstock’s efforts, George Bernard Shaw will coin the term “comstockery” to describe Comstock’s values; Joseph Backrack will produce “womb-veils” for local black markets in his BROOKLYN home; and Margaret Sanger, not a NEW ENGLANDer, will run afoul of the Comstock Act when she opens her birth control clinic in BROOKLYN in 1916.

1871, February 13 — Another East River ice bridge allows thousands to walk between the twin cities of BROOKLYN and New York. It is 27 years before the two cities’ merger. (BROOKLYN Daily Eagle) Some of the two cities’ leaders consider how to have a bridge that wouldn’t be seasonal.

1871, December 22 — Fisk Jubilee Singers, formerly the Fisk Singers—who had begun a tour of the North in October to raise funds for their 5-year-old Black college, Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee, and are introducing spirituals to the concert repertory—are a sensation at NEW ENGLAND–born Rev. Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church, BROOKLYN, NY, singing spirituals, or “cabin songs” like White’s favorite “Steal Away to Jesus” and the favorite of director Ella Shepherd’s slave mother, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

1872 — A new BROOKLYN Atlantics baseball team is formed in the National Association (not the BROOKLYN Dodgers or the old BROOKLYN Atlantics). This team will play until 1875. A new BROOKLYN Eckfords baseball team is also formed in the National Association (also not the BROOKLYN Dodgers, or the old BROOKLYN Eckfords), reviving the 1857 “Eckfords” team name. The team will play only this year.

1872, July 16 — East New York votes for annexation to BROOKLYN, by a vote of 3 to 1.

1873 — BROOKLYN, Illinois, founded in 1829 near East St. Louis, Ill., by free Blacks and fugitive slaves, becomes the first Black-majority municipality in the U.S.

1873, July 26 — Mercantile Library opens its new building on Montague St. It will become the BROOKLYN Public Library.

1873-1874 — Charles Feltman opens Ocean Pavilion Hotel, Coney Island, BROOKLYN. Its restaurant, Feltman’s Restaurant, a fancier place to eat on Coney Island than his old pie wagon—it has tables, tableware, napkins, and a German beer garden—sells “Red Hots” for a dime. The restaurant will survive the hotel, closing only in 1954. Former peddler Feltman had acquired the necessary capital on profits from his invention of the frankfurter sandwich. Feltman’s Restaurant won’t sell such a sandwich, but does sell the old fresh-cooked sausages as “Red Hots” (Wilensky, When BROOKLYN Was the World, pp. 178–79). They will later be called “hot dogs” and “Coney Islands.”

1876 —Carousel horses are carved in large numbers by the specialists in Coney Island, BROOKLYN. At least one will end up in NEW ENGLAND (Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts) as Flying Horses.

1876, February 4 — BROOKLYN Board of Education drops French and German from its public school curriculum, on grounds that schools should not “subserve interests of any class of people” (BROOKLYN Daily Eagle).

1876 — Death in Matanzas, Cuba, at age 26, of Brigadier General Henry Reeve (Henry Mike Reeve Carroll) born in BROOKLYN in 1850, after 7 years service in the Cuban Army of Independence (Army of Liberation, Ejército Libertador) fighting the Spanish Empire in the unsuccessful Ten Years War. Once a drummer boy in the Union Army, he dies fighting Spain for Cuban independence (Wikipedia). Nearly 130 years hence, “in response to Hurricane Katrina, Cuba [will propose] sending a group of 1,586 [Cuban] doctors to assist humanitarian efforts in the United States.” After the offer is declined, in September 2005, Cuban president Fidel Castro will “rename the group the Henry Reeve Brigade (Contingente Internacional de médicos especializados en situaciones de desastre y graves epidemias ‘Henry Reeve’) in honor of Reeve.” Cuba will send the Henry Reeve Brigade first to Angola, and thereafter to more than 20 disaster regions, including Kashmir, Guatemala, Bolivia, Indonesia, Mexico, China, Barbados, Haïti, West Africa, and Chile. In 2017 the Brigade will earn an award for distinguished service from the World Health Organization (Wikipedia).

1876, December — Mark Twain delivers “The Weather of New England” speech at the 71st annual dinner of the NEW ENGLAND Society in the City of New York. Twain, a transplanted Westerner, has just published Huckleberry Finn written at his new home in NEW ENGLAND (Hartford, Connecticut).

1877, January 22 — Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht is born in Prussia, the year after his parents, immigrants to BROOKLYN in 1869 and married there in 1872, return from their 8-year U.S. sojourn where his father had worked in a German brewery. Named by his father Wilhelm for Horace Greeley, the Republican and socialist editor of the New York Tribune, Hjalmar will become President of the German Central Bank in the new Hitler government in 1933 and serve as Germany’s inflation-fighting Minister of Economics from 1934 until 1937. Dismissed from all government service in 1943, he will be imprisoned by the German Secret Police in 1944 on suspicion of having been in on the plot to kill Hitler, but freed by the Allies and exonerated of German war crimes at Nuremberg in 1945.

1880 — The NEW ENGLAND Society in the City of BROOKLYN is re-founded. Benjamin Silliman is its first President, 1880-1887. Within a few years, it has 400 members, and is inviting former presidents of the U.S. and former leading generals of the Civil War to speak at its dinners. BROOKLYN’s population is found this year to be 599,495, having more than doubled (again) in the preceding two decades.

1881 — Seth Low (the Younger, 1850–1916), a Republican reformer descended from a NEW ENGLAND (Salem, Massachusetts) family and graduate of Poly Prep Country Day School in BROOKLYN, defeats a venerably corrupt Democratic machine to be elected Mayor of BROOKLYN. He will be re-elected in 1883.

1882 — Chinese Exclusion Act, the first U.S. federal ethnic immigration ban, ends legal immigration to the United States from China. Immigrants will continue to settle in “Chinatowns” in U.S. cities. Manhattan’s, dating from the 1840s and ’50s, will expand greatly after 1882, and even more after the Exclusion Act’s repeal in 1943. Queens will not get a Chinatown until one gets started in the 1970s in the Dutch and English town of Flushing. BROOKLYN will have to wait to get one until three Chinese open the Winley Supermarket in the former “Little Norway” in Sunset Park in 1986.

1882 — Buffalo Bill Cody & Arizona John Burke, Prairie Wolf, opens in Grand Opera House, BROOKLYN, where Nate Salsbury, manager of Salsbury Troubadours, playing Fawn of the Glen, or the Civilized Indian in another BROOKLYN theater. In a BROOKLYN restaurant they plan a Wild West Show, Old Glory Blowout, which will be produced in North Platte, Nebraska, on July 4, 1882, the first of Buffalo Bill’s internationally celebrated Wild West Shows.

1883, May 12 — The new BROOKLYN base ball club, the Grays (a direct ancestor of the Dodgers), headquartered in the Old Stone House at Gowanus (also known as the Vechte-Cortelyou House, 1699), inaugurates Washington Baseball Park (now J. J. Byrne Park), Park Slope, BROOKLYN, beating Trenton 13-6. The club plays in the Inter-State Association, and will this year be Interstate Champions, but the club will join the American Association in 1884.

1883, May 24 — The BROOKLYN Bridge is opened by Mayor Seth Low of BROOKLYN and President Chester A. Arthur (of New York City). The BROOKLYN-to-Manhattan commuter ferries will fade away, the last one closing in 1924; but they will return in the 21st century.

1884 — Inter-State Association champions of 1883, the BROOKLYN Grays join the American Association (American League), founded in 1882, whose clubs charge less for admission than those of the National Association. The Grays will win the American Association championship in 1889.

1885 — Éamon de Valera (1882–1975), born in October, 1882, in a charity hospital on Lexington Avenue, New York City, is returned after the death of his Spanish father to his mother’s homeland, County Clare, Ireland, by an uncle. He will be an active Irish Republican revolutionary from 1913, saved from execution after the Easter Rising by his American birth, president of Sinn Féin in 1917, and founder of the Fianna Fáil party in 1926. Elected taoiseach (Prime Minister, head of government) of the independent Republic of Ireland, renamed Éire, from 1932–48, 1951–54, 1957–59, he will serve as its third elected President (chief of state) from 1959–73.

1885, March — William M. Evarts begins his term as Senator from New York. Born in 1818 in NEW ENGLAND (Charlestown, Massachusetts), raised in NEW ENGLAND, he was elected 11th President of the NEW ENGLAND Society in the City of New York in 1858. His extraordinary career as a New York lawyer has been highlighted by a term as the first President of the New York City Bar Association 1870-1879, and his successful defense of BROOKLYN’s minister Henry Ward Beecher in his “unlawful conversation” case in 1875. Outstanding advocacy has gained him opportunities in politics. He had nominated New York’s Governor Seward for President at the Republican Convention in Chicago in 1860, then moved unanimous consent for Lincoln when Seward’s support ebbed. In 1865 he had joined the team prosecuting Confederate President Jefferson Davis for treason, then in 1868 had become chief of the team defending President Andrew Johnson at his impeachment trial, and following that had accepted appointment by Johnson as Attorney-General for the remainder of the presidential term. In 1876 he had been counsel for candidate Rutherford B. Hayes before the Electoral Commission considering the disputed election—the losing candidate, Samuel J. Tilden, 25th Governor of New York, had been a classmate of Evarts at NEW ENGLAND’s Yale College—and Hayes had subsequently appointed Evarts Secretary of State. Evarts will serve one term as Senator. Dying in New York City in 1891, he will be buried near his old home in NEW ENGLAND (Windsor, Vermont).

1885, June 6 – Statue of The Pilgrim erected in New York City’s Central Park with sponsorship by the NEW ENGLAND Society in the City of New York.

1888 — William Dean Howells—Ohio-born editor of NEW ENGLAND’s (Boston’s) Atlantic Monthly from 1871 to 1881 and author of The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), the well-known realist novel of material ambition set in Boston—moves to 330 East 17th Street, New York City, near Stuyvesant Park. In 1890, he will publish A Hazard of New Fortunes, a well-known realist novel of material ambition set in the two cities, including a scene in Coney Island, BROOKLYN. Howells has helped bring Missourian Mark Twain into the New York and Boston literary world, and Twain will eventually publish there and live in NEW ENGLAND (Hartford, Connecticut).

1888 — Clara Driscoll, graduate of Western Reserve School of Design for Women (now the Cleveland Institute of Art in Ohio), moves to BROOKLYN. There she and her sister Josephine will be hired by Tiffany Studios to make stained glass objects like lampshades marketed as designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany. “Clara’s first stint there [will be] curtailed, however, by her engagement to Francis S. Driscoll, because the company only employed single women. In 1892, Driscoll’s husband [having died, she will rejoin] the firm, where she [will go] on to become the chief designer of the women’s glass-cutting department, devoted to the design and production of lampshades, with 35 young Tiffany girls under her … responsible for every facet of design and fabrication—except soldering the cut and foiled pieces of glass together, a task completed by the men’s glass-cutting department, since only men were permitted to use heating tools. In 1896, Driscoll [will become] engaged to Edwin Waldo, leaving Tiffany once again, but returning to the company quickly by 1897—a second and final time—after Waldo abruptly disappear[s] before they [can] be married. (He [will turn] up years later, claiming amnesia.)” (Smithsonian Magazine).

1889, April 27 — Lexington Avenue elevated railroad begins running across BROOKLYN Bridge, connecting BROOKLYN to New York City by rail. Population grows.

1890 — Champions of the Inter-State Association in 1883, champions of the American Association (American League) in 1889, the BROOKLYN base ball club (once the Grays but now called the Bridegrooms), direct ancestor of the Dodgers, wins the National League championship, becoming the only team ever to win both League championships. The club continues to play in Washington Baseball Park (now J. J. Byrne Park), Park Slope, BROOKLYN. It gets the name Bridegrooms about this time because of several players’ marriages, but it’s as the BROOKLYN Superbas, The Robins, and The (Trolley) Dodgers that the team will play in the National League from 1890 to 1957, winning pennants again in 1899, 1900, 1916, 1920, 1949, 1952, 1953, and 1955, the year it will finally win its first World Series. The BROOKLYN Dodgers will win one last pennant in 1956 before being moved to Los Angeles. Even in LA, the team will be reported to have won some pennants under the Dodger name, though LA will have gotten rid of its trolleys long before The (Trolley) Dodgers’ move.

1892 — The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch, standing at the entrance to Prospect Park in BROOKLYN, is dedicated with President Grover Cleveland in attendance. The 80-foot tall, 80-foot wide arch is dedicated to the military men who fought for the Union Army in the Civil War.

1892, October 5 — Emerging Black activist Ida B. Wells gives a powerful, well-documented speech against lynching at New York’s Lyric Hall. Wells is now living in Harlem, New York City, having decided not to return to her hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, after hearing that the office of her newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech, was trashed and destroyed for the pioneering anti-lynching editorial she published on May 21, 1892, which is the basis for her New York speech.

Wells’ opportunity had developed, not in New York, but in BROOKLYN earlier this year when she debated Maritcha Remond Lyons, a BROOKLYN Public Schools Assistant Principal, at the BROOKLYN Literary Union of the Siloam Presbyterian Church. Lyons, who had been educated in NEW ENGLAND (Providence Rhode Island), had given Wells advice on public speaking and introduced her to the Black woman activists who were her BROOKLYN friends, like Susan Smith McKinney, MD, and teacher Sarah Garnet, who would be instrumental in founding the National Association of Colored Women Clubs, and journalist Victoria Earle Matthews, who would be a founder of the Women’s Loyal Union of New York and BROOKLYN. Income from Wells’ Lyric Hall speech will be spent to publish her growing anti-lynching file on October 26th as a now famed pamphlet, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, dedicated to the “Afro-American women of New York and BROOKLYN.” (PBS, American Experience).

1894 — Gravesend and Coney Island are annexed by the City of BROOKLYN. Bay Ridge has become a vacation destination.

1894, September 24 — Thomas Edison films Sioux Ghost Dance, Indian War Council (Buffalo Bill Cody & Short Bull talking), Lost Horse’s Buffalo Dance, and Buffalo Bill Rapid Firing Demonstration, from the Wild West Show, in his mobile studio, the Black Maria, as the show (first imagined in BROOKLYN in 1882) closes its run at Ambrose Park, BROOKLYN. On October 6, he films Madame Rita’s Dance, “pickaninnies” dance from The Passing Show, and four “Arab” numbers (The Mexican Knife Duel, Lasso Thrower, Sheik Hadji Tahar, Hadji Cheriff) from the Wild West Show and Cleveland’s Minstrel Show, all in the Black Maria (Gordon Hendricks, “The Kinetoscope,” in John Fell, Ed., Film Before Griffith, 1983, p. 14). Edison produces his films for peep show machines and will fear the projected cinema pioneered in Paris by the Lumière brothers in 1895:

If we make this screen machine that you are asking for, it will spoil everything. We are making these peep show machines and selling a lot of them at a good profit. If we put out a screen machine there will be a use for maybe about ten of them in the whole United States. With that many screen machines you could show pictures to everybody in the country—and then it would be done for. Let’s not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
– Edison to Cody & Burke (Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture, 1926, p. 119)

1894, November — Charles A. Schieren, German immigrant leather manufacturer and reform Republican, is elected Fusion Mayor of BROOKLYN, but likely to be second to last. A non-binding referendum in the City of BROOKLYN has agreed to consolidation with New York City in 1898 by a margin of 277 votes.

1895, June 15 — Ocean Parkway Bicycle Path, the first separated bike path in the U.S., is opened by the City of BROOKLYN. A 10,000-person bicycle parade is led off by the BROOKLYN City Police on bicycles and League of American Wheelmen bicycling clubs from around the region. Activity will lead to a widening of the path by 1896 F. E. Hutchings, “The New Cycle Path March” sheet music is self-published at 1230 & 443 Bedford Avenue, BROOKLYN.

1896, February — BROOKLYN Rapid Transit Company (BRT), incorporated this January, takes over the bankrupt Long Island Traction Company, the BROOKLYN Heights Railroad, and the lessee of the BROOKLYN City Rail Road. BRT has long been in possession of BROOKLYN’s oldest city rail line, the BROOKLYN, Bath and Coney Island Railroad, with passenger service dating from 1863. BRT will acquire the BROOKLYN, Queens County and Suburban Railroad by lease on July 1, 1898. No surprise, since Brooklyn had four separate railroads running to Coney Island by 1883. The “streetcar suburb” of Kings County reaches its apogee, eight years before the BRT’s and IRT’s first subway will begin replacing it.

1896 — Anne Carroll Moore (1871–1961), born and raised in NEW ENGLAND (Maine), in the first year of her first job as a professional librarian, is allowed to run “an experiment, the Children’s Library of the Pratt Institute, in BROOKLYN, built at a time when the BROOKLYN schools had a policy that ‘children below the third grade do not read well enough to profit from the use of library books’” (The New Yorker).

1896 — Williamsburg Bridge design is submitted by engineer Leffert L. Buck, since increasing traffic seems to require a second bridge between New York City and BROOKLYN. At 1,600 feet from pier to pier, it will be the longest suspension bridge in the world from opening in 1903 until 1924.

1896 — Arthur Wesley Dow, born in NEW ENGLAND (Ipswich, Massachusetts) in 1857 and first trained in art in 1880 in Worcester and then Paris, appointed assistant curator of Japanese art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1893, and later first Director of the Ipswich Summer School of Art in his NEW ENGLAND birthplace, becomes visiting art teacher at Pratt Institute, BROOKLYN, a post he will hold until 1903. At Pratt, at New York’s Art Students League, and from 1904 until his death in 1922 as Professor of Fine Arts at Columbia University, New York, Dow will become a major influence on his students, several of whom figure as founders of American Modernism, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Shirley Williamson, Charles Sheeler, Charles J. Martin, Delle Miller, and Charles Burchfield (Wikipedia).

1897, April 6 — Bacchante with Infant Faun, a prize-winning bronze sculpture made in Paris in 1894 by sculptor Frederick MacMonnies, born in BROOKLYN Heights in 1863, and trained in New York City and Paris, is taken back by its donor, New York City architect Charles McKim, from the new Boston Public Library, designed by McKim in the Beaux-Arts style. In several months of rising controversy, the public and press in Boston and NEW ENGLAND have come to think that the users of a public library will get little moral benefit from a sculpture of a dancing, drunk female nude. In June of 1897, McKim will offer it to New York City’s new Metropolitan Museum of Art, which will accept and exhibit it immediately, and will exhibit it again in 2019. In 1906, a copy will be bought by the BROOKLYN Museum.

1897, November 8 — Dorothy Day is born the 3rd of 5 children of Episcopalians John and Grace Satterlee Day at 71 Pineapple Street, BROOKLYN Heights. The Days will move to San Francisco and later Chicago and Dorothy will declare herself atheist and socialist as a student at the University of Illinois, then drop out and return to New York City to become a Catholic socialist activist.

1897, November — Seth Low (the Younger, 1850–1916) of a NEW ENGLAND family that emigrated to BROOKLYN, who has twice been elected mayor of BROOKLYN, loses the election to be the first mayor of consolidated New York City. But in 1901 he will be elected New York City’s second mayor.

1897, December 31 — Outdoor celebrations of the consolidation of Greater New York: parade from Union Square to party at New York City Hall, and a funereal gathering of opponents in front of City Hall, BROOKLYN (tomorrow to be Borough Hall, BROOKLYN, New York City).

1898, January 1 — BROOKLYN merges with New York City, pursuant to the 1894 referendum, devolving from a city to a borough of New York City.

1898, May 1 — Commander George Dewey, a NEW ENGLANDer from Vermont, captures Manila Bay from the Spanish Pacific Fleet with his Asiatic Squadron of the U.S. Navy, led by his flagship Olympia. The Spanish-American War in the Pacific is over. The NEW ENGLAND Society in the City of BROOKLYN immediately offers Dewey membership, which he accepts, legendarily on the bridge of Olympia. He will decide not to run for President in 1900.

1899, January 17 — Al Capone born at Lawrence & Tillary Streets, BROOKLYN, 1^st American child of Gabriele & Teresina who had immigrated in 1894 to a cold-water flat at 95 Navy Street. In March, Alphonse will be baptized at St. Michael’s & St. Edward’s Church, 108 St. Edward’s Street, Ft. Greene. Later his family will move to Garfield Place near Carroll Gardens. Chicago will come later for Al; NEW ENGLAND, never.

1899 — The BROOKLYN base ball club, called the BROOKLYN Superbas, wins the National League championship.

1889 — J. P. Morgan (1837–1913), born and raised in NEW ENGLAND (Hartford, Connecticut), now partner in Drexel, Morgan & Co. in New York City, and a major investor in the reorganization of big railroad corporations like the New York Central, is elected 26th President of the NEW ENGLAND Society in the City of New York. He will become the United States’ most famous capitalist, and (in effect) its private central banker until the creation of the public Federal Reserve in 1913. Dying in Rome, Italy, that same year, he will be buried near his old home in Hartford.

1899 — (or early 1900) Joshua Slocum, Canadian-born U.S. citizen, is in Erie Basin, BROOKLYN, in the aft cabin of his sailboat Spray, and writing his memoir, Sailing Alone Around the World (1899, 1900). The book will bring him enough money to retire to a home in NEW ENGLAND (West Tisbury, Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts).

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1900, January 21 — 17 barbers are arrested in BROOKLYN for shaving on a Sunday. “Blue laws” favored by NEW ENGLAND Protestants are still in effect.

1900, January 23 — A dozen skeletons unearthed in BROOKLYN Navy Yard are thought to be the bodies of dead American prisoners of war thrown overboard from British prison ships during the British occupation of New York City and BROOKLYN in the American Revolution.

1900 — The BROOKLYN Superbas base ball club wins the National League championship a second year in a row.

1900 — The U.S. census finds BROOKLYN—its population doubled between the censuses of 1820 and 1830, doubled again between 1830 and 1840, and tripled in the decade from 1840 to 1850—has doubled in the 20 years since 1880 (599,495) and, at 1,166,582, exceeds one million for the first time.

1901 — Seth Low (the Younger, 1850–1916) of a NEW ENGLAND family emigrated to BROOKLYN, is elected the second mayor of consolidated New York City. He will resign as President of Columbia University in order to assume the new office in 1902. Vice-President Theodore Roosevelt, New Netherland descended, New York City raised, is told while climbing Mount Marcy in the Adirondacks that McKinley has died of his wounds in Buffalo, New York, making him President of the United States.

1903 — New York State Legislature creates the BROOKLYN Grade Crossing Elimination Commission and directs it to fully grade-separate a number of railroads and rapid transit lines in BROOKLYN and Queens. More than 100 years later, virtually all passenger rail lines in New York City (including the subway, LIRR, Metro-North, Amtrak, and the Staten Island Railway) and most freight rail lines are grade-separated. New York City is unique among major American cities in that much of its necessary passenger rail infrastructure is underground or grade-separated. The street railway and trolley fade away in BROOKLYN, but the subway, attaching some of its elevated lines, booms.

1903 — Women’s Trade Union League founded in NEW ENGLAND (Boston) at a meeting of the American Federation of Labor, when it becomes clear that the U.S. labor movement is trying to avoid organizing U.S. women into trade unions. It is national, but active in key urban areas like New York City, Boston, and Chicago. It has two objectives: (1) aiding trade unions and striking women workers and (2) lobbying for “protective labor legislation.” It will reach its acme from 1907 to 1922 under the presidency of one of its earliest adherents, Margaret Dreier Robins (1868–1945), daughter of German immigrants living on Monroe Place, BROOKLYN Heights, whose sister Mary Dreier also becomes a prominent member.

1904 — Initial wing of the Brooklyn Museum (then called the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences) is completed.

1904, October 27 — BROOKLYN Rapid Transit Company (BMT, combined with Interboro Rapid Transit or IRT) first electric subway opening day. Tunnel under the East River begins to link to already existing elevated railways that formerly ran across the BROOKLYN Bridge and open up more of BROOKLYN to development. BROOKLYN’s population will grow quickly.

1905 — Pioneering movie company, Edison (American) Vitagraph, moves its studios from the rooftop of 140 Nassau Street in New York City to the Midwood neighborhood of BROOKLYN, off Avenue M at Locust Avenue and East 14th-15th Street. Vitagraph had been founded in 1897 by two English immigrants, businessman Albert E. Smith and cartoonist, lecturer, and Edison film actor J. Stuart Blackton, who lives at 1277 East 14th Street in the same neighborhood of BROOKLYN. Vitagraph will come to prominence the next year with short documentary-propaganda films lifted from Edison about the Spanish-American War of 1898, including The Battle of Manila Bay and Tearing Down the Spanish Flag, and the animated short, The Humpty-Dumpty Circus. In 1906, Blackton will make one of the first animated cartoon sequences, Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, in Midwood. Vitagraph will make a film in California in 1910 and move most production to Hollywood in 1911, but the Midwood studio will survive, filming Rudolph Valentino, Norma Talmadge, and Cecil B. De Mille, until 1915. The building is now a day school for Jewish girls.

1907 — Immigration to the United States reaches a peak as 1.3 million immigrants enter the United States legally, largely via the immigration center opened on Ellis Island in New York City in 1892. 20 million will have come between 1880 and 1920. 5 million Germans have arrived during the 1800s, but a preponderance of immigrants after 1890 have been from eastern and southern Europe. The Irish, Italian, and Jewish stereotype of New York City begins to take shape (but it will not be proclaimed until the 1960s when Latino, African-American, and Caribbean-American BROOKLYNites are making it obsolete).

1907 — Annual Report of the New York City Superintendent of Education to the Board of Education finds:

The largest growth in high schools is found in BROOKLYN. This growth arises not only from the natural increase in the number of pupils entering from the BROOKLYN elementary schools, but also from the number of pupils entering from the Manhattan elementary schools … The consequence is that the BROOKLYN high schools are all crowded to excess.

1908, November 14 — President-elect William Howard Taft attends the dedication in what is now Fort Greene Park in BROOKLYN of the new monument to the more than 11,000 Prison Ship Martyrs, who died as prisoners of war and were thrown overboard from derelict British prison ships anchored in BROOKLYN’s Wallabout Bay during the American Revolution. 20,000 visitors fill the Park, with another 15,000 marching in a parade. The monument has been built with funds appropriated by the City, State, and Federal governments and privately raised by the Daughters of the American Revolution. Its architect, hired in 1905, is the then celebrated Stanford White, who has designed a new entrance to a crypt first built in 1873 to replace one built in 1808, and added a wide stairway leading to a plaza on top of the hill, from the center of which rises a freestanding, 148-foot Doric column crowned by a bronze lantern. The tower has an elevator that can take visitors to the top, which will operate until the 1930s. The monument’s centennial in 2008 will be celebrated with similar crowds (New York Times; DAR; Fort Greene Association).

1909, August 29 — Psychoanalysis founders Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Theodor Ferenczi arrive in New York harbor from Germany for their first visit to America. They will go to the new amusement park at Coney Island, BROOKLYN, and then spend September in NEW ENGLAND, where Freud is to speak on the latest in psychology. At Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, in the week of 6-11 September, he will give lectures published the next year as Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1910). (Anarchist Emma Goldman and Ernest Rutherford, the discoverer of radioactive transmutation of elements, are present.) Later in September, Freud will be a guest of William James in his country home in NEW ENGLAND (Chocorua, New Hampshire). Freud will say of America, presumably including BROOKLYN and NEW ENGLAND, that America was “a mistake; a gigantic mistake, it is true, but none the less a mistake,” and that although he did not “hate” America, he “regretted” it (in Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 2, 1953, p. 60; in Max Eastman, Einstein, Trotsky, Hemingway, Freud and Other Great Companions, 1962, p. 129, quoted by Paul Roazen, Freud and His Followers, 1975, p. 385). But Freud will also write:

In Europe I felt as though I were despised; but over there I found myself received by the foremost men as an equal. (New York Times)

1910, January 1 — William Jay Gaynor (1848–1913), an Irish Catholic living in Park Slope, BROOKLYN, who has been unexpectedly elected reform Mayor of consolidated New York City, walks from his home in BROOKLYN Heights across the BROOKLYN Bridge to City Hall to be inaugurated. After the ceremony he looks for a restaurant, finds none open on the holiday, and walks back across the Bridge to BROOKLYN to eat lunch. On 9 August this year, Gaynor will be shot in the neck and become the only New York City Mayor to have survived an assassination attempt. He will die instead of a heart attack on a deck chair aboard the HMS Baltic on 10 September, 1913, on his way to Europe after having been denied renomination by Charlie Murphy’s Tammany Hall Democratic machine, but run anyway, backed by reform groups, and lost.

1910 — Grain warehouses in Erie Basin in Red Hook, BROOKLYN’s largest port facility, are mostly shifted to general cargo instead. The Basin’s “Stores” (the BROOKLYN word for warehouses) had been reported to have storage for 3,000,000 bushels of grain and capacity for other cargoes. The two large stationary elevators used to transfer grain from canal boats to the Stores and later to fill the holds of oceangoing steam and sailing ships have become impractical as the vessels got bigger and no longer had the room to shift around the basin.

The major culprit in the increase in size were large passenger liners, which started transporting grain both for profit and as ballast. The tall grain elevator buildings were torn down and replaced with general-purpose warehouses. Their job of moving grain was shifted to floating grain elevators that could move to and from ships. By about 1910, most of the basin’s warehouses had been converted from grain to general cargo and shipyards occupied much of the basin. (Red Hook Water Stories)

1910 — Charles Benedict Davenport (1866–1944), Harvard-trained biologist who was born in NEW ENGLAND (Stamford, Connecticut), grew up in BROOKLYN, and has been, since 1901, scientific director of the biological laboratory of the BROOKLYN Institute of Arts and Sciences in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, launches his Eugenics Records Office there, soon to be the largest “eugenics” (good genes) research program in the U.S. Charles is the son of Jane Joralemon (Dimon) Davenport and Amzi Benedict Davenport, the founder and elder of one Congregational church and deacon of another (possibly descended from the NEW ENGLAND minister who tried to burn his pants in 1742, above); but Amzi had moved the family from NEW ENGLAND (Stamford Connecticut) to 11 Garden Place, BROOKLYN Heights, for his real estate business, employing young Charles as an errand boy and janitor. Charles had then gone to BROOKLYN Polytechnic for training as an engineer and back to NEW ENGLAND for his PhD in biology at Harvard and a well-regarded career (at the time) as a professor. The BROOKLYN Institute’s Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, of which he became the founding director in 1901, will become a center for the study of the biological inheritance of human traits from “frivolousness” and “criminality” to intelligence and “feeble-mindedness,” providing some “scientific” backing for the federal immigration limitation laws of 1921 and 1924, and for the eugenics movement of the early 20th century whose goal would become the selective breeding of human beings, and the passage of U.S. state laws mandating the sterilization of the “unfit.” Margaret Sanger and her 1916 BROOKLYN birth-control clinic will find support in the pseudoscience of the U.S. eugenics movement and Hitler will note it with approval in Mein Kampf in 1924 (Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, New York / London: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003; Harry Bruinius, Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity, NY: Knopf, 2006).

1910 — Charles Ives (1874–1954), who was born in NEW ENGLAND (Danbury, Connecticut), educated in New Haven, Connecticut for both high school and college (Yale), begins composing two radically modernist musical works: Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Massachusetts, and Three Places in New England. They are way ahead of the music of his time (except in Vienna and Paris) and will attract no audiences or performers for 25 years, until they finally win a Pulitzer in 1947. Ives has moved to New York City after marrying a NEW ENGLANDer to start a successful career in insurance; but he has also played organs in the city’s Protestant churches and had composed Central Park in the Dark (1906). We do not know whether he visited BROOKLYN.

1911, March 25 — Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory on the 8th, 9th and 10th floors of a building on the east side of Washington Square in New York City (Manhattan) catches fire. The company has locked its doors to prevent workers from slacking and 123 of its women workers, aged 14-23, and 23 men, die, most by jumping out of the windows and falling to the sidewalk. Frances Coralie Perkins, a NEW ENGLANDer born in 1882 in Boston to a Maine family and schooled in Massachusetts, who has just become head of the New York Consumers League and received a master’s in political science at Columbia University in Manhattan, comes down from her apartment on the north side of Washington Square and watches from the street as the bodies of victims are attended to. (Six unidentified women will be buried in the Cemetery of the Evergreens, in BROOKLYN.) Perkins, deeply moved, concludes from the event that only state laws and regulations can prevent private enterprise from exploiting labor to the point of death. She will develop into a key labor politician, progressing in 1919 to membership in Governor Al Smith’s Industrial Commission of the State of New York, to Governor Franklin Roosevelt’s chief New York State Industrial Commissioner in 1929, and finally to President Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor (1933–1945).

1912 — According to legend, Paul Diabo, the first of many Mohawks to take a high-steel job in New York, is working on the Hell Gate Bridge, and falls into the river and dies. Mohawks specializing in high steel will colonize a block in North Gowanus, BROOKLYN, bounded by 4th Avenue, Court, Schermerhorn, and Warren Streets, reaching about 700 in the period 1930-1955.

1912, March 4 — Charles Hercules Ebbets breaks ground on land in part of Flatbush, BROOKLYN, then known as Pigtown, Goatville, Tin Can Alley, and Crow Hill, for a new $650,000, 18,000-seat ball park for his team, the BROOKLYN Base Ball Club, then called the Superbas and the (Trolley) Dodgers. He calls it Dodgers Field, hopes to call it Washington Park after his previous stadium, but will be persuaded to rename it Ebbets Field. Ebbets dies in 1925 and on April 18 of that year is laid to rest in Green-Wood Cemetery, BROOKLYN.

1913, April 5 — BROOKLYN Superbas (a.k.a. the Dodgers) beat New York Highlanders (this year renamed Yankees, which played at the Polo Grounds) 3-2 on a home run by Casey Stengel, in an exhibition game to open brand-new Ebbets Field in part of Flatbush, BROOKLYN. The first home run in Ebbets Field is hit. In the season opener on 9 April, also in Ebbets Field, the Superbas will lose to the Philadelphia Phillies 1-0. (Encyclopedia of New York City and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle each report slightly varying information for these two games.)

1913, September —Joseph Stella, Italian immigrant artist, has an epiphany on a night bus ride to Coney Island, BROOKLYN, during post-Labor Day “Mardi Gras” at Coney Island. He begins work on Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras (Yale University Art Gallery) and finishes in February, 1914; it is his first big painting since learning the European avant-garde and returning to New York City.

Arriving at the Island I was instantly struck by the dazzling array of lights. It seemed as if they were in conflict.
– Joseph Stella (“I Knew Him When (1924),” in Barbara Haskell, Ed., Joseph Stella, 1994, p. 206)

1913, late December — Rodolfo Pietro Filiberto Raffaele Guglielmi (or Rodolpho d’Antonguolla, 1895–1926), a dancer, arrives by ship in BROOKLYN, New York from Apulia, southern Italy. He will make himself into a movie star as Rudolph Valentino, beginning at Vitagraph in Midwood, BROOKLYN.

1914 — Upstart Federal League of baseball teams and owners is founded. BROOKLYN has one of the teams, the BROOKLYN Tip Tops, which will play only one season, folding in 1915.

1914 — Harold R. Atteridge (lyrics) and Harry Carroll (music) write “By the Beautiful Sea,” a hit song set in Coney Island, BROOKLYN.

1914, July — Black writer Claude McKay, born in Jamaica in 1889 or 1890, leaves Kansas State University for New York, marries Eulalie Lewars in Jersey City, and opens a restaurant somewhere on Myrtle Avenue, BROOKLYN, near its intersection with Prince Street, east of Borough Hall. His wife will return to Jamaica, B.W.I. in 6 months, pregnant with son Rhue Hope, whom he will never see. McKay’s “If We Must Die” (1919) will frame the post-WW1 anti-Black riots that year known as the “Red Summer.” His Harlem Shadows poetry collection in 1922 will be one of the books held to have inaugurated the Harlem Renaissance.

She had a little apartment in Myrtle Avenue near Prince Street.
– Claude McKay, “Myrtle Avenue” (chapter in his novel, Home to Harlem, 1928)

1915 — “Charles Atlas” (Angelo Siciliano, b. 1892) opens as a sideshow attraction in Coney Island, BROOKLYN. He has taken the name “Charles Atlas” from the gold-painted statue of Atlas at the Atlas Hotel in Coney Island.

1916 — Nathan Handwerker, a former Feltsman’s employee, opens Nathan’s selling nickel hot dogs at Coney Island, BROOKLYN.

1916, spring — “Mary Pickford” (born Gladys Smith in Toronto, Canada), about to sign a star contract with Adolph Zukor, has a house built or bought for her by Vitagraph in BROOKLYN at 1320 Ditmas Avenue & Rugby Road; but instead she signs with Zukor’s Famous Players, moves to Hollywood and never moves in.

1916, autumn — Charles Ebbets’s BROOKLYN base ball club, called the BROOKLYN Robins and the BROOKLYN Trolley Dodgers, win the National League pennant. They wear their new gray uniforms with orange piping. They will lose the World Series to NEW ENGLAND’s Boston Red Sox in five games.

1916, October 16 — Margaret Sanger, born Irish Catholic in Corning, NY, opens first-ever U.S. birth control clinic at 46 Amboy Street, near Pitkin Avenue in Brownsville, BROOKLYN. Her sister, Ethel Byrne, is nurse. Advertising is by handbill in Yiddish, Italian, and English. Police shut it down pursuant to the 1873 law sponsored by Anthony Comstock, NEW ENGLAND immigrant to BROOKLYN, who died the year before, and arrest Sanger on 26 October, after 10 days and 488 women clients (or 464, according to Feldt, New York Times). Out on bail, Sanger will resume the work. Arrested again for violating NY State law criminalizing the distribution of contraceptives, she and her sister will be tried in 1917. Sanger, offered leniency in exchange for a promise to obey the law, refuses and gets 30 days in the workhouse. An appeal will fail but in 1918 Judge Crane of the NY Court of Appeals will find that doctors may legally prescribe contraception.

1917, April — The U.S. enters the Great War, later to be called World War I, on the side of England against Germany. Large U.S. German populations like BROOKLYN’s are discriminated against. Their sauerkraut becomes “Victory Cabbage,” their hamburger, “Salisbury Steak,” but their frankfurter sandwich, pioneered as a street food in Coney Island, holds on to its original names: the “Coney Island,” the “red hot,” and the nickname, “hot dog,” that it got after being introduced to the American public at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 (where Filipinos on exhibit were called “dog-eaters”). In 1917 the United States passes its first federal immigration restriction law, requiring a literacy test from immigrants over the age of 16. The U.S. will not sign the treaty of peace that ends the war, but has nevertheless become the leading world power.

1917 — Jones-Shafroth Act confers U.S. citizenship on inhabitants of Puerto Rico, and voting and officeholding rights on Puerto Ricans resident in the United States proper. A wave of Puerto Rican migrants to the mainland United States will peak in the 1950s, nearly 70% of them ending up in New York City. The census of 2010 will count Puerto Rican New Yorkers—Nuyoricans—as 8.9% of the people and 32% of the Latino people, of New York City’s neighborhoods (including BROOKLYN‘s Bushwick, Williamsburg, East New York, Sunset Park, and others).

1918, November 1 — Greatest single subway disaster, crash in Malbone Street tunnel, near what is now the Prospect Park station, BROOKLYN. A dispatcher filling in for a striker goes too fast on an “S” curve on what is now the Franklin Avenue shuttle line. 97 killed; 250+ hurt. Malbone Street will be renamed Empire Boulevard.

1920 — The U.S. census finds BROOKLYN, its population having exceeded one million (1,166,582) for the first time in 1900, has again nearly doubled in two decades and is now, for the first time, more than two million (2,018,356).

1920, May 1 — The BROOKLYN Superbas (direct ancestor of the Dodgers) play the Boston Braves in Boston to a 1-1 tie in a baseball game lasting 3 hours 50 minutes and 26 innings, a major league record, called after inning 26 because of darkness.

1920, autumn — Charles Ebbets’s BROOKLYN base ball club, called the BROOKLYN Robins and the BROOKLYN (Trolley) Dodgers, win the National League pennant again. They will lose the World Series again, this time to the Cleveland Indians, in seven games.

1924 — Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, called the National Origins Act, admits a quota of immigrants from any nation in a particular year to a maximum of 2% of the numbers of people of that origin found in the U.S. census of 1890, except Chinese, and some other Asians, like Japanese, who are completely excluded (the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 had specified 3%). Immigration to the U.S. is throttled, reduced by 90%. BROOKLYN‘s many immigrants and descendants of immigrants are counted as having “national origins” other than the United States, including English and German, as well as the more recently arrived Italian and eastern European.

1924, March 3 — H. P. Lovecraft, horror fantasy writer who has lived all his life with his mother in NEW ENGLAND (Providence, Rhode Island), marries Sonia Greene and comes to live with her at her apartment at 793 Flatbush Avenue, BROOKLYN. She will leave him to work in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1925, and with the allowance she sends, Lovecraft will move into a one-room apartment at 169 Clinton Street in Red Hook, BROOKLYN, where he will write “The Horror at Red Hook” for Weird Tales magazine in August. In 1926 he will move to BROOKLYN Heights, but will return to Providence before the end of the year and spend the rest of his life there.

1929-1939 — The Great Depression decimates many BROOKLYN institutions. Immigration to the United States plummets between 1930 and 1950. The New England Society in the City of BROOKLYN has as few as 30 members.

1933 — President Franklin Roosevelt appoints Frances Perkins to the post of Secretary of Labor. She was born and raised in NEW ENGLAND (Boston and Worcester, Massachusetts), was turned to appointive politics after witnessing the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911 as a resident of New York City (Manhattan, not BROOKLYN). The first woman to hold a U.S. Cabinet appointment, she will lead in drafting the New Deal’s Social Security Act and its national laws on minimum wage, child labor, and unemployment insurance. Dying in 1965, she will be returned to her parents’ NEW ENGLAND home town of Newcastle, Maine, for burial. It is not known if she ever went to BROOKLYN.

1938 — Richard Wright, born in Mississippi and an outstanding member of the Great Migration of Black immigration to northern cities, uses his new Guggenheim Fellowship to move to Harlem. Then he rents a room at 109 Lefferts Place, Greenpoint, BROOKLYN, the home of his Chicago friends Herbert and Jane Newton, an interracial couple of prominent Communists who had moved to BROOKLYN. There he will write most of his novel Native Son, published in 1940.

1939-1945 —World War II reinvigorates (temporarily) BROOKLYN as a manufacturing center, a port, and the site of the Navy Yard. After the war, railroads and highways will take over as the preferred means of shipping goods, reducing the value of New York’s harbor; manufacturing declines in New York City. Immigration to the United States will continue to plummet until 1950.

1943 — Betty Smith writes A Tree Grows in BROOKLYN, a semi-autobiographical novel centered on Francie Nolan and her parents, the children of Irish and Austrian German immigrants from the height of immigration in the 1890s, and nostalgically set in the tenements of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, BROOKLYN, in 1912 and 1900.

1946 — Suburbanization shifts into high gear, driven by returning World War II veterans. Families begin a mass movement to the automobile suburbs, eastward of BROOKLYN and Queens on Long Island, and northwest of the Bronx to Westchester and New Jersey, a movement somewhat delayed for BROOKLYNites by their self-image as the home of the perennially pennant-winning, series-losing (except in 1955) BROOKLYN Dodgers baseball team before its move to Los Angeles in 1957. The less wealthy, who, if Black, are contractually excluded from most of the new suburban developments like Levittown, replace the émigrés. For example, the 1970 census will show Crown Heights, BROOKLYN, to have gone from 70% White and mostly Jewish in the 1960 census to 70% Black, mostly Caribbean (West Indian). The Lubavitcher Hasidic Jews will be the only group that has stayed.

1947 — Jackie Robinson of the BROOKLYN Dodgers, the first African-American player in the Major Leagues since they had been segregated in the 1880s, is chosen Rookie of the Year. His 1945 tryout with NEW ENGLAND’s Boston Red Sox had drawn racial slurs from their management. “African-American” being an excessively rare term in the 1940s and 50s, he is called a “Colored” by the polite, a “Negro” or a “Black” by progressives, and a “hero” by most BROOKLYNites.

1955 — W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois, AB, Harvard (1890), PhD (1895), born in NEW ENGLAND (Great Barrington, Massachusetts) in 1868 to free Black parents (his father an immigrant from Haiti), and the author of The Souls of Black Folk, buys 31 Grace Court, BROOKLYN Heights, his last U.S. home, at age 88. The seller is BROOKLYN-born playwright Arthur Miller, who had lived there since 1947 and had seen to the 1949 New York premiere of his Death of a Salesman, the play he had written in 1948 in his vacation studio in NEW ENGLAND (Roxbury, Connecticut). Du Bois was the delegate at the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in New York City in 1910 who substituted “Colored” for “Negro” to include “dark skinned people everywhere.” He will apply for membership in the Communist Party USA, and move from BROOKLYN to Ghana in 1961 to research articles on the African diaspora for the Encyclopedia Africana. There the U.S. will refuse to renew his passport, and he will become a Ghanaian citizen. Rev. William Howard Melish of the Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity, BROOKLYN Heights, will visit him in Ghana before he dies there at age 96 on the day before the March on Washington in 1963.

1955 — The National League pennant-winning BROOKLYN Dodgers finally win a World Series against the New York Yankees, after having lost to them in 1941, 1947, 1949, 1952, and 1953. The long-running connection of BROOKLYN baseball to NEW ENGLAND’s is no longer what it was in the 19th century. Clem Labine of Lincoln, Rhode Island, the winning pitcher of crucial Game #4, is the only NEW ENGLANDer on the Dodger roster, unless one counts Don Newcombe, of Madison, New Jersey, the losing pitcher of Game #1, because he came to the Dodgers via the Nashua (New Hampshire) Dodgers of the NEW ENGLAND League, the first racially integrated professional baseball team in the 20th century. Sandy Koufax, of Borough Park and Bensonhurst, who did not pitch Game #1 because it fell on Yom Kippur, is the roster’s only native BROOKLYNite. The Dodgers’ owner, a Bronx-born New York Giants fan, will move the team to Los Angeles two years later in 1957. The movement of BROOKLYNites to the Long Island suburbs will accelerate.

1956 — Containerization of freight for shipping, invented by trucking executive Malcolm McLean, begins reducing the price per ton by 97%, as well as the power of longshoreman’s unions and the value of harborage in BROOKLYN and Manhattan. Arthur Miller’s 1955 play, A View From the Bridge, set on the BROOKLYN docks, will become a period piece. A move to recapture the working waterfront for recreation will begin.

1965 — Immigration and Nationality Act removes the “national origins” exclusions of the Immigration Act of 1924. Immigration begins to rise from the rest of the Americas, but not so much any more from the European standbys of Ireland, Germany, Italy, Russia, and eastern Europe.

1965, April — New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission comes into being to enforce the New York City Landmarks Preservation law, adopted following the demolition of Penn Station in 1964. Parts of BROOKLYN, called “brownstone BROOKLYN,” will be among the first to be preserved by the new Commission, starting on November 23rd with BROOKLYN Heights. Deindustrialization accelerates in BROOKLYN, as does inequality of wealth and income, and the rediscovery of cheap, historic housing begins leading to the process called (by 1980) “gentrification,” and the creation in some areas of a “post-industrial” city. Young families buy houses in marginal neighborhoods and renovate them, the “renovation generation.” This brings the re-invigoration of businesses and schools to formerly run-down neighborhoods, but also displaces longtime residents with lower incomes and less wealth.

1968, June 6 — New York Senator Robert Francis Kennedy, born and raised in NEW ENGLAND (Massachusetts), is assassinated in California after winning the state’s Democratic presidential primary. He was elected to the Senate from New York in 1964 after serving as Attorney General of the United States from 1961 to 1963 under his brother, President John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a member of the NEW ENGLAND Society of the City of New York.

1972, January 25 — Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm (1924–2005), graduate of BROOKLYN College (AB, 1946), a former schoolteacher, and a BROOKLYN Democrat, declares her candidacy for president of the United States, becoming the second woman and the first African-American woman to run for the presidential nomination of a major party. She has been Representative in Congress since 1969 for New York’s 12th District, just redrawn to include neighborhoods in BROOKLYN like Bedford-Stuyvesant (where Chisholm went to Girls High School and now lives) and extending west to Greenpoint on the East River. When she was elected to Congress in 1968 over James Farmer, the Black founder of the national Congress of Racial Equality, (who was not from BROOKLYN) she had become the first African-American woman in either House of Congress. Born in BROOKLYN in 1924 to Afro-Caribbean parents who had immigrated like many others from British colonies there (Guyana and Barbados), she has been identified as “Negro” by the New York Times in 1968, and will be identified in 1972 more often as “Black” than as “African-American.” She will win 152 Democratic Convention delegates before withdrawing from the race. (The Convention will nominate George McGovern.) A founding member both of the Congressional Black Caucus in 1971 and of the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1972, she will remain in the House of Representatives until her retirement in 1983.

I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud. I am not the candidate of the woman’s movement of this country, although I am a woman and equally proud of that. I am the candidate of the people and my presence before you symbolizes a new era in American political history.
—Shirley Chisholm, Campaign Announcement, January 25, 1972

1980, November — Bernie Sanders, 39—born and raised Jewish in BROOKLYN, who had moved to NEW ENGLAND (Stannard, Vermont) in 1968 as a carpenter, filmmaker, and writer active for Civil Rights and against the Vietnam War—wins his first election, by a 10-vote plurality, to become Mayor of Burlington, Vermont. Unsuccessful candidate for Governor of Vermont in 1972 and 1976, Sanders will be re-elected Mayor of Burlington in 1983, 1985, and 1987. He will be elected to Congress as an Independent socialist in 1990, serving until he wins election to the Senate with Democratic Party support in 2006. He will be reelected Senator in 2012 and 2018, and run popular if unsuccessful campaigns for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in 2016 and 2020.

1982, August — Frederick Richmond (1923–2019)—born, raised, and educated in NEW ENGLAND (Boston, MA), who had moved to New York City and BROOKLYN after graduating from Boston University in 1946 and become rich—resigns before completing his 4th term from the seat representing BROOKLYN in the U.S. House of Representatives that he has held since 1974. He pleads guilty to reduced charges of tax evasion, income tax underreporting, possession of cannabis, and illegally paying a government employee. Meade Esposito, boss of the Democratic Party in BROOKLYN, laments, “He was one of the best we had. Somewhere along the line he got lost.”

1985 — Actor and director Spike Lee begins work on She’s Gotta Have It, his first feature film, set in BROOKLYN, that will gross over $7 million in U.S. theaters after release in 1986. His family had emigrated to BROOKLYN (Fort Greene) from Atlanta, Georgia, where Lee had made his first film, Last Hustle in BROOKLYN, as a student at Morehouse College. Lee follows up with Do the Right Thing, also set in BROOKLYN, in 1989; the film picks up numerous accolades, including 2 Academy Award nominations. Lee’s company, Forty Acres and a Mule, still had offices in Fort Greene in 2015, but Lee no longer lived in BROOKLYN, though he still often vacationed in NEW ENGLAND (Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts).

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2001 — First season at KeySpan Park (now Municipal Credit Union Park), in Coney Island, for the BROOKLYN Cyclones, formerly a farm team in St. Catherines, Ontario, of the Toronto Blue Jays, still playing in the minor New York-Penn League but now a New York Mets farm team. BROOKLYN has a professional baseball team and a home stadium for the first time since 1957.

2010 — U.S. census numbers BROOKLYN’s population at 2,504,700, or 486,344 more than its 1920 peak. Latino, African-American (including descendants of the Blacks of the mid-20th century Great Migration), Asian, and Native American BROOKLYNites are found to total 1,914,177 or 76.4%. White in BROOKLYN totals 1,072,041, presumably including most of the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, the Jews, and the eastern Europeans who had come to BROOKLYN in the 19th and 20th centuries, the descendants of the NEW ENGLANDers who had come to BROOKLYN in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, and, of course, the Dutch.

2012-2013 — First season of the BROOKLYN Nets basketball team, who have moved back to New York after 35 seasons in New Jersey. The team plays in the new Barclay’s Center at Atlantic Avenue. The National Hockey League team The Islanders will follow suit, moving to the Barclay’s Center in 2015.

2013, November – Bill de Blasio (born Warren Wilhelm Jr. in Manhattan, New York, in 1961, but raised in NEW ENGLAND (Norwalk, Connecticut, and Cambridge, Massachusetts), is elected Mayor of New York City. (Another Mayor with roots in NEW ENGLAND, though his parents were commuters to jobs in the City.) De Blasio has already been elected New York City Councilman from the 39th District in BROOKLYN, 2002-2009, and the City’s Public Advocate 2010-2013. He will serve two terms as Mayor of New York.

2016, March – William Bryk (b. 1955) moves from his hometown BROOKLYN to NEW ENGLAND (Antrim, New Hampshire), where he will win an election for the first time since his high-school days (for Trustee of the Antrim Town Library in 2017). As a BROOKLYNite he had run for Congress in 1980, for Manhattan School District Board #6 in 1983, for New York City Council in 1996 and 1997, for New York State Assembly in 1998 and for District Attorney of Richmond County (Staten Island) in 1999, losing every race. Branching out, he had run (and lost) races for the U.S. Senate in Idaho in 2010, for the U.S. Senate in Wyoming in 2012, and for the U.S. Senate in Alaska, Oregon, Wyoming, and Idaho, simultaneously in 2014.

2020 — Michael “Mike” Bloomberg, a billionaire New Yorker raised in NEW ENGLAND (Medford and Boston, Massachusetts) and the first Mayor of New York City to be elected for three consecutive terms (2002–2013), runs for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States, hoping to win against Republican and former Queens resident, Donald Trump. He withdraws from the race after spending millions but losing a debate exchange with Senator Elizabeth Warren of his former home state of Massachusetts.

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