USA > New York > New York City > Leslie's history of the greater New York, Volume II > Part 23
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ria, the rector of whose Episcopal Church, the Rev. John W. Brown, with one or two others, came to look the field over in 1846. Services were first held in the parlors of Mr. David Provoost's house; but a room was afterward hired, supplied with furniture from Astoria. A church was finally ready for occupancy on Sunday, October 23, 1853, on Kent Street, between Franklin and Manhattan, and the name se- lected was that of the Ascension. The Methodists organized in 1847, and their first building on Union (now Manhattan) Avenue, near Java Street, was erected of wood a year or two later. The First Pres- byterian Church of Greenpoint, now on Noble Street, corner of Guern- sey, was not organized till 1869. The First Baptist Church has no precise records of its earliest organization, but it was in flourishing operation in 1851, since which time the records are intact. The first Roman Catholic Church was organized in 1855.
On January 1, 1855, the City of Brooklyn, as the result of the first and smaller of the two consolidations of cities to which it has been subjected in the course of its history, began its enlarged existence. The subject of the union of the two cities of Williamsburgh and Brooklyn had been agitated as much as ten years before, on October 24, 1845, when a meeting of citizens of Brooklyn, and of residents of Williamsburgh, then still a village, was held for the purpose of dis- cussing the expediency of consolidation. Three years later, in No- vember, 1848, a meeting was again held, but now only of the resi- dents of the village, at which the project was once more considered, but nothing came of it. Now, when it had become an accomplished
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fact, brought about largely by the last Mayor of the smaller city, it was deplored by some of its citizens. It was declared to. be a premature step, twenty years ahead of the time when it should have been taken. " For a time," writes a disgruntled Williams- burgher, "it greatly injured the local trade and social prestige of this portion of the present city of Brooklyn. It reduced Williams- burgh to the position of an insignificant suburb of a compara- tively distant city, which was in no way identified with or in- formed of the needs, economies, or real interests of its new ad- junct." At any rate, the consolidation did one thing for Brooklyn, of which it might justly boast. The older city having about 145,- 000 inhabitants and the younger about 50,000, and Bushwick about 7,000, the new city of Brooklyn, with its two hundred thousand peo- ple, rose to the rank of the third city in the State of New York, soon to distance every other city in the Union but the metropolis by its side and ancient Philadelphia, and destined to hold the rank of the third city in the Union until a few years ago, when Chicago entered upon its policy of annexing distant settlements in the State of Illinois.
In November, 1854, the election of officers for the combined cities had resulted in the choice of George Hall to be the first Mayor of the Greater Brooklyn. This was truly a remarkable coincidence, for Mr. Hall had been made the first Mayor of the earlier and smaller Brooklyn in 1834, by the votes of the Aldermen, as the law then re- quired. He addressed a long message to the Common Council at his assumption of the office, which preserves for later generations a de- tailed statement of many particulars regarding the city at this in- teresting period. Among the first enterprises to emerge from the mere tentative or projectory stage was the greatly needed supply of water. In April, 1855, the Nassau Water Company was incorporated by the Legislature. Slowly the subscriptions toits capital came in, and other delays incidental to such undertakings made it July 31. 1856, before the company could invite the public to participate in the ceremonies attending the beginnings of work upon its plant. They appropriately prepared elaborate ceremonies to honor this event. Ground was first to be broken on Reservoir Hill, that lofty elevation whence the tower that now crowns it can be seen for a score of miles across country and surrounding sea. A platform was built upon the brow of the high hill to the left of the entrance to Prospect Park that now is, but was not then. Here were the guests of the company placed amid gay decorations of flags, the Mayor and Common Council and others, numbering nearly a thousand, who had been conveyed hither in omnibuses and carriages, toiling up the slope of Flatbush Avenue in a long procession. The exercises con- sisted of the reading of a brief account of the work of the water com- pany thus far, after which the Mayor was introduced, who made a few remarks, and then was handed a spade, wherewith he broke the
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ground for the reservoir. Then followed speeches by eminent di- vines and public men, the fine oratory of Dr. Bethune doing ample justice to the great occasion. By act of Legislature the Directors of the company were made a Board of Water Commissioners in 1857, whereby the contracts and property of the Nassau Company were made the property of the city, and a Water Department was added to the municipal government. Late in November, or early in De- cember, 1858, the water was first introduced into the pipes and cir- culated through the city. Almost immediately one or two fires oc- curred, that on December 17 threatening to repeat the disastrous one of ten years before. It was clearly seen that nothing but the prompt- ness and efficiency of the water supply had prevented the fire from becoming a conflagration, and the enthusiasm of the people, therefore, knew no bounds. Nothing would do but there must be a grand cele- bration such as had marked the completion of the Croton system in New York in 1842. Hence, the Common Council appointed April 27, 1859, for the exercises. Unfortunately that day proved excessive- ly stormy, even more unfit for public ceremonies and processions than the memorable April 27, 1897, when Grant's Tomb was dedicated. It was at once determined to keep the vast number of visitors over to the next day, which happily dawned and continued bright and warm, perfectly adapted to the festive purpose contemplated. Sa- lutes of guns ushered in the day. At 11 a.m. the procession started, wherein marched the men of the Fire Department and the militia, the Thirteenth Regiment wearing its new uniform for the first time that day. Trades were represented upon floats as usual, from twelve to fifteen thousand persons being in line altogether, and requiring two hours to pass any given point. The literary exercises were held at the City Hall; here an oration was delivered by Richard C. Underhill, an ode was sung to the tune of the Star Spangled Ban- ner, after which several addresses of congratulation were made by ex-Mayor Trotter of Brooklyn, and mayors from other cities, re- sponded to at the close by Mayor S. S. Powell of Brooklyn. The fountain in the square in front of the City Hall was set playing, form- ing no unimportant incident of the day's proceedings. At night there was a fine display of fireworks, and calcium lights were con- centrated upon the spray of the fountain, making fine rainbow effects. In distant Greenpoint the night was also made luminous with fire- works, and old Williamsburgh was not content to desist from the delight of witnessing their brilliancy till the second evening. Thus all of Brooklyn, from one end to the other, congratulated itself upon the achievement of this great public work, and announced its joy to the world.
In our previous volume we observed how the Municipal Police, too largely under the control of the Mayor,-and an engine for munici- pal corruption under such a Mayor as Fernando Wood,-was changed
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to the Metropolitan Police by the Legislature in 1857. Five Com- missioners, appointed by the Governor, were to have charge of the police arrangements in the metropolitan district, which was con- sidered as including New York and Brooklyn, as well as all of Kings County, besides Westchester and Richmond counties, and Newtown, Flushing, and Jamaica, towns of Queens County. The Mayors of the two cities in this district were to be ex officio members of the Commission. It is certainly interesting to notice this provision, which seemed to contemplate in advance a union now covering all municipal interests, as well as the one of police, extending over almost exactly the same territory. Mr. J. S. T. Stranahan was one of the first Com- missioners, and it is possible his work in this connection made him so early and earnest an advocate of the consolidation of all these communities into one city, the practical operation of the scheme along one line giving him confidence that it would work well in every particular. The headquarters of the police force were at the familiar place, 300 Mulberry Street. One inspector was assigned to Brook- lyn with ten captains under him, in 1857, and the precincts were numbered in order after those in New York. Another advance in municipal management was the extension of the drainage and sew- erage system. Before 1857 there were but about five miles of sewers in the city, but the introduction of the artificial water supply made the problem of drainage easier. In 1859, a scientific plan was inau- gurated, whereby the city was divided into four districts. Two of these discharged water and house drainage into the Wallabout Bay and the East River, between the Bay and Red Hook, which was done with very little aid from the water system, by reason of the natural slope of the city toward these termini. At the north and south the hint of the old tide mills was taken, and their device utilized in scour- ing the sewers. Tide gates were placed in Newtown Creek and in the Gowanus Canal, which held a supply of water after the tides went down, and then with this head of water on it was sent into the sewers at ebb, clearing them out effectually. Just as the country was about to enter upon the dark days of the Civil War, on April 17, 1860, the Legislature passed an act which resulted in securing that brightest ornament of Brooklyn city - Prospect Park. At the head of the Board of Commissioners to secure this prize was again the honored J. S. T. Stranahan, whose statue appropriately adorns the entrance of the Park to-day, although the aged gentleman is still alive to look upon it and appreciate that honor. As originally laid out it was to be bounded on the east by Washington Avenue, Ninth Avenue on the west, Douglas Street at its northern and nar- rowest end, and the Coney Island Road at the south. While some legal technicalities were left to be settled in the court the Commis- sion went to work promptly, and employed Lieutenant (now Gen- eral) Egbert L. Viele, to do for Prospect what he had done for Cen-
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tral Park in New York only a few years before. But, in 1861, came war, and the laudable design had to be abandoned till the return of peace in 1865.
The address of Mayor Hall in 1855, as he assumed the chief magis- terial chair of Brooklyn as newly consolidated, is replete with sta- tistical details. From it we learn that the city then embraced six- teen thousand acres, or twenty-five square miles. " Within these limits, 516 streets have been opened for public use, old roads have been discontinued and closed, hills have been leveled, valleys and lowlands filled up, old landmarks have disappeared, and almost the whole surface of the city has been completely changed." It must be owned that there are many labyrinthine features even to this day
Bonwill 1802
FORT WADSWORTH, ON THE NARROWS.
about the naming and the order of these streets, which, while not lacking in picturesqueness, are greatly bewildering to the casual visi- tor, and can be but poorly mastered by a resident, unless he makes a special effort to possess the cue of other neighborhoods than his own. In the first place, in a score of instances, there are a street and an avenue bearing the same name, yet at a great distance from each other, such as Clinton and Washington streets, and Clinton and Washington avenues, in entirely different portions of the city. While in New York there is some method about calling one set of thor- oughfares avenues and another streets, in Brooklyn there appar- ently is none whatever, for, with delightful variety, we pass from Lafayette Avenue to its next neighbor, Clifton Place, and in a long series of streets we have Greene or Gates or Jefferson avenues, with
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Madison and Monroe and Quincy streets sliced in between, though differing neither in width nor in direction. A careful study may re- veal a dim principle : the avenues are longer than the streets, perhaps, as a general thing. Thus Clifton Place is not an avenue like Lafayette on one side and Greene on the other, because Tompkins Square inter- venes, and makes of its continuation on the other side Van Buren Street again. Yet there is no such circumstance,-i.e., a difference in continuance, to explain the difference between Jefferson Avenue and Hancock Street immediately next to it. Laudable attempts are made here and there to produce order out of this chaos. Thus, in Green- point, a number of streets follow the order of the alphabet. At first they plainly did so by simply using the letters A, B, C, etc., street; but this somehow was obscured later, and therefore not readily ob- served by the stranger, unless his attention is called to the matter. For now we read of Clay Street and India Street and Noble Street, where C and I and N sufficed before. In the section already criticised, the heroes of the Revolution are immortalized in an east and west direction; here we find Kosciusko and De Kalb and Greene and Gates and Hancock and Jefferson avenues. But, unfortunately, Washington and Clinton had been used up in a southerly direction. In the same order we pass from Washington and Franklin to Bed- ford and Nostrand (reminiscences of local history and old settlers), and then an attempt at regularity meets us again in a series of gover- nors of New York State-Marcy and Tompkins and Throop and Lew- is and Stuyvesant, with no nice calculation of chronology, it is evi- dent. A unique effort at guiding bewildered strangers is noted along the line of the Long Island Railroad on Atlantic Avenue, where a list of cities is followed after we have passed Bedford and Nos- trand avenues. Here are New York and Brooklyn properly head- ing the list, and then of a sudden one will imagine himself travel- ing along the Hudson River or New York Central Railroad, as are called out Kingston, Albany, Troy, Schenectady, Utica, Rochester, Buffalo, after which this laudable order is interrupted again by drawing for names upon local history or settlement. In Will- iamsburgh, as we noted, a large part of the place had its streets numbered from First to Twelfth or more; but with similar lack of inventiveness the cross thoroughfares were also numbered, adding the distinguishing epithets of South and North, according as they ran on either of these sides parallel to Grand Street. After the consolida- tion the numerals were retained, although in Brooklyn's Gowanus district there were also streets marked in the same way. The only device that ingenuity could hit upon to extricate the postoffice peo- ple out of this horrible dilemma was to require correspondents to put E. D. (Eastern District) after their Brooklyn, when the letters were meant for Williamsburgh. It seems hardly credible that no improvement was made upon this awkward arrangement until deep
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in the "eighties," when the Williamsburgh numbered thoroughfares were named Kent, Wythe, and so on, till some of the older street names like Rodney and Hooper and others could be carried into the " numerals " across Broadway. Finally, in southern Brooklyn, where Gowanns formerly was, the system of numerals was applied, but ap- parently at haphazard, with no special reason why First Street might not have been at Union or Wyckoff. But, beginning at last, the system has been carried out to the end of the island as now embraced within the city limits, One Hundredth Street resting almost upon the Bay at the Narrows. Here, also, the New York idea of naming crossing thoroughfares avenues has been adopted, First Avenue running (with serious interruptions as yet), along the Bay shore, and Twenty- eighth Avenue carrying one well into Gravesend, near Coney Island.
As the city grew the original four lines of horse cars mentioned above were supplemented by others, yet there were not many before the war. The Atlantic Street (or Avenue) lines, to Greenwood, and also to Bedford, began operations in 1859. In 1860 the Grand Street Line ran its cars throngh that portion of former Williamsburgh, as far as Newtown; and the same year saw the establishment of the Broad- way cars, drawn part of the way by horses, and part by steam, as some of us can remember, from the ferry to East New York. It was still the day of small things for rapid transit in Brooklyn. A subject of se- rious debate and strenuous opposition was the running of street cars on Sunday. Mayor Hall was elected on a ticket making prominent temperance and Sabbath observance. When Mr. Powell became Mayor he squarely faced the issue, and, in a message to the Common Council recommended that permission be granted to the companies to run their cars on the sacred day. This was done, and in the course of time it has been accepted by church people as well as others as among the necessities of city life.
The excellent advantages accruing to the city of Brooklyn from the Atlantic Basin were about this time beginning to be duplicated by similar enterprises on Gowanus Bay. Here it was then contemplated to construct two basins, the Erie, covering sixty acres, just south and around the corner from Red Hook, and the Brooklyn, immediately adjoining it to the east. In the course of a few years leading np to and since the war, wharves and dry docks were constructed on a larger scale than in the older Atlantic Basin, although we still miss here the substantial granite and brick warehouses and elevators of the other enterprise. During the years before the Civil War, industry kept on placing its trophies upon the extended territory of Brooklyn. Large concerns in New York found it profitable to buy large blocks and put up their factories here, whose hundreds and thousands of hands swelled the population materially. Hat factories, agricultur- al works, printing presses, steel works, sugar refineries, breweries, chemical works, sprang up galore, in Williamsburgh, old Bushwick,
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Greenpoint, as well as at the Wallabout and other sections of the city. The number of the newspapers was increased by the Standard, in 1859, and the Union, in 1863, later forming the Standard-Union, as now we know it. Churches and schools kept on at an encouraging ratio. There were 113 churches in 1855, and 27 public schools, with over thirty thousand children in attendance. The school boards of the two cities and of Bushwick town were organized into one Board of Education. The Long Island College Hospital was organized, and its first course of lectures given during the winter of 1859-60, and in 1855 the Brooklyn City Hospital began its work. For the social life of the people provision was made in various ways outside of the
PELHAM PARK CLUB HOUSE.
churches. In December, 1857, the Mercantile Library Association was formed. Long without any adequate accommodations for the higher amusement of the people, a supreme effort was made in 1858, resulting in the admirable Academy of Music, which was opened to the public in January, 1861, although not quite completed then. In 1856 the people of the city were much alarmed by an outbreak of yellow fever along the Bay Shore Road in New Utrecht, owing to in- fected ships from Porto Rico and Havana anchoring in the Narrows, near the Quarantine station, then on Staten Island. In 1860, there was another outbreak of the fever due to the same cause (spread by lightermen who had been employed on some infected ships within the city limits), from Columbia Street to the river along both sides of
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Congress. Sanitary arrangements were yet primitive, but the disease did not become epidemic to a very alarming degree.
Thus Brooklyn was slowly coming to its own in the comparatively unprogressive days before the war. It was even now something more than New York's bedroom, for large manufacturing and industrial interests had found their home on this side of the water. Neverthe- less, some of the greatest of these were supported by the capital and managed by the brains of merchants and financiers who were also making the Metropolis the Queen of American Commerce and Fi- nance. Dr. Stiles, proud of his own city, and doing full justice to its intrinsic greatness and excellencies, puts the case honestly and wise- ly when he remarks, commenting on this earlier consolidation: " Although Brooklyn had thus, at a single bound, jumped from the seventh to the third position among the cities of the American Union, it could by no means claim the same relative position in point of wealthı, business, or commercial importance, being outranked in these respects by several cities of less population. Nor had it risen to its eminence by virtue of its own inherent vigor and enterprise. Candor certainly compels the acknowledgment that it was chiefly attributa- ble to the overflowing prosperity and greatness of its giant neighbor, New York." Greater things were reserved for it after the cloud of war had been lifted from the country.
CHAPTER IX.
BROOKLYN DURING THE CIVIL WAR.
N January, 1861, the picturesque individual who occupied the chair of Mayor of New York, addressed, as we have noted before, an interesting memorial to his Common Council in which he proposed to follow the example of those Southern States which were then week by week falling away from the Union. But he did not contemplate that the metropolis should stand alone. Geography, in his mind, was already enriched with a new term, Tri-Insula,-the Threefold Island. The metropoli- tan secession was to include Manhattan, Staten and Long Islands. Brooklyn, then, was to accompany her big neighbor and sister in this isolation from the Federal body, which would thus have happened to be an insulation at the same time, in more senses than one, literally and figuratively both. We can not discover what warrant the un- speakable Fernando Wood had in taking it for granted that Brook- lyn would have been so disloyal. The Mayor then in office, Samuel S. Powell, was not the man to walk in the footsteps of his colleague across the East River, and the Mayor soon to be elected, Martin Kalbfleisch, was not to be counted on to support secession. But, as was duly noticed before, the guns that rained destruction upon Fort Sumter changed even Mayor Wood's attitude. In the hour of violent assault, he stood with others upon the firm basis of a self- sacrificing loyalty.
The call for troops to defend the Union did not leave Brooklyn unmoved. It was three days after the surrender of Fort Sumter that the President's call for seventy-five thousand men was published in the city. War then had come, and, by a spontaneous impulse, such as seized the citizens of the Union only a few weeks ago as we are writing, every one who possessed a flag, or could afford to buy one, gave public evidence of his love of country by displaying the banner that rallied around it every sentiment of patriotism and devotion. Soon the lack of public display was taken to indicate secret disaffection. It was not quite certain what stand would be taken in the crisis of war by some of the newspapers of the city, and, when these failed to come out with the Stars and Stripes on the second day after the President's proclamation, crowds of ardent citizens marched from one office to the other, until from each hung out the
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desired emblem of loyalty. But more substantial evidences of en- thusiasm were not wanting. There were at that time only four regi- ments of the National Guard of the State of New York in the city; and these were very deficient in numbers. There was the Thirteenth, with only about two hundred and fifty men; the Fourteenth, with about one hundred less; the Seventieth, with three hundred and fifty; and the Twenty-eighth with four hundred more or less. These de- pleted numbers were soon more than made up, and the increased or full quotas were not left without the means for equipment. Collec- tions were taken up in the churches on the very next Sunday, and al- though for this reason the matter was, as it were, suddenly thrust upon the congregations, yet one thousand dollars were raised in Ply- mouth Church, and a little over that in the Pierrepont Street Baptist Church. Mr. A. A. Low gave $300 for the Thirteenth. And while the younger men of the city were thus placing their lives at the dis- posal of the country, others were doing what they could to alleviate the casualties that must necessarily occur, or to lighten the sacri- fice of interests that was involved in leaving home and business. The Common Council voted a sum of $75,000 to be devoted to the needs of the families of the volunteers, if unable to provide for them sufficiently otherwise. Just as we have seen again in recent days, as the cloud of Civil War gathered over the country there were found business houses that could forget profits in the hour of na- tional need. The Messrs. Whitehouse & Pierce, of 18S Fulton Street, not only supplied those of their employees who wished to go to the front with the necessary equipments, but they promised to keep their places open for them till their return, and to continue paying their salaries to their families. The Union Ferry Company, not to be outdone in generosity and patriotism, made exactly the same prom- ises to their employees, although they did not furnish equipments.
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