Читать книгу The Personality of American Cities - Edward Hungerford - Страница 16

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Physically only the East river separates Brooklyn from Manhattan island. The island of Manhattan was and still is to many folk the city of New York. Across that narrow wale of the East river—one of the busiest water-highways in all the world—men have thrust several great bridges and tunnels. Politically Brooklyn and Manhattan are one. They are the most important boroughs of that which has for the past fifteen years been known as Greater New York.

But in almost every other way Manhattan and Brooklyn are nearly a thousand miles apart. In social customs, in many of the details of living they are vastly different, and this despite the fact that the greater part of the male population of Brooklyn daily travels to Manhattan island to work in its offices and shops and you can all but toss a stone from one community into the other. The very fact that Brooklyn is a dwelling place for New York—professional funny-men long ago called it a "bed-chamber"—has done much, as we shall see, toward building up the peculiar characteristics of the town that stands just across the East river from the tip of the busiest little island in the world.

Consider for an instant the situation of Brooklyn. It fills almost the entire west end of Long island—a slightly rolling tract of land between a narrow and unspeakably filthy stream on the north known as Newtown creek and the great cool ocean on the south. This entire tract has for many years been known as Kings county—its name a slight proof of its antiquity. Many years ago there were various villages in the old county—among them Greenpoint, Bushwick, Williamsburgh, Canarsie, Flatbush, Gravesend and Brooklyn. They were Dutch towns, and you can still see some evidences of this in their old houses, although these are disappearing quite rapidly nowadays. Brooklyn grew the most rapidly—from almost the very day of the establishment of the republic. Robert Fulton developed his steam-ferry and the East river ceased to be the bugaboo it had always been to sailing vessels. Fulton ferry was popular from the first. With the use of steam its importance waxed and soon it was overcrowded. Another ferry came, another and another—many, many others. They were all crowded, for Brooklyn was growing, a close rim of houses and churches and shops all the way along the bank of the East river from the Navy Yard at the sharp crook of the river that the Dutch called the Wallabout, south to the marshy Gowanus bay. Upon the river shore, north of the Wallabout, was Williamsburgh, which was also growing and which had been incorporated into a city. But when the horse-cars came and men were no longer forced to walk to and from the ferries or to ride in miserable omnibuses, Brooklyn and Williamsburgh became physically one. Williamsburgh then gave up its charter and its identity and became lost in the growth of a greater Brooklyn. That was repeated slowly but surely throughout all Kings county. Within comparatively recent years there came the elevated railroad—at almost the same time the great miracle of the Brooklyn bridge—and all the previous growth of the town was as nothing. For two decades it grew as rapidly as ever grew a "boom-town" in the West. The coming of electric city transportation, the multiplying of bridges, the boring of the first East river tunnel, all helped in this great growth. But the fairy web of steel that John A. Roebling thrust across the busiest part of the East river marked the transformation of Brooklyn—a transformation that did not end when Brooklyn sold her political birthright and became part and parcel of New York. That transformation is still in progress.

We have slipped into history because we have wanted you to understand why Brooklyn today is just what she is. The submerging of these little Dutch villages with their individual customs and traditions has done its part in the making of the customs and traditions of the Brooklyn of today. For Brooklyn today remains a congregation of separate communities. You may slip from one to the other without realizing that you have done more than pass down a compactly built block of houses or crossed a crowded street.

And so it has come to pass that Brooklyn has no main street—in the sense that about every other town in the United States, big or little, has a main street. If you wish to call Fulton street, running from the historic Fulton ferry right through the heart of the original city and far out into the open country a main street, you will be forced to admit that it is the ugliest main street of any town in the land: narrow, inconsequential, robbed of its light and air by a low-hanging elevated railroad almost its entire length. And yet right on Fulton street you will find two department-stores unusually complete and unusually well operated. New Yorkers come to them frequently to shop. The two stores seem lost in the dreariness of Fulton street—a very contradiction to that highway.

Yet Brooklyn is a community of contradictions. Here we have called Fulton street a possible main street of Brooklyn, and yet there is a street in the town, for the most part miles removed from it, that is quite as brisk by day and the only street in the borough which has any real activity at night. Like that great main-stem of Manhattan it is called Broadway, and it is a wider and more pretentious street than Fulton, although in its turn also encumbered with an elevated railroad. But up and down Broadway there courses a constant traffic; on foot, in automobiles, in trolley-cars. Broadway boasts its own department-stores, some of them sizable, many hundreds of small shops, cheap theaters—and some better—by the score. It is an entertaining thoroughfare and yet we will venture to say that not one in ten thousand of the many transients who come to New York at regular intervals and who know the Great White Way as well as four corners up at home, have ever stepped foot within it. We will go further. Of the two million humans who go to make the population of Brooklyn; a large part, probably half, certainly a third, have never seen its own Broadway.

This speaks volumes for the provincialism of the great community across the East river from Manhattan. Remember all this while that it is a community of communities, self-centered and rather more intent upon the problem of getting back and forth between its homes and Manhattan than on any other one thing in the world. As a rule, people live in Brooklyn because it is less expensive than residence upon the island of Manhattan, more accessible and far more comfortable than the Bronx or the larger cities of New Jersey that range themselves close to the shore of the Hudson river. It is in reality a larger and a better Jersey City or a Hoboken or a Long Island City.