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I APPROACHED PROFESSOR CAMPANELLA’S RICHLY DETAILED and illustrated history
of Brooklyn with the perspective of a general reader who, while having
merely the briefest personal experience of the borough thought he had more
then a passing familiarity with it from the literature and films it has inspired.
Consistent with his subjects of professional studies in urban planning
and development, the author’s prime focus is on the evolvement of New
York’s most densely populated borough: the formation of the suburbs, roads
and parks, the rise and fall of buildings, the binding and eventual destruction
of communities.

His concentration on the minutiae of details of the zoning and planning
of developmental projects allows little space for more fully drawn portraits
of many of the historical protagonists whose achievements, ambitions, and
failures impact the lives of the ever-expanding population, whose hope might
have been, no matter their national or ethnic backgrounds, for no more than
security and opportunity.

That hope finds expression in the brief glimpse into the history of Campanella’s
own family that he allows in the acknowledgments prefacing the
book. In two long paragraphs, he tells of his grandfather taking his family, in
1902, across the East River from Manhattan’s East Side to escape a cholera
outbreak, opening a barbershop in Coney Island and establishing roots from which his children and extended family would, over the generations, become
part of the greater Brooklyn story.

The barest details are given of the lives and activities of the author’s great-uncles,
aunts, mother, and father, set against the background of ever
changing environmental and social conditions would have provided nourishment
enough for such novelists as Dos Passos or the now-forgotten Albert
Halper.

Here, too, can be perceived small indications of influences that allow for
the very occasional revealing of Professor Campanella’s disapproval and
judgment of the many actions and schemes that contributed to the disappointment
at a society’s loss of potential and vitality as represented in such a place
as his Brooklyn.

Restrained as he seems by the discipline of his scholarship in city planning,
architecture and urban studies, it is not until the epilogue that he permits
himself the indulgence of mourning the loss of neighborhoods; their
‘essence, their identity, their soul,’ and the encroachment of ‘manufactured
authenticity’. Brooklyn, he laments, “has become ground zero of gentrification
in New York.”

While not as passionately expressed as Pete Hamill in Downtown: My
Manhattan, raging at the destruction of Penn Station, he does single out one
Fred C. Trump’s 1966 destruction of Coney Island’s Pavilion of Fun, ‘the last
great example of Victorian Architecture in the United States’, as “an act of
vandalism.”

The history of Brooklyn, as portrayed, allows limited time for nostalgia.
Given the presentation of schemers, opportunists, the selfishly ambitious
and piratically greedy entrepreneurs and a litany of “clear it . . . build it . . .
tear it down . . . build it again,” there should be little surprise at the vulnerability
of beauty and prospects of permanence.

The second-largest borough of New York City, the “western lump of that
great glacial pile known as Long Island, now named Brooklyn, had been
home to branches of the Leni Lenape Nation for a thousand years before
the arrival of the Dutch in the Seventeenth Century.”

By the mid-1860s, the remaining Lenape, who had survived two hundred
years of European occupation and the Dutch resistance against the British,
followed by the 1776 ‘patriots’ revolutionary war would be, by U.S. government
edict, removed to the so-called Indian Territories of Oklahoma.
In his first two chapters, Campanella unearths in forensic detail a history forged by displacement, war, and slavery that would contribute to the
identification of Brooklyn as “The Borough of Cemeteries,” host to more
then half of the burial places in the combined five boroughs of New York
city.

One estimate of the achievement and value of history such as he presents
can be arrived at by the measures to which the general reader will be inspired
to seek further information related to particular incidents and
characters which the author has not pursued beyond the boundaries of his
intent.

If those early chapters relate what is, after all, a sadly familiar narrative of
early colonization and the varieties of exploitation imposed upon the land
and its occupants, still, it is in the descriptions of several exceptional individuals
and their achievements that the book is at its most engaging.

We meet Lady Deborah Moody who, in seeking liberation from the religious
repression of the Puritans in the 1640s founded the Anabaptists community
of Gravesend, the first such settlement known to be achieved by a
woman.

An equally formidable woman is encountered in chapter six, appropriately
titled “Isle of Offal and Bones.”

Situated at the South East of Brooklyn, Barren Island could be even more
definitively named Hell Island; the setting, Campanella writes “of dark tales
that make children hug tight their dogs and elders bring in the cat.”

Once the fishing and hunting grounds of the Lenape, the island was, from
1855, the site of industrial fish processing and what would become the largest
waste processing plant in the world, receiving all the “night soil” and garbage
of Manhattan and Brooklyn.

By the century’s end, there were 130,000 workhorses in Manhattan. After
lives of labor in service to the city’s economy and progress, most would
sicken and die in stables and on the streets to be collected and loaded onto
scows and shipped to Barren Island.

In 1889 alone it was recorded that 7,000 horses, near to 24,000 dogs and
cats, thousands of cows, sheep, pigs, goats, and fowl were processed and rendered
to fertilizer and multiple other uses and profitable products.

The workforce was such that a caste system evolved among the mix of
African-Americans, immigrant Swedes, English, Irish, and Prussians, who
mostly lived in company-owned boarding houses.

Such was the dehumanizing effects of the environment that those who on the rare occasion would cross to Manhattan were, in 1878, with the support
of the courts, effectively banned from public transport on the grounds
that the system did not allow for “the transportation of smells.”

While true to the dispassionate tone that he employs throughout, Thomas
Campanella frequently uses the subtle ironic comment or reference to contemporary
reportage that communicates a prime interest in the human cost
of the decisions and actions of the disparate and ever competing ambitious
and powerful.

His portrayal of the feral hell-hole that “bred lawlessness and anarchy,”
causing, in 1888, legal action to be instigated in Brooklyn against the rendering
plants for inflicting grievous harm to “the health and welfare of the
public,” only to be frustrated by the corruption of the courts and politicians,
would have provided material capable of shocking even Upton Sinclair.

Yet, Campanella tells us, “life blossomed with weed-like vigor amidst the
sand and garbage.” By 1910, the island, now home to 1500 people living in
rudimentary dwellings and still lacking public services, police presence, and
paved roads did have two churches, a school, baths, a butcher, a baker, and
a grocery store.

Conditions on the island had attracted attention from social reformists
and agencies such as the North American Civic League for Immigrants. Immensely
beneficial and progressive as the resulting improvements were, they
were partly motivated by a concern that continuing neglect of basic human
requirements would, in the words of an investigator for the Department of
Labour, “provide the groundwork for rebellion and sedition.”

Such concerns were validated in 1913 when more than 500 workers, having
been refused a raise in pay, took strike action, which closed one company
plant for two weeks until strikebreakers were used, resulting in violence
and one shooting. 1918 saw the arrival of Jane Shaw, who Campanella allows
himself to describe as the “redeemer who brought more joy to the long scorned
isle than a diamond ring pulled from the trash.”

“Lady” Jane Shaw, Guardian Angel of Barren Island, so to be named by
the press at the time, was an experienced teacher sent by the public school
system. Her positive presence stimulated a metamorphosis, and not only in
the classroom. She went into homes to give cooking classes and encourage
both the growing of vegetables and the raising of poultry. With a piano she
herself provided, she conducted music lessons and arranged communal
dances.

Skilled at lobbying as she must have been, she had the Red Cross send
milk daily by police boat to be distributed by her pupils to the sick. After
training with a Navy physician, she assumed the role of de facto doctor to the
community where the disease was decreasing.

Within ten years, her work had contributed beyond measure to the transforming
of the Isle into what she, in a deserved self-indulgent display of lobbyist
hyperbole described as ‘the richest spot on Earth.’

The emerging nascent society, nourished so richly by its “counselor, dictator,
friend and champion,” would in 1920 see the beginning of what would
eventually, be its destruction.

In that year, the New York Sanitary Utilization Company ceased operations
on the island, with the loss of jobs resulting in a declining population.
The narrow creeks and salt marshes separating the island from
Brooklyn was filled in and Flatbush Avenue was extended, thus gathering
what Campanella describes as “the Hades of horsedom” to the greater
Brooklyn.

The former island became the site of New York City’s first municipal airport
in 1931, by which time little evidence of its dark history survived.

Robert Moses, the contentious parks commissioner for New York, ordered
the remaining 400 Barren Island residents to be evicted from their
rented homes in March 1936. Given fourteen days to leave, many of the families
had lived there forty years and all were known to Jane Shaw.

Lady Jane’s intervention persuaded the city officials to grant a reprieve
enabling her last class to graduate on the 30th of June. The school was closed
down the next morning.

Jane Shaw died in 1939, by which time no trace of the community she had
transformed remained. The locations of her school and village, together with
the toxic rendering plants, are now absorbed into a National Recreation Area
and, by ironic symbiosis, a wildlife sanctuary.

Allowing that, in consideration of the scope of Professor Campanella’s
history, I have given disproportionate attention to Barren Island and Jane
Shaw, I yet believe justification can be claimed for an attempt to find a core
of thematic unity in what is fundamentally an episodic narrative.

The account of Barren Island contains, in concentrated form, most of the
recurring threads that bind the stories of the designing of roadways and the
erection and destruction of amusement parks, racetracks, and hotels, the unrealized
dreams of great buildings to doomed public housing.

Finally, in a world that allows too many Robert Moses’ and Fred Trumps
to attain power and too few Jane Shaws, Thomas Campanella’s message of
the failures and destructive results of the misguided and, at times, venal implementation
of short-sighted and profit-motivated urban renewal projects
needs to be heeded in many more places than his still loved Brooklyn.

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