Brooklyn: The Once and Future City

(Hardback)

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Description

An unprecedented history of Brooklyn, told through its places, buildings, and the people who made them, from the early seventeenth century to today America's most storied urban underdog, Brooklyn has become an internationally recognized brand in recent decades-celebrated and scorned as one of the hippest destinations in the world. In Brooklyn: The Once and Future City, Thomas J. Campanella unearths long-lost threads of the urban past, telling the rich history of the rise, fall, and reinvention of one of the world's most resurgent cities. Spanning centuries and neighborhoods, Brooklyn-born Campanella recounts the creation of places familiar and long forgotten, both built and never realized, bringing to life the individuals whose dreams, visions, rackets, and schemes forged the city we know today. He takes us through Brooklyn's history as homeland of the Leni Lenape and its transformation by Dutch colonists into a dense slaveholding region. We learn about English emigre Deborah Moody, whose town of Gravesend was the first founded by a woman in America. We see how wanderlusting Yale dropout Frederick Law Olmsted used Prospect Park to anchor an open space system that was to reach back to Manhattan. And we witness Brooklyn's emergence as a playland of racetracks and amusement parks celebrated around the world. Campanella also describes Brooklyn's outsized failures, from Samuel Friede's bid to erect the world's tallest building to the long struggle to make Jamaica Bay the world's largest deepwater seaport, and the star-crossed urban renewal, public housing, and highway projects that battered the borough in the postwar era. Campanella reveals how this immigrant Promised Land drew millions, fell victim to its own social anxieties, and yet proved resilient enough to reawaken as a multicultural powerhouse and global symbol of urban vitality.

Reviews

"Winner of the PROSE Award in Architecture and Urban Planning, Association of American Publishers"
"Finalist with Special Recognition for the Brendan Gill Prize, Municipal Art Society of New York"
"Mr. Campanella . . . aims to give an account of the Brooklyn unknown, overlooked and unheraldedthe quotidian city taken for granted or long ago blotted out by time and tide. He succeeds admirably . . . Brooklyn: The Once and Future City is a nuanced portrait of a diverse group of communities. Genteel farmland, then a byword for urban blight, and now the apotheosis of hipsterdom and gentrificationBrooklyn has seen it all. Mr. Campanella, a native Brooklynite himself, brings both love and scholarship to his writing, revealing the true spirt of this fractured land." * The Economist *
"Say the name Brooklyn these days, and many people think of Jay-Z or Barclays Center or, most often, skyrocketing real estate prices fueled by gentrification. But for 500 years now, Brooklyn has charted a rich history unique in the American experience. In Brooklyn: The Once and Future City, Thomas J. Campanella . . . has produced a meticulously researched and information-filled chronicle of a place that, in its own way, defines New York City."---Paul Alexander, Washington Post
"An ambitious and accomplished book . . . . For lovers of history and of the city, this book is a dream. It feels like a book that Campanella was born to write."---Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions
"Campanellas book does a masterful job of showing how individual egos or ill-planned decisions of long ago set the stage for the city we know today."---Larry Getlen, New York Post
"A lively biography of New York's second borough. . . . Teeming with information, this is a must-read for fans of urban history." * Kirkus Reviews *
"A fascinating and well-written exploration."---Norman Oder, Curbed
"Brooklyns history . . . is as specific and varied as its inhabitants. A single block can contain centuries worth of information, memories and relics left by heroes and villains alike. The prospect of writing a history of such a multilayered city must have been daunting even for as qualified a fourth-generation Brooklynite as Thomas J. Campanella. . . . Thankfully, Campanella takes a practical approach: Instead of attempting a chronology that traces themes or communities through the decades and centuries, he treats each chapter as a self-contained deep dive into a particular part of the borough, describing how that place came to be. . . . Illuminating."---Emily Gould, New York Times Book Review
"Campanella . . . limns Brooklyns multiple identities and the tensions over what the borough was, and to whom . . . a fascinating chronicle."---Katrina Gulliver, New Criterion
"Campanella's magisterial history . . . [is] always approachable and takes readers to the heart and soul of the Kings County."---Liz Thomson, Arts Desk
"Every writer knows that there's inherent drama in an underdog story. Brooklyn is the ultimate urban underdog. Brooklyn native Campanella celebrates the onetime city, now-borough's astonishingly rich history, characterized by diversity, immigration, industrialization, decline, and now rebirth . . . vibrant and relevant."---Josh Stephens & James Brasuell, Planetizen
"Campanella is always enlightening and remains critical throughout, with class and racial politics never far from the surface."---Darran Anderson, History Today
"[Thomas Campanellas Brooklyn is] not only the best history of Brooklyn, its one of the most entertaining works published this year, suffuse with fantastic tales of the achievements, iniquities, and dreams of its famous neighbor."---Anthony Paletta, American Conservative

Author Bio

Thomas J. Campanella is associate professor of urban studies and city planning at Cornell University and historian-in-residence of the New York City Parks Department. His books include Republic of Shade and The Concrete Dragon, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. He divides his time between Ithaca and the Marine Park neighborhood of Brooklyn where he grew up. Twitter @builtbrooklyn