Brooklyn: The Once and Future City

An unprecedented history of Brooklyn told through its places buildings and the people who made them from the early seventeenth century to todayAmerica'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 worldÕs 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 BrooklynÕs history as homeland of the Leni Lenape and its transformation by Dutch colonists into a dense slaveholding region. We learn about English ŽmigrŽ 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 BrooklynÕs emergence as a playland of racetracks and amusement parks celebrated around the world.Campanella also describes BrooklynÕs outsized failures from Samuel FriedeÕs bid to erect the worldÕs tallest building to the long struggle to make Jamaica Bay the worldÕs 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.

Hardcover: 552 pages

Publisher: Princeton University Press (September 10 2019)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0691165386

ISBN-13: 978-0691165387

Product Dimensions: 7 x 2 x 10.2 inches

Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds