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.
A quiet street on Brooklyn Heights
And yet, like each of these three, it is something more than a mere housing place for folk who work within congested Manhattan. It, too, is a manufacturing center of no small importance. Despite the transportation obstacles of being divided by one or two rivers from most of the trunk-line railroads that terminate at the port of New York, hundreds of factory chimneys, large and small, proclaim its industrial importance. Its output of manufactures reaches high into the millions each year. And the pay-roll of its factory operatives is annually an impressive figure.
The fact remains, however, that it is a community of communities, each pulling very largely for itself. A smart western town of twenty-five thousand population can center more energy and secure for itself precisely what it wishes more rapidly and more precisely than can this great borough of nearly two million population. Brooklyn has not yet learned the lesson of concentrated effort.
Now consider these communities of old Kings county once again. We have touched upon their location and their growth; let us see the manner of folk who made them grow. About the second decade of the last century a virtual hegira of New England folk began to move toward New York City. The New England states were the first portion of the land to show anything like congestion, the wonderful city at the mouth of the Hudson was beginning to come into its own—opportunity loomed large in the eyes of the shrewd New Englanders. They began picking up and moving toward New York. And they are still coming, although, of course, in no such volume as in the first half of the nineteenth century.
These New England folk found New York already aping metropolitanism—with its unshaded streets and its tightly built rows of houses. Over on Long island across busy Fulton ferry it was different. There must have been something in the early Brooklyn, with its gentle shade-trees down the streets and its genial air of quiet comfort that made the New Englanders think of the pretty Massachusetts and Connecticut towns that they had left. For into Brooklyn they came—a steady stream which did not lessen in volume until the days of the Civil War. They gave the place a blood infusion that it needed. They crowded the old Dutch families to one side and laid the social foundations of the Brooklyn of today.
It was New England who founded the excellent private schools and small colleges of Brooklyn, who early gave to her a public-school system of wide reputation. It was New England who sprinkled the Congregational churches over the older Brooklyn, who gave to their pulpits a Talmage and a Storrs, who brought Henry Ward Beecher out from the wilds of the Mid-west and made him the most famous preacher that America has ever known. It was New England who for forty years made Brooklyn Heights—with its exquisite situation on a plateau overlooking the upper harbor of New York—the finest residential locality in the land. It was New England for almost all that time who filled the great churches of the Heights to their capacity Sabbath morning after Sabbath morning—New England who stood for high thought, decent living and real progress in Brooklyn. It was New England that made Brooklyn eat her pork and beans religiously each Sabbath eve.
The great churches and the fine houses still stand on Brooklyn Heights, but alas, there are few struggles at the church-doors any more on Sabbath morning. The old houses, the fine, gentle old houses—many of them—have said good-by to their masters, their gayeties and their glories. Some of them have been pulled down to make room for gingerbread apartment structures and some of those that have remained have suffered degradation as lodging- and as boarding-houses. It has been hard to hold the younger generation of fashionable Brooklyn in Brooklyn. Manhattan is too near, too alluring with all of its cosmopolitan airs, and these days there is another steady hegira across the East river—the first families of Brooklyn seeking residence among the smart streets of upper Manhattan.
There is another reason for this. We have told how Brooklyn sold her birthright when she threw off her political individuality and made herself a borough of an enlarged New York. Perhaps it would be more true to say that she mortgaged that birthright the very hour when the Brooklyn bridge, then new, took up the fullness of its mighty work. In the weaving of that bridge is wrapped one of the little-known tragedies of Brooklyn—the immensely human story of Roebling, its designer and its builder, who suffered fatal injuries upon it and who died a lingering death before it was completed. Roebling's apartments were upon a high crest of Brooklyn Heights and the windows of his sick-room looked down upon the workmen who were weaving the steel web of the bridge. In the last hours of his life he could see the creation of his mind, the structure that was about to be known as one of the eight modern wonders of the world, being made ready for its task of the long years.