The coming of that first bridge began the transformation of Brooklyn; although for a long time Brooklyn did not realize it. The New England element within her population did not even realize it when she gave up her political identity as a city. Then something else happened. Two miles to the north of the first bridge another was built—this with its one arm touching the East Side of Manhattan—the most crowded residence district in the new world—while its other hand reached that portion of Brooklyn, formerly known as Williamsburgh. We have already spoken of Williamsburgh—in its day a city of some promise but for sixty years now part of Brooklyn. In the greater part of these sixty years it hung tenaciously to its personality. Back of it was a great area of regular streets and small houses known as the Eastern District. The folk who lived there called themselves Brooklyn folk. Williamsburgh was different. Its folk were glad to give themselves the name of the old town, although the pattern of its streets ran closely into the pattern of the streets of the community which had engulfed it. They held themselves a bit by themselves. They had their own shops, their own theater, their own clubs, their own churches, their own schools. They also had the opportunity of seeing the social and the business changes that the development of the first bridge had wrought in old Brooklyn; how Fulton street from the old City Hall down to the ferry-house had lost its gayety and was entering upon decadence.
The Williamsburgh bridge repeated the story of the Brooklyn bridge—only in sharper measure. It was like a tube lancing the overcrowded mass of the East Side of Manhattan. It had hardly been completed before it had its own hegira. The Jews of the crowded tenements of Rivington and Allen and Essex and all the other congested narrow streets east of the Bowery began moving over the new bridge and out to a distant section of Brooklyn, known as Brownsville. They had preëmpted Brownsville for their own. For a time that was all right. Then the wiser men of that wise old race began asking themselves "why go to Brownsville, eight or nine miles distant, when at the other end of the bridge is a fair land for settlement?"
So began changed conditions for Williamsburgh. For a little while it sought to oppose the change, but an ox might as well pull against the mighty power of a locomotive, as a community try to defy the working of economic law. For a decade now Williamsburgh has been "moving out," her houses, her churches, many of her pet institutions—going the most part farther out upon Long island and there rebuilding under many protective restrictions. The old Williamsburgh is nearly gone. Strange tongues and strange creeds are heard within her churches. And some of them have been pulled down, along with whole blocks of the gentle red-brick houses, to give way to cheap apartments, wrought wondrously and fearfully and echoing with the babbling of unfamiliar words. Nor has the transformation stopped at Williamsburgh. The invasion has crept, is still creeping into the Eastern District just beyond, transforming quiet house-lined streets into noisy ways lined with crowded apartments.
It is only within a comparatively little time that the older Brooklyn has realized the change that is coming upon her. She has known for years of the presence of many thousands of Irish and German within her boundaries. They have been useful citizens in her development and have done much for her in both a generous and an intelligent fashion. She holds today great colonies of Norse and of the Swedish—down close to the waterfront in the neighborhood of the Narrows, and her Italian citizens, taken by themselves, would make the greatest Italian city in the world. She has the largest single colony of Syrians in the New World and more than half a million Jews. According to reliable estimates, three-quarters of her adult population today are foreign-born.
Thus can we record the transformation of a community. It is a transformation which has created many problems, far too many to be recounted here. We have only room to show the nature of the change to a town where grandfathers used to be all in all and which has sleepily awakened to find itself cosmopolitan, its institutions changing, its future uncertain. There have not been a dozen important Protestant churches builded in Brooklyn within the past twelve years—and some of these merely new edifices for old congregations which have been forced to pick up and move. And there have been old churches of old faiths that finally have had to give up and close their doors for the final time. Even the old custom of singing Christmas songs in the public schools has been forbidden. The New England strain of Americanism in Brooklyn is dying.
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Brooklyn today has no theater of wide reputation, although in Greenwood she has what is deservedly the most famous cemetery in America. Hold on, Brooklyn may have no theater, but she has a town-hall and a town-hall that is worthy of mention here. They do not call it the town-hall or the opera-house, but it is known as the Academy of Music and it is an institution well worth the while of any town. And the Brooklyn Academy of Music is the rallying or focal point for so much that stands for good within the community that we must see how it has come into being.
It seems that when Brooklyn men and women of today were Brooklyn boys and girls there stood down on Montague street in the oldest part of the town an elder Academy of Music and to it they were taken on certain great occasions to hear a splendid lecture with magic-lantern pictures, the Swiss Bell Ringers, or perhaps even real drama or real opera, although play-acting was frowned upon in the early days of that barn-like structure. Eventually, its directors capitulated entirely. Times were changing. So it was that Brooklyn saw the great actors and the great singers of yesterday upon the stage of its old Academy; from that stage it heard its own preachers, heard such orators as Edward Everett and John B. Gough; crowded into the spacious auditorium at the Commencement exercises and the amateur dramatics of its boys and girls. The old Academy was a part of the social fabric of old Brooklyn.
There comes an end to all temporal things and a winter's morning a full decade ago saw the historic opera house go up in a truly theatrical puff of smoke and flame. And it was said that day that Brooklyn had lost an institution by which it was as well known as the Navy Yard or Plymouth church—where Beecher had once thundered. Before the ruins in Montague street were cool there were demands that the Academy be rebuilt. Brooklynites even then were beginning to feel that the old Brooklyn was beginning to pass. Beecher was dead; the last of Talmage's Tabernacles was burned and was not to be rebuilt. The idea of becoming a second Harlem was appalling. The rebuilding of the Academy was a popular measure, a test as to Brooklyn's ability to preserve at least a vestige of civic unity unto herself.
It was a hard test and it almost failed. There was a time when it seemed as if Brooklyn must give up and become the Cinderella of all the boroughs of the new New York. But it seems that there were other institutions in Brooklyn and not the least of these was, and still is, the Institute of Arts and Sciences. This is a sort of civic Chautauqua. Toward it several thousand men and women each pay five dollars a year for the opportunity to gain culture and entertainment at the same time. They have lectures, museums, picture-shows, recitals and the like and this institute has so fat a purse that the impresario or prima donna is yet to be found who is strong enough to withstand its pleadings.