South Brooklyn

Old South Brooklyn Entrepreneur is far more than a financial and commercial biography of Anson Blake 1789-1868. It provides many details of local history, not only of South Brooklyn (today’s Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Red Hook, Boerum Hill and Gowanus) before the Civil War, but of New York City’s economic history, including Anson Blake’s speculation in Wall Street area lands and buildings. Blake also speculated in Upstate New York’s Black River Canal region of Oneida, Hamilton and Herkimer counties where Anson Blake wanted a railroad to be built through his lots. Many interesting illustrations and photographs depict facets of Manhattan and Brooklyn history — including Blake’s early land and building speculation enterprises in South Brooklyn adjacent to the terminus of the original Long Island Railroad, and the Atlantic Street and Hamilton Avenue ferries. This book describes New York’s and Brooklyn’s history during the second quarter of America’s 19th century.

Southern cooking meets the Brooklyn foodie scene, keeping charm (and grits) intact Georgia native Nicole Taylor spent her early twenties trying to distance herself from her southern cooking roots--a move "up" to Brooklyn gave her a fresh appreciation for the bread and biscuits, Classic Fried Chicken, Lemon Coconut Stack Cake, and other flavors of her childhood. The Up South Cookbook is a bridge to the past and a door to the future. The recipes in this deeply personal cookbook offer classic Southern favorites informed and updated by newly-discovered ingredients and different cultures. Here she gives us pimento cheese elevated with a dollop of creme fraiche, grits flavored with New York State Cheddar and blue cheese, and deviled eggs made with smoked trout from her favorite Jewish deli. Other favorites include Collard Greens Pesto and Pasta, Roasted Duck with Cheerwine Cherry Sauce, and Benne and Banana Sandwich Cookies. The recipes speak to a place "where a story is ready to be told and there is always sweet tea chilling." This promises to be a new Southern classic.

Settled in the 1600s, Brooklyn Heights is one of New York's most historic neighborhoods. Its strategic location overlooking the harbor proved instrumental during the Revolutionary War's Battle of Brooklyn. In the 1830s, steam ferries transformed it into America's first suburb, where abolitionism flourished and one of the largest Civil War Sanitary Fairs was held. Throughout the nineteenth century, wealthy philanthropists and entrepreneurs built high-styled Gothic Revival and Italianate homes and founded many landmark Brooklyn institutions. Though the neighborhood declined with the new century, it became a target of Robert Moses's urban renewal projects in the 1930s. Its designation as the city's first historic district saved Brooklyn Heights, and it has since blossomed into one of the city's most desirable neighborhoods.

In The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn, Stuart M. Blumin and Glenn C. Altschuler tell the story of nineteenth-century Brooklyn's domination by upper- and middle-class Protestants with roots in Puritan New England. This lively history describes the unraveling of the control they wielded as more ethnically diverse groups moved into the "City of Churches" during the twentieth century. Before it became a prime American example of urban ethnic diversity, Brooklyn was a lovely and salubrious "town across the river" from Manhattan, celebrated for its churches and upright suburban living. But challenges to this way of life issued from the sheer growth of the city, from new secular institutions—department stores, theaters, professional baseball—and from the licit and illicit attractions of Coney Island, all of which were at odds with post-Puritan piety and behavior. Despite these developments, the Yankee-Protestant hegemony largely held until the massive influx of Southern and Eastern European immigrants in the twentieth century. As The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn demonstrates, in their churches, synagogues, and other communal institutions, and on their neighborhood streets, the new Brooklynites established the ethnic mosaic that laid the groundwork for the theory of cultural pluralism, giving it a central place within the American Creed.

Featured in The New York Times Book Review Only a few decades ago, the Brooklyn stereotype well known to Americans was typified by television programs such as “The Honeymooners” and “Welcome Back, Kotter”—comedies about working-class sensibilities, deprivation, and struggles. Today, the borough across the East River from Manhattan is home to trendsetters, celebrities, and enough “1 percenters” to draw the Occupy Wall Street protests across the Brooklyn Bridge. “Tres Brooklyn,” has become a compliment among gourmands in Parisian restaurants. In The New Brooklyn, Kay Hymowitz chronicles the dramatic transformation of the once crumbling borough. Devoting separate chapters to Park Slope, Williamsburg, Bed Stuy and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Hymowitz identifies the government policies and young, educated white and black middle class enclaves responsible for creating thousands of new businesses, safe and lively streets, and one of the most desirable urban environments in the world. Exploring Brownsville, the growing Chinatown of Sunset Park, and Caribbean Canarsie, Hymowitz also wrestles with the question of whether the borough’s new wealth can lift up long disadvantaged minorities, and the current generation of immigrants, many of whom will need more skills than their predecessors to thrive in a postindustrial economy. The New Brooklyn’s portraits of dramatic urban transformation, and its sometimes controversial effects, offers prescriptions relevant to “phoenix” cities coming back to life across the United States and beyond its borders.

From America's first suburb to its favorite borough, Brooklyn is by all accounts matchless. Taking readers away from the film sets and off the tour buses, borough historian John Manbeck reveals the communities that have defined its diverse neighborhoods, from the early Dutch settlers to today's colonizing hipsters. Through urbanism and war, depression and gentrification, Manbeck's columns, first printed in the Brooklyn Eagle and now collected here, show Brooklyn for what it isa cultural and social nonpareil that just happens to sit across the East River from Manhattan.

Considered one of the city's most notorious industrial slums in the 1940s and 1950s, Brownstone Brooklyn by the 1980s had become a post-industrial landscape of hip bars, yoga studios, and beautifully renovated, wildly expensive townhouses. In The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn, Suleiman Osman offers a groundbreaking history of this unexpected transformation. Challenging the conventional wisdom that New York City's renaissance started in the 1990s, Osman locates the origins of gentrification in Brooklyn in the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Gentrification began as a grassroots movement led by young and idealistic white college graduates searching for "authenticity" and life outside the burgeoning suburbs. Where postwar city leaders championed slum clearance and modern architecture, "brownstoners" (as they called themselves) fought for a new romantic urban ideal that celebrated historic buildings, industrial lofts and traditional ethnic neighborhoods as a refuge from an increasingly technocratic society. Osman examines the emergence of a "slow-growth" progressive coalition as brownstoners joined with poorer residents to battle city planners and local machine politicians. But as brownstoners migrated into poorer areas, race and class tensions emerged, and by the 1980s, as newspapers parodied yuppies and anti-gentrification activists marched through increasingly expensive neighborhoods, brownstoners debated whether their search for authenticity had been a success or failure.