Brooklyn
Brooklyn became part of New York City in 1898 and by 1946 it had doubled its population. It had almost a million more inhabitants than Manhattan, but to the Manhattan crowd, Brooklyn in was the punchline of a joke. The disdain for the Bridge &Tunnel crowd, most of whom were born and raised in New York City, by the self-proclaimed urban sophisticates, who were largely transplanted from someplace else, was already in place. The ridicule had spread by cultural osmosis through the rest of the U.S. As Elliott Willensky pointed out in When Brooklyn Was the World, a stock character in war movies of the 1940s was a cocky, gum-chewing draftee from Brooklyn with an ethnic surname who moided da language. Right before the war the Society for the Prevention of Disparaging remarks Against Brooklyn was formed. It was meant as a gag but by 1946 it had 40,000 members who counted 3,000 slanders against Brooklyn in the media that year.
Before incorporation Brooklyn had been part suburb in the old meaning of an industrialized zone outside the city proper where more noxious activities like oil refineries were located, and part suburb in the newer sense of a bedroom community for commuters. In fact, Brooklyn Heights was among the first of these new-style suburbs. Brooklyn also had was a major city in its own right with a thriving civic and business life. Most of Brooklyn's residents then not only lived in Brooklyn but also worked there. It had a busy downtown with office buildings, department stores, banks and theaters. It had a Beaux-Art museum, a massive city hall, Prospect Park and Grand Army Plaza. It had its own suburbs and its local elite.
Hard to imagine, but 19th-century Brooklyn was considered the Protestant Middle Class alternative to Manhattan.. Many of its residents had come from New England or rural areas of Long Island and New York state. Later in the century they were joined by the more prosperous members of the Irish and German community, followed a little later by the Irish and German working class fleeing the wave of new immigrants from south and east Europe who had begun crowding into Manhattan's tenement districts. At the turn of the century, with the construction of the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges and the subway system and the incorporation of Brooklyn into New York City, the newer immigrants poured in as well, crowding into neighborhoods like Williamsburg, Brownsville and Red Hook where they could find marginally better housing in the newer tenement buildings, perhaps gaining more space, or a private bathroom, or steam heat or hot running water, The newspapers of the era referred to the Williamsburg Bridge, which linked the Lower East Side and Williamsburg, as the "Jew's Highway."
The southern part of the borough had been independent towns and villages until shortly before Brooklyn joined New York. The area was still semi-rural at the begiining of the twentieth century with clusters of stores, churches and colonial-era buildings in the centers of the former market towns and orchards, nurseries, truck and dairy farms as well as lots of abandoned farmland. It also held the dumps, junkyards and glue factories commonly found on the fringes of urban centers. Some suburban residential clusters had developed along the old steam railway lines that led to the beachside resort towns like Coney Island. Some of Brooklyn's middle and professional classes had moved southward from the Prospect Park area to build substantial homes on large lots along tree-shaded streets in the Flatbush area. The ocean front had resort towns that catered in their early days to the affluent but then to a more proletarian crowd as the rich moved on to other shores.
The borough went through explosive growth in the first two decades of the century. Then in the 1920s, when Manhattan lost about a third of its residents, the population of Brooklyn's crowded tenement districts also plummeted by as much as 60 percent, while the southern and eastern sections grew rapidly, resulting in a net gain for the borough as a whole. The expanding subways and the spread of the automobile opened up whole new areas to dense settlement. Single and two-family houses and apartment buildings replaced the farms, vacant lots and mini-estates of south Brooklyn, while some of the borough's older residential neighborhoods went into decline. Many of the old Protestant families moved to Queens or the suburbs,The ones who stayed often assimilated into the numerically dominant Irish Catholic community through intermarriage. Middle class German and Irish families moved into some of the former Anglo-Saxon enclaves like Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights while others joined the migration to Queens and Long Island, where they were in the majority. A sizable second-generation Eastern European Jewish middle class settled in Midwood, Flatbush, Borougn Park and in the apartment houses along Eastern Parkway.
By 1946 Brooklyn was about one-third Jewish and was home to almost half of the city's Jews. A sizable Italian community established itself in the borough as well. the Ukrainians and Poles took over some of the old German neighborhoods and Scandinavians had an enclave in Bay Ridge and Sunset Park. The black community in Bedford-Stuyvesant rivaled Harlem in size but not cultural influence. The song "Take the A Train" celebrated the subway line that connected the city's two African American enclaves. Bed-Stuy still had a sizable ethnic white population as well in the 1940s.
Much of the third generation of Brooklyn's ethnic middle class moved out in the three decades following the Second World War. Like the Irish and Germans before them, and accompanied by the Italians, they settled in Queens and the suburbs. The Brooklyn of nostalgic memory did not disappear, it just moved to Long Island.
Some Brooklyn neighborhoods:
Midwood: A middle class enclave
Williamsburg: A tenement district
Downtown- Department stores, movie theaters, restaurants, banks and office buildings
Brooklyn Life:
Lundy's: Everyone's favorite seafood restaurant