An unprecedented history of Brooklyn, told through its areas, buildings, as well as the people who made them, from the first seventeenth hundred years to today

America’s many storied urban underdog, Brooklyn has become an internationally recognized brand in recent decades-celebrated and scorned among the hippest places in the globe. In Brooklyn: The Once and Future City, Thomas J. Campanella unearths long-lost threads of the urban past, informing the rich background of the rise, fall, and reinvention about Brooklyn: The Once and Long term City of 1 of the world’s most resurgent cities.

Spanning decades and neighborhoods, Brooklyn-born Campanella recounts the creation of spots familiar and lengthy forgotten, both constructed and never noticed, bringing to life the individuals whose dreams, visions, rackets, and plans forged the city we know today. He will take us through Brooklyn’s background as homeland from the Leni Lenape and its own transformation by Dutch colonists right into a dense slaveholding region. We find out about English émigré Deborah Moody, whose town of Gravesend was the first founded by a woman in the us. We see how wanderlusting Yale dropout Frederick Law Olmsted used Potential customer Park to anchor an open space program that was to attain back again to Manhattan. And we witness Brooklyn’s emergence as a playland of racetracks and amusement parks celebrated around the world.

Campanella also describes Brooklyn’s outsized failures, from Samuel Friede’s bid to erect the world’s tallest building towards the long battle to help to make Jamaica Bay the world’s largest deepwater seaport, as well as the star-crossed urban renewal, open public casing, and highway projects that battered the borough in the postwar period. Campanella reveals how this immigrant Guaranteed Land drew large numbers, fell sufferer to its social anxieties, and yet proved resilient enough to reawaken like a multicultural powerhouse and global symbol of metropolitan vitality.