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When Brooklyn Was the World, 1920-1957, by Elliot Willensky
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Around the corner. The next block. Across the At the end of the line. Borough Park. Gowanus. Flatbush. Canarsie. Ridgewood. Greenpoint. Brownsville. Bay Ridge. Bensonhurst. City Line. What was the place called Brooklyn really like back then... when Brooklyn was the world?
Elliot Willensky, born in Brooklyn and now official Borough Historian, takes us back to a sweeter time when a trip on the new BMT subway was a delightful adventure, when summer days were a picnic on the sand and evenings were Nathan's hotdogs at Coney Island and a whirl of lights, spills, and chills at dazzling Luna Park.
Remembering Brooklyn, it's the neighborhoods you think of first -- or maybe it's your own block, the one you were raised on. In those days, the street was a more animated, more colorful place. Jacks and jump rope, hit-the-stick, double-dutch and skelly or potsy (hopscotch to you) were played everywhere. The street was a natural amphitheater, and the stoop was the perfect place for grown-ups to sit and watch and visit with neighbors. Stores-on-wheels selling fruit, baked goods, and the old standby, seltzer, rolled right down the block, and the Fuller Brush man and Electrolux vacuum-cleaner salesmen worked door to door, saving housewives countless shopping trips.
For many, a big night out was dinner at a Chinese restaurant, where 99 percent of the patrons were non-Chinese, and you could get mysterious-sounding dishes like moo goo gai pan and subgum chow mein -- "One from column A, two from column B." If you could afford to go somewhere really classy, the Marine Roof of the Bossert Hotel was one of the hottest nightspots. A hot date on Saturday night featured big bands at the clubs on The Strip (Flatbush Avenue below Prospect Park) -- the Patio, the Parakeet Club, the Circus Lounge -- or gala stage shows at the Brooklyn Academy of Music or the enormous Paramount Theatre.
Still, for family entertainment you couldn't beat a day at the beach and a night on Surf Avenue, taking in the sideshows and the penny arcades.
For Brooklyn, the years between 1920 and 1957 were a special time. It was in 1920 that the subway system reached to Brooklyn's outer edge -- linking the entire borough with Manhattan and making it an ideal spot for millions of new families to build their homes. The end of the era came in 1957 -- the last year that Brooklyn's beloved Dodgers played at Ebbets Field before moving to sunny California. For many loyal fans the fate of "Dem Bums" represents the fate of Brooklyn.
With a brilliant, entertaining text and hundreds of exciting, nostalgic photographs (many never before published), When Brooklyn Was the World recovers the history of this lively city, as remembered by the millions of people who knew Brooklyn in its golden era.
- Sales Rank: #545020 in Books
- Published on: 1986-04-13
- Released on: 1986-04-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.75" h x 8.25" w x 1.00" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 239 pages
About the Author
Elliot Willensky, who now lives in the community of Brooklyn Heights, serves as the officially appointed Borough Historian of Brooklyn and as Vice-Chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission of the City of New York. A consulting architect and exhibition designer who frequently writes and lectures on urban themes, he has taught at Brooklyn College, Cornell University, and Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture and Planning. He is a member of the board of directors of the Municipal Art Society of New York, the Brooklyn Historical Society, and the Frederick Law Olmsted Association. He is coauthor of The AIA Guide to New York City, widely regarded as the most comprehensive architectural guidebook to New York City's five boroughs.
Most helpful customer reviews
34 of 34 people found the following review helpful.
WOW!!
By A Customer
It has been 40 years since I have stepped foot in Brooklyn. Being a Brooklynite, who had been away all this time, when I first saw this book I had to sit down and breathedeeply. A friend had suggested this book and indeed, it was a great recomendation. There were the photographs of many of the familiar neighborhoods and places of my youth coming alive. As I read Mr. Willensky's writings suddenly the sounds and smells were coming back and I was beingtransported back to my proud Brooklyn. Again, I felt proud of being a Brooklynite and can't wait to make my first trip back after all my years away from this great place. I have no expecations on what I will find after such a long time. As the book deals with Brooklyn as it was from 1920 to 1957, I will try not to compare what I find with the way Elliot Willensky knew it and I too lived it. Excellent narrative, great photos and a must see and read for ALL former Brooklynites and anyone wanting to learn about the greatest place on earth! LONG LIVE BROOKLYN!!Richard Bender
24 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
Great contribution to the collective memory of Brooklyn
By A Customer
What a find! I had to buy this book after browsing through it during a visit to a friend - another transplanted Brooklynite. And it was worth the price. This book transports you to a time and place when Brooklyn truly WAS the world. There are sights, sounds and smells that come alive through historical perspective and photographs. This book makes a great contribution to the collective memory of all of us who were lucky enough to have been a part of the Brooklyn that was the world.
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
if you grew up in brooklyn and like old pictures
By Christopher Polizano
Christopher Polizano
Dr. Roche
New York History
December 3, 2004
Brooklyn: Hometown and Borough
Elliot Willensky's When Brooklyn Was the World 1920-1957 visits New York's most populous borough during its heyday. His account takes the reader on a tour though the streets of Brooklyn during its most fascinating period, combining the best features of a photo album, a diary, and a travel guide.
Willensky's Brooklyn is born from the excitement of the lawless and indulgent Roaring Twenties and leaves with a final parkway ride out to Levittown during the postwar flight to suburbia. His study begins generally, examining Brooklyn as a whole, searching for its special lure and curiosity in a section entitled "Are You Really From Brooklyn?" He questions the borough a unique identity and discovers features present throughout it: ethnic diversity, neighborhood pride, a transit company bearing its name, along with a spirit of accomplishing the unexpected, revealed in celebrations of "da bums" World Series victory.
The book then proceeds along a very loose chronology, with periodic interruptions allotting time to study cultural habits and architectural features. Yet, When Brooklyn Was the World serves less as a time line than a narration of daily life. Where appropriate, Willensky blends decades together, and he is a little over-detailed so its possible to get lost in the forest, but he closely develops two eras of Brooklyn life, the era of prohibition and the period during America's involvement in World War II. He tells a series of anecdotes illustrating Brooklyn's restlessness under the Volstead Act, restlessness equal to that of Manhattan. Speakeasies were raided. Mob bosses were ratted on. Breweries produced water-down near-beer, and occasionally a batch of the good stuff. His account of the World War II era showed a Brooklyn with its parks aquisitioned by the military for anti-aircraft artillery. During the war, crowds converged on the Navy Yard to witness the launching of ships, and Brooklyn participated in air-raid and blackout drills, the latter to prevent illuminating the silhouettes of ships deploying troops from the harbor.
Willensky personalizes the rest of his account by focusing on the neighborhood as the centerpiece of the Brooklyn experience. He consults several books written about single geographic sections of Brooklyn and then synthesizes them into a tour of Brooklyn's communities. He divides this study into two parts: old Brooklyn, those areas closest to Manhattan, generally developed by World War I, and roughly consisting of land north and west of the glacier's terminal morraine, and new Brooklyn, areas settled by Brooklyn's new residents after 1920.
When Brooklyn was the World develops both new and old Brooklyn through descriptions of community physical settings. Old Brooklyn, the developed area, was heavily industrialized and contained the downtown area, Brooklyn's shopping and political headquarters. It was composed of neighborhoods ranging from Greenpoint, with its American Main Street, to Brooklyn Heights, with its promenade, overlooking the warehouses of Upper New York Bay. New Brooklyn was less densely populated and contained many open lots, such as the verdant gardens of Canarsie, which reminded some residents of the fields of Italy back home.
The description of new Brooklyn's neighborhoods focuses on the new ethnic residents that moved into these empty lots following World War I: Jews in Brownsville, Italians in Canarsie, blacks in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Willensky best conveys ethnic Brooklyn through a description of local food choices. The reader smells the overused garlic emanating from a Jewish deli, orders "ah-beetz" from an Italian eatery when he notices the local pastor enjoying the same, and, on a special night, eats the "exotic" dim sum cuisine at "the chinks" (Chinese were less commonly seen in Brooklyn, and political correctness was a feature this period lacked).
Whatever neighborhood you were from, in the summer you made your way down to Coney Island. Train fare was only five cents, and all four of the main BMT lines terminated at Stillwell Avenue, with convenient access to the area's entertainment. There, you would experience beach and boardwalk crowded by over a million New Yorkers on a hot summer evening. Note the endless rules and regulations listed on Robert Moses's Department of Parks sign, which features the all capital word NO prominently. Don't forget to ride the comet and the parachute jump at the amusement parks. If you're hungry, be sure to try a Nathan's hot dog, priced five cents below that of the competition. For those with refined tastebuds and thick wallets, the area had its share of gourmet cuisine. You might try Feltmans' or, if you have the time, take a ride to Sheepshead Bay and eat the unforgettable seafood found at Lundy Bros. When Brooklyn Was the World describes Coney Island's entertainment as if it were selling the reader a vacation from Red Hook.
Day-to-day life is presented from the awe-filled eyes of a child. We gaze upon the steel truss of the Navy Yard's shipbuilding center, have our picture taken on a Shetland pony, and wonder where the neighborhood ice-cart man goes come winter. This perspective indicates Willensky's goal audience: former Brooklynites who have grown up and moved away, now looking to relive childhood memories of their hometown, and those who never lived in Brooklyn but wonder what it was like to grow up the child of an immigrant there.
The book operates effectively at the street level by including a wide array of primary sources. Restaurant menus, insignias, postcards, newspaper headlines: all feature prominently in When Brooklyn Was the World. The real power of Willensky's Brooklyn, however, lies in the photographs that guide the reader along nearly every page: past the Camp Fire Girls' triumphal march down Bedford Avenue on Brooklyn Day, underneath the Fulton Street el as it makes its final trip , near the egg shaped dome of the Kings County Courthouse, and through the revolving barrels at Steeplechase park. Willensky obtains most of these photographs from the archives of the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library, and the Brooklyn Historical Society; from the images and cartoons of the New York Daily News; and from various private collections.
Willensky at times describes Brooklyn as though it were only a temporary phase. There is an return to the motif of parents working hard to put their children through school, so that they might be able to one day move out of Brooklyn. The book ends appropriately by describing the loss of old Brooklyn following the end of World War II. The Navy Yard, once New York's largest industrial center, was dismantled. Brooklyn's downtown area was rebuilt and renamed the Civic Center. Fulton Street's original path was moved provide space for judges' parking. Most important, economic growth allowed many Brooklynites of European descent to drive down the Long Island Expressway and move out to the suburbs. This housing void was filled by 100,000 newcomers, many of them Puerto Rican's and blacks, "seeking a better tomorrow, as their predecessors had."
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