As part of a government-sponsored project to put the nation’s talented writers back to work during the Great Depression, the “WPA Guide to New York City” was published in 1939 by Federal Writers Project. The travel triptych was deemed by the New York Times as “one of the best books ever published about New York.”
Its passage on Brooklyn Heights is a precious view into a bygone era. The full descriptor is below, but here are some choice passages:
* The seclusion of the Heights was destroyed in 1908 when the IRT subway opened the neighborhood to commuters. Many of the patrician inhabitants fled; the old Victorian mansions were partitioned into studios and apartments; and writers and artists were attracted to the region. Many hotels, the Touraine, the Towers, the Bossert, and the huge St. George were erected.
* Brooklyn Heights, bounded by the East River, Fulton Street, Atlantic Avenue and Court Street, is an old, distinctive residential quarter, famous in Victorian days for its churches and its clergymen.
* Late in the nineteenth century, Brooklyn Heights was an aristocratic neighborhood whose residents set the tone in manners and customs for the elite of the entire city.
* The view from the apartments, hotels, and rooming houses along Columbia Heights, the street that edges the bluff, is one of the most exciting in the world. A popular vantage point is the plaza at the foot of Montague Street.
And now the full Brooklyn Heights entry. Unfortunately, no author is attached to the piece.
Brooklyn Heights, bounded by the East River, Fulton Street, Atlantic Avenue and Court Street, is an old, distinctive residential quarter, famous in Victorian days for its churches and its clergymen. The Heights section occupies a bluff that rises sharply from the river’s edge and gradually recedes on the landward side. Before the Dutch settled on Long Island in the middle of the seventeenth century, this promontory was called Ihpetonga (“the high sandy bank”) by the Canarsie Indians. The natives lived there in community houses, some of which were a quarter of a mile long. Apartment dwellings were not brought back to the Heights until the twentieth century, and today there are but few.
The view from the apartments, hotels, and rooming houses along Columbia Heights, the street that edges the bluff, is one of the most exciting in the world; it includes Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn Bridge, Governors Island, the Statue of Liberty and the shipping factories and wharves along the East River. A popular vantage point is the plaza at the foot of Montague Street. The distinguished artist Joseph Pennell found the vistas from his studio atop the Margaret Hotel on the Heights more exciting than those from the London Embankment, and he made many etchings of the harbor. The locale was also made famous by Ernest Poole in his novel, The Harbor.
Late in the nineteenth century Brooklyn Heights was an aristocratic neighborhood whose residents set the tone in manners and customs for the elite of the entire city. Many of the brownstone mansions belonged to the merchants whose trading ships docked near by. The piers ran back to warehouses whose roofs were planted with real lawns and trees, forming backyard gardens for the houses above them.
The seclusion of the Heights was destroyed in 1908 when the IRT subway opened the neighborhood to commuters. Many of the patrician inhabitants fled; the old Victorian mansions were partitioned into studios and apartments; and writers and artists were attracted to the region. Many hotels, the Touraine, the Towers, the Bossert, and the huge St. George were erected.
