CHAPTER 1

It has been said that seven in every ten Americans have a link to Brooklyn.

Although there are several explanations as to how Brooklyn got the name Brooklyn, the one accepted by most historians is that the terrain reminded the early settlers of a small town outside Amsterdam called Breuckelen — a name that, through the years, evolved into Brooklyn.

Like its American counterpart, Breuckelen remained independent for hundreds of years, not being taken over by Amsterdam until the twenty-first century.

The first European to reach Brooklyn from Europe was Giovanni Verrazano in 1503, and not many people believe that it was not until Henry Hudson came a century later in 1632 that the next European came.

If you want to know why Henry Hudson sailed under the Dutch West India Company flag instead of the flag of his native England, it was because two of his previous voyages — which had been done for English backers — had ended in failure, and he could get backing nowhere else.

Not all Brooklynites were in favor of consolidating with Manhattan and the other boroughs in 1898. A nonbinding poll taken several years before showed the vote for consolidation was whisper thin, but Brooklyn (along with East Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island) was united with Manhattan to form Greater New York in 1898. All were not happy though, and in 1915, a bill was introduced in the state legislature to correct the terrible mistake and return Brooklyn to an independent entity. It failed.

What most Brooklynites don't know is that it was the Lenape Indian tribe from Brooklyn — and not an Indian tribe from Manhattan — who sold Manhattan to the Dutch for twenty-four dollars.

The longest street in Brooklyn is Bedford Avenue, which stretches 10.1 miles from Greenpoint to Sheepshead Bay.

It was a pitcher for the Brooklyn Excelsiors named Arthur William "Candy" Cummings who made professional baseball the sport it is today by inventing the curveball in the 1860s. He said he got the idea for it by watching the gyrations of seashells that he tossed in the ocean.

Although there are only Seven Wonders of the World, the Brooklyn Bridge is often referred to as the "Eighth Wonder of the World."

Strangely, even though there are dozens of streets in Brooklyn named for nonentities, there is not one street named for the Brooklyn minister Henry Ward Beecher, who was considered the most popular man in the United States throughout much of the nineteenth century.

Did you know that the "population" of Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery is not much different than the population of Boston, Massachusetts?

By a strange coincidence, the last movie shown at the RKO Albee in Downtown Brooklyn — the year was 1978 — was a screen version of the play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It was written by Edward Albee, adopted grandson of B. F. Albee, the vaudeville magnate who had built the theater and named it after himself.

The only readable grave in the Montauket Indian cemetery on Long Island is that of Stephen Talkhouse, who, during his adult lifetime, walked regularly every day, back and forth from Montauk to Easthampton and Southampton.

Yes, it's true. There is a cigarette brand sold worldwide (online in the US) called Peter Stuyvesant Red King, known familiarly as Stuyes. It is promoted as containing "premium tobacco for experienced smokers" and is particularly popular in South Africa, Greece, and Australia.

The only poem of Walt Whitman to be published during his lifetime was "O Captain, My Captain" in an anthology, the ode he wrote on the death of Abraham Lincoln.

The Gerritsen family deserves special mention in Brooklyn's Hall of Fame. Not only did they build North America's first tide-powered gristmill in the mid-1660s, but they also operated it continuously for almost three centuries until an arson-set fire destroyed the mill in 1934.

Are those who reside in Cobble Hill aware that Cobble Hill Park's current location was the site of Brooklyn's Second Unitarian Church, affectionately called Church of the Turtle because of its shape? Its first minister was Samuel Longfellow, brother of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

One of the names used for the Williamsburg Bridge before it officially became the Williamsburg Bridge was the East River Bridge.

The one man from Brooklyn closest to becoming president of the United States was Henry Cruse Murphy who, in the nineteenth century, was a New York State senator, publisher of the Brooklyn Eagle, mayor of Brooklyn (when he was only thirty-one years old), and two-term US congressman, among other things. In 1852 he came close to getting the nomination of the Democratic candidate for the presidency, losing out by only one vote to Franklin Pierce who became the nominee that year and went on to win the nomination and later the presidency in the general election.

There is a footnote to history in St. Mary's Star of the Sea Church at 467 Court Street in Cobble Hill. It was here that Al Capone — born and raised in Brooklyn before he went to Chicago and became famous as the nation's number 1 gangster — married a beautiful Irish girl named Mae Coughlin.

Not everyone was thrilled to hear Brooklyn's famous minister Henry Ward Beecher preach. Like all famous men, he had his detractors, such as one who called him the Gospel of Gush or another who complained that he screeched instead of preached.

According to one account, the number of soldiers contributed by Brooklyn to the armed services in World War II was greater than the total contributed by thirty-eight different US states.

Don't think that William M. "Boss" Tweed was all bad, even though at taxpayer expense he accumulated a fortune estimated to total $200 million through fraud and kickbacks. Among other things, he founded the Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital, raised funds for orphanages and public baths, fought to get the land the American Museum of Natural History was built on, and most importantly, was the man the city fathers of Brooklyn hired to lobby before the New York State Legislature to get the initial funds to start building the Brooklyn Bridge.

The last Brooklyn Dodger to retire from the Los Angeles Dodgers was Don Drysdale in 1969.

Some of the inhabitants of Sheepshead Bay are descendants of the stableboys and jockeys who once worked at the old Sheepshead Bay racetrack.

Did you know there are twenty miles of paths and roads in Green-Wood Cemetery?

In 1834, Brooklyn, then an independent city, became the third leading city in the United States in terms of population — a ranking it held throughout most of the nineteenth century.

Although tourist guides and guidebooks often point out that the Commandant's House at the Brooklyn Navy Yard was possibly designed by Charles Bulfinch, the architect for part of the US Capitol Building, today's historians seriously doubt that, saying the Bulfinch connection was more likely "a fantasy of nineteenth-century writers."

In retrospect, the great achievement of Brooklyn-born William Van Alen, who was the chief architect of the Chrysler Building, was a mixed blessing. When he submitted the bill for his services, Walter Chrysler refused to pay the amount on the grounds they had no written agreement, and Van Alen had to sue to get his money. He won the suit, but the fact he had to litigate to get it turned off any chance of future assignments. He ended up a teacher of sculpture.

Although Fort Hamilton was obviously named for Alexander Hamilton, no contemporary account exists as to how and when this came about.

Not all the famous celebrities buried in Brooklyn are in Green-Wood Cemetery. For example, in Cypress Hills Cemetery, which is on the Brooklyn-Queens border, are the graves of Jackie Robinson, Mae West, Eubie Blake, and the Collyer brothers.

The people of Baltimore are rightly proud of the running of the Preakness Stakes — the second race in the Triple Crown — at the city's Pimlico Race Course. But do they know that from 1890 to 1904, the Preakness was run at the Gravesend racetrack in Coney Island?

In the 1920s, there was a plan that seemed a fait accompli to eliminate King's Highway; but at the last minute, the city fathers not only reversed themselves and left it standing, but also widened its streets.

An unsung Brooklyn hero was Cyrus Smith, a mayor of Brooklyn in the early nineteenth century when it was the third largest city in the United States. Trying to establish Brooklyn's first public hospital, he went to the Board of Aldermen to get financing. When it offered him only $200, he sold his own house to obtain the funds to build it, and that, according to one account, was the beginning of what is now today's Brooklyn Hospital.

Try to find the beach when you go to the Bath Beach section of Brooklyn. There has been no direct access to the beach since Shore Road was constructed by Robert Moses in the 1950s.

As they say, there is nothing new under the sun. That floating swimming pool the New York City Parks Department moored several years ago in the East River opposite Brooklyn Heights was not the first floating swimming pool to be anchored there. A century and a half previously, there was a floating covered barge called Gray's Baths tied up in almost the very same spot. One famous person who wrote about swimming there was Walt Whitman.

One of the biggest expenses the city of Brooklyn incurred in 1863 was paying the $300,000 bounty to the men who volunteered for service in the Union Army. To meet the demand, the city had to obtain a special loan of $250,000.

In the War of 1812, Brooklyn got a scare when it was reported that a British fleet was spotted off Sandy Hook. The entire population, young and old, pitched in building fortifications along the shore, but the fleet, for reasons unknown, never did attack.

It was not only the famous saltwater pool of the St. George Hotel that was so spectacular. So was the grand ballroom above the pool. Said to be the largest hotel ballroom in the world, it measured 130 times 116 square feet and featured a device called Colorama that produced a changing sequence of colors and shadows via twelve thousand colored electric light bulbs.

Robert Fulton didn't forget his employees on the Nassau, the ferry that, in 1814, launched ferry service between New York and Brooklyn. Years after one employee had retired, he could still be seen at one end of the Nassau, where he had been given space to sell cookies and candies to the passengers.

It was Brooklyn's Charles Ebbets, head of the Dodgers for many years, who invented the rain check now standard at all major-league ballparks.

Many people assume it was William Wrigley Jr. who introduced the first commercially made chewing gum in the United States. It was actually a Brooklyn inventor named Thomas Adams, and — believe it or not — he got the idea from General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, the infamous conqueror of the Alamo who, after being sent in exile, lived briefly in Staten Island. Showing Adams some samples of chicle, which he had brought from his homeland to chew on, Santa Anna suggested the chicle might have potential as a substitute for rubber and suggested that Adams try to see if he could do something with it. Adams tried to make toys from it and also used it as tires on wagon wheels; and when all that didn't pan out, he formed it into sticks, which he began to market as chewing gum. His company, which he established on Sands Street in 1861, is still a factor in the chewing gum market, having introduced such popular brands as Black Jack and Chiclets through the years.

In the first St. Ann's Episcopal Church, which stood at the corner of Sands and Washington streets, there were two columns of listings for the baptisms of African Americans. One column had the heading Black; the other, the heading Free Black.

If you are a baseball fan, you might like to know that at 133 Clinton Street, there is a plaque on the exterior of the brick building announcing that the building was once the clubhouse of the Brooklyn Excelsiors, a famous nineteenth-century baseball team.

All that is left of the Brooklyn's original Hall of Records, which was located on Joralemon Street across Brooklyn's Borough Hall, are two outdoor lighting standards that have been reinstalled at the southern entrance to the New York State Supreme Court on Cadman Plaza East.

Yes, there really was a hill in Cobble Hill, and it played an important role in the Battle of Brooklyn in the American Revolution. At the beginning of the battle, it was from this hill that a small detachment of Continental soldiers stationed there fired two-gun salutes to inform General George Washington that British troops under General Howe had crossed over from Staten Island and were moving into Gravesend. Later, Washington used the hill as a vantage point to view the progress of the battle. After the British occupied Brooklyn, they leveled the hill.

When the Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883, it was the world's largest leap across space, i.e., 1,595.5 feet.

The longshoremen of Brooklyn showed their true colors when, in the midst of a widespread longshoreman's strike after World War II that affected shipping up and down the entire East Coast, they continued to handle the coffins of GIs being shipped back from Europe at the Brooklyn Army Terminal.

The present headquarters of the Brooklyn Historical Society on Pierrepont Street is not the first building the organization had. When it opened in 1863 as the Long Island Historical Society, its headquarters was at 44 Court Street, where the Temple Bar building is now.

In its 2015 reemergence as a performance theater, the Kings Theater in Flatbush (formerly Loew's Kings) can no longer say it was a "Wonder theater," a claim that everyone assumed referred to the lavishness of its décor when in actuality it meant it had a Wonder organ.

Although several Brooklyn neighborhoods from Brooklyn Heights to Clinton Hill have been singled out at various times as elite places to live, that honor — it may come as a surprise — once applied to Flatbush. In a 1908 book titled The Realm of Light and Air in the Flatbush of Today, the author described Flatbush as follows: "Flatbush is the city of beautiful streets, handsome homes, and impressive buildings and is recognized as the most attractive place for residence in the great city of New York."

A real stranger-than-fiction story associated with Green-Wood Cemetery is that of the side-by-side graves of the two Prentiss brothers — one of Clifton Prentiss, who served in the Union Army, and the other of William Prentiss, who was a soldier in the Confederate Army. The story doesn't end here. It seems that in April 1865, they were both mortally wounded in the same battle just a few feet from each other; Clifton was leading an attack on fortified earthworks that William was helping to defend.

The street we know now as Old Fulton Street has gone through three name changes through the years. Before its present name, it was Cadman Plaza East, and before that, it was Fulton Street. Then there was its original name — Ferry Street.

From a safety point of view, it was a good thing the early Brooklyn major-league baseball teams stopped playing at Washington Park in Park Slope. Being made of wood, it was a firetrap.

In 1907 Harry Houdini, the famous magician, introduced one of his most popular escapes in the Orpheum Theater in Downtown Brooklyn. As described in the Brooklyn Eagle, "he was able to release himself after being handcuffed and shackled to the four wheels of a large automobile."

A major factor in the growth of Coney Island in the early twentieth century was the support of two brothers from Cleveland, Ohio, named Johnson. The older one, Thomas L. Johnson, had been Cleveland's mayor and a US senator who had become wealthy by inventing the trolley cashbox.

The Johnson brothers set up trolley lines in half a dozen American cities, including Brooklyn where their lines started in different parts of the city and ended up in Coney Island. While here, they lived briefly on Shore Road, and both brothers are buried in Green-Wood Cemetery.

In 1865 when the city of Brooklyn switched over to paid firemen, many of the volunteer fire organizations reorganized themselves as veterans' organizations and for years afterward, staged parades, fancy balls, and conventions, as they had done previously.

The name of Remsen, one of the first families in Brooklyn Heights, derived from the fact that the original name was Rem. And the sen part, which came later, brought the name to mean "son of Rem."

One of the names used for the Williamsburg Bridge before it officially became the Williamsburg Bridge was the "East River Bridge."

Did you know the High Street stop in the Independent Subway line is not on High Street but on Cadman Plaza East?