Class 2. September 4. Community Archives: Historical patterns and records
Methods: archival research on past land uses (old maps, images, directories, manuscript census
(Friday, September 6: Meeting with CM Brad Lander, 12:00 noon, 456 5th Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11215).
Expert: Ben Vershbow, Director, Community Programs, Wikimedia Foundation (formerly NYPL)
Readings or application: Sanborn Maps
Suleiman Osman, “Urban Wilderness,” chapter 1 in The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
John Gallagher, “Gowanus” and “Gowanus Canal” (with Matthew Kachur), in Encyclopedia of New York City, ed. Kenneth T. Jackson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010, 2nd ed.): 538-39.
Ben Vershbow and Shannon Mattern, “Urban Memory Infrastructure,” Urban Omnibus (March 2017).
Read this short history of construction of Gowanus Parkway, now Gowanus Expressway
Review these resources:
UCLA Community Archives Lab, “Assessing the Affective Impact of Community Archives—A Toolkit,” UCLA, 2018.
Tanvi Misra, “The Accidental Revelations of Sanborn Maps,” Citylab, Oct. 13, 2014.
Historical Information Gatherers, “FIMo–How to Interpret Sanborn Maps,” 2019.
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/64b486c0-1296-c1eb-e040-e00a18063e84
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47dd-ab6c-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47dd-911b-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/7aca7e74-e1ce-a0c9-e040-e00a18062462
The New York Public Library has digitized the Sanborn Map Company’s Brooklyn publication of 1886. It contains an interesting set of nine plates for the land adjacent to the Gowanus Canal. The space was, as we know, primarily used for industrial purposes. Simple frame, brick, and concrete structures preponderated. A large number of blocks, usually some way inland from the Canal, lay vacant.
The labels on the map provide an interesting picture of the 1886 economy. At the east side of Gowanus Bay, between Hamilton Avenue and Twentieth Street, the most prominent establishment was the South Brooklyn Saw Mill Company, which held a large pond for storing and transporting logs. The pond is now gone, its place occupied by a large Home Depot and a FedEx Shipping Center. Further east down Eighteenth and Nineteenth lay a wood and coal storage facility and a bleaching and dyeing establishment.
Moving up the Canal, north of Hamilton, the map provides evidence of intricate economies of agglomeration, firms up and down supply chains gaining efficiencies by clustering near to each other. Roebuck’s Planing Mill, at the north-west of Hamilton, would have benefited from the nearby South Brooklyn Saw Mill. The dye manufacturer at 131-133 Twelfth Street likely sold to the bleaching and dyeing company further south.
This sort of pattern extended widely. Sulphur, for instance, is used in the manufacture of dyes, and it was prepared at the basin of Seventh Street. Dyes are used in the manufacture of carpets and hats, both of which were prominent features of the local economy.
The Gowanus Canal, in this way, exhibited an astonishing diversity of industrial enterprises with complex interactions. Wood, coal, oil, gas, and iron works were pervasive, with of course a wide array of local industrial applications. They were joined by baggers, coopers, carpenters, stone yards and masonry supplies manufacturers, horse shoers, grain and feed warehouses, wagon manufacturers and repairers, brewing and brewing supplies, a sausage factory, a soon to be honey and maple syrup factory, and bakeries. The large fertilizer manufacturer at the south end of Huntington Street, also relying on sulphur and near to an ammonia factory, was undoubtedly a major contributor to the present environmental condition of the area.
At the west end of Seventh Street, on the west side of the Canal, Plate 21 indicates a series of simple frame structures, 15 of which spill out onto the road, with the word ‘squatters’ scrawled across them. I wonder at the extent to which that amounts to bureaucratic recognition of that other effect of industrialization, the working homeless.
For shanties, have a look at Lisa Goff’s excellent book, Shantytown USA: Forgotten Landscapes of the Working Poor (Harvard, 2016).
In Brownstone Brooklyn, Osman states “The brownstone was cityness.” I had never heard the word “cityness” before, so I was intrigued. Merriam-Webster defines it as: “the quality or state of being citified.” The sociologist Saskia Sassen defines cityness as “a concept that encompasses innumerable types of urbanity, including, indeed, an intersection of differences that actually produces something new; whether good or bad, this intersection is consequential.” It seems as though Osman was pointing to the brownstone as embodying the intersection between public life (the stoop, the sidewalk) and private life (inside the home). The Brooklyn brownstone signified a new way of life in the city for the middle class in the 1960s and 1970s. Osman’s historical analysis of the Brooklyn brownstone and the shaping of neighborhoods in South Brooklyn reminded me of Jane Jacob’s emphasis on small scale urban neighborhoods. Osman describes these new brownstone neighborhoods as little villages where people might refer to where they live by specific neighborhood markers such as the central pub where political meetings are taking place or the neighborhood church. In a way, brownstone Brooklyn created parochial enclaves inside a larger urban system.
It is interesting to think about brownstone Brooklyn in relation to Gowanus, our case study site. While Gowanus does have some single family housing units, it is certainly not known for its brownstones. However, it is flanked between Carroll Gardens, Boerum Hill, and Park Slope – architectural masterpieces of the brownstone Brooklyn development era. All of these neighborhoods also include historic districts placing restrictions on the types of new buildings that can be built. Gowanus, on the other hand, is like a blank canvas for urban developers. Will these developers consider the concept of cityness in their plans?
Finally, I was surprised to learn that Brooklyn had the highest concentration of Black slaves in the North! I did not know that!
http://www.urbanlab.org/articles/sassen%20Cityness.pdf
Good morning, all! And thank you to my colleagues for their comments so far. Osman’s chapter struck me when thinking about the preservation (digital and physical) and redefinition work being done on the historical fabric of the broadly defined “Brownstone Brooklyn” and all of the “neighborhoods” it includes.
When gaining a familiarity with the history of the randomness behind neighborhood boundaries and the subjectivity of names, all in search of “authentic neighborhoods” (Osman 19), I kept coming back to this idea of the unattainable urban authenticity. This word troubles me when thinking about the selective inquiries into a neighborhood’s past that can play problematic roles in the salvage of redevelopment, when preservationists must ask the question, for whom is this for? The built environment becomes a depository for histories and narratives of a city’s past, so the tension over the Right to the City becomes a site of racial exclusion and/or token representation: “Black and Puerto Rican Residents were at times celebrated as sources of anti-bureaucratic authenticity and at other times studiously avoided” (emphasis added, Osman 24). As we gain familiarity with our study site for the semester, I am curious to note and track how selective histories are enacted to justify and rationalize redevelopment and look for patterns on who is in(ex)cluded in these narratives.
On a personal note, I’ve recently moved to Downtown Brooklyn and was interested to learn about the renovation efforts placing the historic farm boundaries over the urban landscape, and the implied system of slavery that made this romanticized “tradition of land settlement and homeownership” possible (Osman 25), my current street bears the name of a slave-owner, Schermerhorn, who contributed to the fact that Brooklyn had the highest ratio of slaves to slave holders in the North (Osman 25) as Rebecca also pointed out.
This first week’s readings quickly got wheels turning on what our public website project is for, but also what its approach to information, generally, we can imagine as an interdisciplinary group. First, I was struck by a term I hadn’t heard before (or just hadn’t taken note of) in the interview with Ben Vershow on the NYPL projects: “civic tech.” Beyond open source government data, I am compelled to consider how technological development with the primary goal of increased civic participation would look. What tools and frameworks does this encourage? How does the development process differ? It seems, from the interview, that popular input (perhaps uniquely accessible from the home institution of a public library) is key not only because the projects needed volunteers for both data and quality control, but because of its community-building effects. Vershow says, “collective stewardship could be ennobling and empowering for the community, and is also a practical strategy for dealing with being under-resourced and under-valued.” As a funded research seminar, we don’t necessarily have a capacity problem. But that does not address the inherent value of community participation beyond exploiting (in the nicest, public-library-est way possible) labor.
In considering our project, I am struck by the centrality of maps to civic tech projects. Especially as google maps has become an everyday lifeline and streeteasy neighborhood outlines define people’s housing searches, maps are increasingly quotidian tools for understanding our world. However, as Osman begins her chapter in Inventing Brownstone Brooklyn describing the mid-century “gulf” from Manhattan into Brooklyn, I wonder how to represent other types of space? What would it mean to visualize not only the physical map of the city but to understand it in terms of idea space, or emotional space? The NYPL’s projects are, appropriately, historical in nature. What does it mean to do something similar where spaces relate to each other, not just to themselves in the past? What if we were to create something about Gowanus that linked the ideas being proposed, floated, and executed, to similar projects in other spaces, either within or beyond NYC?
Toby Irving
I too am struck by some interesting terms from this week’s readings. Urban memory infrastructure. Heritage institution (the NYPL as such an institution). The Osman chapter help clarify the relationship between the “built environment” if the various areas encompassed by “Brownstone Brooklyn” and the various memories, invented backstories, selective retrievals and misreadings enacted by the several generations of new arrivals and pioneer gentrifiers who sought to distinguish their new neighborhood from their prior places (Manhattan, suburbs, etc.). In that regard, our semester-long focus area of Gowanus seems ideally suited. I discovered something about the area when I visited a site at the intersection of Gowanus and Park Slope, The Old Stone Barn. The original farmhouse structure dates from the Dutch colonial period, when the whole area was a marshy wetland and not yet canalized, and the Dutch who settled the area mixed farming activities with the harvesting of seafood they learned from the indigenous natives’ oystering activities. The Old Stone Barn is now a museum and the displays highlight the several historical layers that the barn interacted with. Besides the indigenous and the colonial Dutch, there were also the colonial British and the early American Republic. Now I simple repeat what I Red in the display captions for those not familiar with that episode of The American war of independence. The barn entered the old-fashioned capital H history books when it was the site of a pivotal turning point in the Battle of Brooklyn between the outnumbered forces under General George Washington and the combined might of the British army and navy along with their Hessian auxiliaries. The turning point that centered around the barn enabled Washington to turn a military defeat into a successful evacuation to fight another day.)
More fascinating to me and something that makes me pause on the notion of the “built environment” is learning that the barn was excavated because the original structure was buried under a thick layer of dirt by a late 19th Century round of urban infrastructure improvements or engineering works. Something to flatten and smooth out the streets. I need to learn more about this but it suggests the need to historicize the “built environment” to include episodes of building, unbuilding/erasure/alteration, rebuilding, etc.
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