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Brooklyn

The Once and Future City

Thomas J. Campanella

$62.99

Hardback

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English
Princeton University Press
18 November 2019
An unprecedented history of Brooklyn, told through its places, buildings, and the people who made them, from the early seventeenth century to today

America's most storied urban underdog, Brooklyn has become an internationally recognized brand in recent decades-celebrated and scorned as one of the hippest destinations in the world. In Brooklyn: The Once and Future City, Thomas J. Campanella unearths long-lost threads of the urban past, telling the rich history of the rise, fall, and reinvention of one of the world's most resurgent cities.

Spanning centuries and neighborhoods, Brooklyn-born Campanella recounts the creation of places familiar and long forgotten, both built and never realized, bringing to life the individuals whose dreams, visions, rackets, and schemes forged the city we know today. He takes us through Brooklyn's history as homeland of the Leni Lenape and its transformation by Dutch colonists into a dense slaveholding region. We learn about English emigre Deborah Moody, whose town of Gravesend was the first founded by a woman in America. We see how wanderlusting Yale dropout Frederick Law Olmsted used Prospect Park to anchor an open space system that was to reach back 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 to the long struggle to make Jamaica Bay the world's largest deepwater seaport, and the star-crossed urban renewal, public housing, and highway projects that battered the borough in the postwar era. Campanella reveals how this immigrant Promised Land drew millions, fell victim to its own social anxieties, and yet proved resilient enough to reawaken as a multicultural powerhouse and global symbol of urban vitality.

By:  
Imprint:   Princeton University Press
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 248mm,  Width: 165mm, 
ISBN:   9780691165387
ISBN 10:   0691165386
Pages:   552
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  Professional and scholarly ,  General/trade ,  ELT Advanced ,  Undergraduate
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Thomas J. Campanella is associate professor of urban studies and city planning at Cornell University and historian-in-residence of the New York City Parks Department. His books include Republic of Shade and The Concrete Dragon, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. He divides his time between Ithaca and the Marine Park neighborhood of Brooklyn where he grew up. Twitter @builtbrooklyn

Reviews for Brooklyn: The Once and Future City

A fascinating and well-written exploration. ---Norman Oder, Curbed A lively biography of New York's second borough. . . . Teeming with information, this is a must-read for fans of urban history. * Kirkus Reviews * Mr. Campanella . . . aims to give an account of `the Brooklyn unknown, overlooked and unheralded-the quotidian city taken for granted or long ago blotted out by time and tide.' He succeeds admirably . . . Brooklyn: The Once and Future City is a nuanced portrait of a diverse group of communities. Genteel farmland, then a byword for urban blight, and now the apotheosis of hipsterdom and gentrification-Brooklyn has seen it all. Mr. Campanella, a native Brooklynite himself, brings both love and scholarship to his writing, revealing the true spirt of this fractured land. * The Economist * Campanella . . . limns Brooklyn's multiple identities and the tensions over what the borough was, and to whom . . . a fascinating chronicle. ---Katrina Gulliver, New Criterion


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