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About the Author
Russell Granger is the founder and CEO of Arch Digitals, a branding and marketing agency specializing in strategy and design for engaging customers online. He began focusing his research and archiving efforts on antebellum Brooklyn when family history pursuits led to the discovery of an association with Walt Whitman. Russell currently lives in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn, just a few streets from several ancestral addresses from the 1830s.
Scene at the Ferry Landing
Scene at the Ferry Landing, Brooklyn, by William J. Peirce, 1857. Modern tinting.
Boston-based artist and engraver William J. Peirce created this dynamic composition for an 1857 edition of Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, which elected to caption the windswept, tumultuous scene (note the capsized mast and the escaping survivors) with the decidedly prosaic, “View of the Fulton Ferry Buildings.” Ah, good old New England reserve.
Montague Hall
Rare image of the west side of City Hall Square, circa 1850.
Antebellum Brooklyn was somewhat famously lacking in theatrical venues, especially when compared with New York. This was not entirely unintentional. The Bowery was close enough, and a taciturn pride characterized many Brooklynites who considered their multi-function meeting halls more than suitable for lectures, musical programs, events, and theatricals.
The Fleet Mansion
The Fleet Mansion, north side of Fulton between Duffield and Gold, abt. 1850. Brooklyn Museum.
The Fleet name, still seen to mark various locations around the downtown and Fort Greene areas, is not maritime or waterfront related but an old Long Island family (thought to have been shortened from Fleetwood), a wealthy scion of which was one Samuel Fleet, who made a large fortune in the War of 1812 selling grain from his Huntington farm. He multiplied his capital in early Brooklyn real estate, and in 1819 built a stately homestead on Fulton between Duffield and Gold.
Printing House Square, New York
1865 chromolithograph of Printing-House Square. NYPL Digital Gallery.
Although we are concerning ourselves in this collection with Whitman’s Brooklyn, it would seem incomplete – conspicuous in its absence, even – to neglect the familiar scene that was just across the river, the one into which nearly every disembarking passenger from the Fulton Ferry emerged, and within which Whitman himself was deeply immersed in ways both personal and professional. The nature and character of Brooklyn itself is also strongly bound up in the contrast with and reflection of New York, such that a visual context is illuminating.
posted in All, New York June 1st, 2010
Navy Yard Hospital
U.S. Navy Yard Hospital, on Wallabout Bay, 1857. Flushing Avenue at right. Modern tinting.
By the time this image was published in 1857, the Naval Hospital already had a twenty year legacy of serving America’s enlisted. As virtually the last moment in history when the familiar Brooklyn landmark could be seen rising majestically above the murky yet bucolic arrangement of crested shoreline and wetlands known as Wallabout Bay, it is a rather important view. Very shortly after this, the bay would be filled in, bit by bit, to accommodate the growing Navy Yard, and the lands and buildings surrounding the hospital – once known as the Annex – would be separated no more.
posted in All, Navy Yard June 1st, 2010
View of Brooklyn, 1855
View of Brooklyn, from the foot of Wall Street, 1855. Period tinting.
This image has all the iconic elements that make it the quintessential mid-19th century view of Brooklyn before the bridge: the majestic Heights to the west sloping gracefully down to the ferry landing at Fulton street; the cluster of masted sails in Wallabout Bay at the Navy Yard; church steeples sprinkled throughout, and a busy East River thoroughfare of skips and sloops, schooners and a paddlewheel, all surrounding the centerpiece of life between the cities: the ubiquitous ferry boat.