Borough Hall in 1908, the year the subway opened at this location. Note the two transit entrances.

Our class was turing Cadman Plaza yesterday in the second installment of our walk-through of the site. After dipping in to Borough Hall for five minutes to talk and get out of the cold–it could not have been more than 28 degrees at the time–we wrapped up in the downtown Brooklyn subways station. The Borough Hall subway opened in May 1908, a full ten years after the consolidation of the five boroughs. A student noted that the plaque placed during the station’s opening contained the seals of both Brooklyn and New York City itself. This led to a discussion about how strategic and intentional the laying of the subways lines were when the tracks were being planned and laid out in the 1900s. The real answer is I don’t know–a student will be looking into that in the coming months–but it sounds feasible; the main purpose of the Brooklyn Bridge was to link Brooklyn and Manhattan’s city halls, which are only about two miles apart as the crow flies. In this sense the subway was a continuation of the Great Bridge’s main purpose.

The subway did more than ease movement however; it had the ancillary but still important purpose of binding Greater New York together. I made the point to the class that Staten Island is the least New York-like of the five boroughs culturally and politically. It’s more complicated than this, but what does Staten Island lack that the other four boroughs all have? . . . Subway lines.

The mayor at the time was none other than George B. McClellan, Jr., son and namesake of the Civil War general. It has never been clear to me why Mac Jr. gets so little recognition. He did so much to build New York City’s infrastructure and worked tirelessly to make Gotham a twentieth century city. He even served in World War One a few years after leaving city hall. I suspect he has never received his just due because his mayoralty came after that of Seth Low, who with LaGuardia and a few others is remembered as the top-tier of New York City leaders. It is strange how we fixate on some historical figures at the reputational expense of others.

(image/Irving Underhill, Library of Congress)

Today marks an interesting day in Brooklyn history: the Daily Eagle published its last edition on this date in 1955. Students in my upcoming course will be studying the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and its significance to Brooklyn, New York City, and American history. The BDE dated back to the 1840s, when Walt Whitman was an editor for several years before leaving over political differences tied to his Free Soilist leanings. The Eagle seems to have been silent on Abraham Lincoln’s famous 1860 visit to Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church, where the soon-to-be presidential candidate attended services the day before his Cooper Union speech launched him to national prominence. The newspaper’s apparent silence on Lincoln’s visit is not surprising given its publisher’s Democratic leanings. The Eagle came into its own during the Gilded Age but took a blow with the consolidation of New York City in 1898. It was still a great paper–it lasted another half century and then some. Still, once Brooklyn was subsumed into Greater New York it could not compete with the papers across the East River.

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle building stood in what is now Cadman Plaza.

The Eagle continued performing its yeoman service documenting local and national events. It was so successful that it eventually outgrew its original building and moved into a new facility in what is now Cadman Plaza. For those who know Brooklyn, the building you see above stood where the New York State Supreme Court building is today, across the street from the post office. The paper coverage was especially good during the Great War, which is fortunate given that the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Governors Island military base, and New Jersey piers shipping men and armaments across the Atlantic were all with a stone’s throw of Eagle offices. The paper continued doing well until, like the rest of Brooklyn, it became victim to Brooklyn’s decline and the mass exodus to the suburbs that took place after the Second World War. In its final edition the editors explained that the paper fell victim to the “Manhattan Pattern” that had been underway “since Brooklyn became part of New York City.” Indeed as the paper noted in that editorial sixty-one years ago today, the papers was always a step-child compared to Manhattan’s more privileged status within the municipal infrastructure. That’s true, but the Eagle’s demise was due also to trends taking place in the publishing industry at the time; many dailies were either going away or consolidating, a victim to the rise of television, frequent newspaper strikes, suburbanization, and other issues.

Brooklyn became a lesser place when the Eagle shut down. Even worse, the borough is saddled with the monstrous eyesore of a building that took its place when the Eagle building was then down. When the Brooklyn Dodgers finally broke through and won the World Series that October the Eagle was sadly not there to cover it. In a cruel irony, the iconographic headline “THIS IS NEXT YEAR” celebrating the Dodgers’ win appeared in the October 5, 1955 edition of the New York Daily News.

(image/Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. “Brooklyn Daily Eagle.” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1903. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e3-f806-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99)