Brooklyn: The Once and Future City Audiobook (Free)

An unprecedented background of Brooklyn, told through its areas, buildings, and the people who made them, from the first seventeenth hundred years to today

America’s many storied urban underdog, Brooklyn has become an internationally recognized brand in latest decades-celebrated and scorned among the hippest locations in the world. In Brooklyn: The Once and Long term Town, Thomas J. Campanella unearths long-lost threads from the metropolitan past, informing the rich background of the rise, fall, and reinvention about Brooklyn: The Once and Long term City of 1 from the world’s most resurgent cities.

Spanning generations and neighborhoods, Brooklyn-born Campanella recounts the creation of places familiar and lengthy forgotten, both built and never realized, bringing alive the individuals whose dreams, visions, rackets, and schemes forged the town we realize today. He will take us through Brooklyn’s background as homeland of the Leni Lenape and its transformation by Dutch colonists into a dense slaveholding region. We find out about British émigré Deborah Moody, whose city of Gravesend was the 1st founded by a woman in America. We see how wanderlusting Yale dropout Frederick Regulation Olmsted used Potential customer Recreation area to anchor an open space program that was to reach back to Manhattan. And we witness Brooklyn’s emergence being 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 battle to produce Jamaica Bay the world’s largest deepwater seaport, as well as the star-crossed urban renewal, open public casing, and highway projects that battered the borough in the postwar period. Campanella reveals how this immigrant Promised Land drew a huge number, fell sufferer to its social anxieties, yet proved resilient enough to reawaken as a multicultural powerhouse and global image of metropolitan vitality.