Past and Present: Eastern Parkway, 1920

A look at Brooklyn, then and now.

It’s relatively easy to imagine Brooklyn before the Dutch took over. The land probably looked like undeveloped virgin land anywhere in New York State. There were woodlands, hills and valleys, streams and fields. The Canarsee people who were here when Henry Hudson sailed into Coney Island harbor were primarily hunters and gatherers. Their villages and small agricultural fields did not make much of an impact on the land. Then the Europeans came.

Fast forward several hundred years, and Brooklyn is a city. The land was farmed, and then leveled for development. But as we all know, some parts were developed faster than others. We generally think of the spread of urban Brooklyn to be like a wave washing out into the rest of Brooklyn from its origins in Brooklyn Heights, but that’s not the whole story. There were six original towns in Kings County, not just Brooklyn, and some of those towns had smaller villages, as well. Growth occurred in pockets and spread out, meeting other pockets, and filling in, until the entire city was developed. In general, this took time. But sometimes….

The area around Eastern Parkway is fascinating in this regard. Olmsted and Vaux planned this urban parkway to be a scenic promenade for pedestrians and riders. The wide road, with its service streets, walking paths, medians and highway made its way east from Prospect Park at a time when there wasn’t much out there after you left the park. It was built between 1870 and 1874, long before the neighborhoods along its path existed.

A trip along Eastern Parkway back then was really a trip to the country. The most prominent building on the Parkway, the Brooklyn Museum, didn’t begin construction until around 1896, and it was never finished. The building we know today is only a quarter of the vast planned structure built for the Brooklyn Institute for Arts and Sciences. The Sciences part never made it.

Yes, there were scattered houses and farms along the route, but it would take until the beginning of the 20th century for groups of row houses to be built along the Parkway in Crown Heights, and the large apartment buildings we are familiar with today, near Grand Army Plaza and the Museum weren’t built until the late teens through the early 1930s. The Main Branch of the Library broke ground in 1912, but the design was shelved, then scrapped, and today’s library didn’t open until 1941.

The vintage photograph for today was taken in 1920. Can you believe it? That’s after World War I, and Eastern Parkway is still farms and fields. This picture is amazing. You can see the Beaux Arts masterpiece of McKim, Mead & White’s Institute for Arts and Sciences as a ghostly presence in the background, looming over everything. Behind it to the far left are the trees of Prospect Park, and just behind the museum, on a grassy hill, is the Mount Prospect Reservoir.

Across the wide expanse of Eastern Parkway, across the street from the Institute, the first upscale apartment buildings have gone up, and that area is filling in with buildings. You can make out automobiles traveling along the parkway. Just in front of the Institute, the road going north/south is Classon Avenue. The street running through the center of the photograph, with the trolley car on it, is Franklin Avenue.

Between Classon and Franklin, the plots of land there are filled with a mixture of buildings. There are a few larger wood framed houses, smaller houses and shanties. Some of the houses have enough land around them to support small farms, probably with chickens, goats, and maybe even a cow, as well as a garden. This is even more clearly seen in the plot east of Franklin, in the front of the photograph. Here a small house, with outbuildings and shanties sits in the middle of a field, with a couple of trees.

Some of the small farms had been there for a long time, while other buildings were later, and as the general area of what is now Prospect and Crown Heights developed, many people of lesser means found themselves gentrified out into this area. Some settled between Eastern Parkway and Malbone Street, now Empire Boulevard, building wood framed houses of varying degrees of niceness in the land south of the parkway.

The area soon had a reputation as a no-man’s land of shanties and poverty. This was not good farmland; it was along the rocky terminal moraine that makes up some of the highest land in Brooklyn. Most of the land was owned by some of the largest landowners in Flatbush, but they had just let it lay fallow, as it took too much effort to get anything substantial from the land. The squatters and the poor moved in alongside the legitimate owners.

Newspaper stories on this area were generally of a derogatory nature. This part of Crown Heights was considered a shanty town, populated by poor Irish, Italian and black people who picked out a living on the land, and were a source of amusement and annoyance for the rest of “civilized” Brooklyn. The Eagle would on occasion, send a reporter over in this general area to take down word for word, in whatever colorful dialect their interviewee had, the opinions of one of the people in the area. Of course, whether it was the broken English of an Italian immigrant, or the colorful brogue of an Irishman, or the minstrel show plantation English of a black resident, whatever they said was written in such a way as to both denigrate and amuse.

Although the land was poor farmland, it was valuable land for development, and this photograph was probably taken from the air to show investors or possible purchasers what was available along the growing Eastern Parkway. This photo dates from 1920. All of the farmhouses, shanties, trees and fields in this photo would be gone in less than ten years. Most of them disappeared in five. In their place would rise several large schools and lots of apartment buildings and further east, row houses.

The scrub land shown in this photograph would be leveled of buildings and trees, and the ground graded and divided into buildable lots. Franklin Avenue would soon be built up with four and five story apartment buildings with storefronts lining both sides of the street. Both sides of Eastern Parkway would be lined with six story elevator apartment buildings designed for the middle classes flocking to the area from the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side.

In the short space of twenty years, the land around Eastern Parkway, east of the Brooklyn Museum changed tremendously. First came an unprecedented period of development, as the land along the Parkway and along the parallel and adjacent streets was rapidly developed with apartment buildings. Several large and important schools were built in the shadow of the Institute, including Clara Barton High School and the Bishop McDonnell High School for Girls, now St. Francis De Sales School for the Deaf, built in 1924.

By the mid-1930s, the Mount Prospect Reservoir was completely obsolete, as the city now received its water from upstate. The reservoir was turned over to the Parks Dept. in 1940, and was filled in, and made into a city park. Not much stays the same in Brooklyn, only change. This photograph, a moment in time in 1920, documents that rapid change.

GMAP