Brooklyn Returns to Its Pot-Growing Roots

With Brooklyn DA Ken Thompson no longer prosecuting minor marijuana offenses, and Downtown Brooklyn about to get its first pot dispensary, the borough is on the verge of returning to its pot-growing roots.

Before the 1950s, pot was cultivated pretty freely in the city. Just imagine the summer of ’51 — the Dodgers were leading the National League, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses was campaigning for hundreds of miles of urban freeways, and downtown Brooklyn was home to an enormous field of marijuana.

If you read the newspapers that summer, you’d think the city was on the brink of pot-provoked destruction. And New York was cracking down. The General Inspector of the city’s Sanitation Department, John E. Gleason, was leading a well-publicized charge against pot-growing.

That summer, Gleason and his squad of sanitation workers destroyed more than 41,000 pounds of marijuana in the city, rooting it out from vacant lots and illicit farms purportedly run by ne’er-do-well drug kingpins.

In July 1951, The Brooklyn Eagle wrote of one operation: “Probably the most daring exploit of the dope ring was in establishing a “farm” in a lot in the heart of the borough’s projected Civic Center, where 300 pounds of the plant, worth over $10,000, were located and removed.”

Just to be clear, the “projected Civic Center” area with the 10-foot-tall marijuana plants became Cadman Plaza and the Brooklyn War Memorial — which was finished and dedicated just three months later in November of 1951. (After the pot was cleared away, of course.)

But the truth of Brooklyn’s marijuana groves is actually less sensational than you might think. Ben Gocker, senior librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library, told Brokelyn that the pot fields were a remnant of World War II, when hemp was used as a fiber source for industrial rope manufacturing.

But it’s still interesting to consider the parts of Brooklyn once overgrown with weed. “Of 81 localities checked during the last month,” the Eagle then wrote, “plantings of marijuana were found in 35.”

One location was in Williamsburg’s 84 North 4th Street, just around the corner from present-day Blue Bottle and Radegast Hall.

Boerum Hill’s 82 Butler Street was another site, near Smith Street.

Out in the New Lots section of East New York, there was another marijuana farm at the corner of Livonia Avenue and Warwick Street.

But there were dozens more, now lost to history. As Paul F. Ellis — then the United Press Science Editor — wrote in the Eagle, “The weed of marijuana grows wild in millions of vacant lots in various parts of the United States, and looks to be an innocent plant of nature. But it is not.”

White Wings and Dream Stuff [Brooklyn Public Library]
When Weed Grew Wild in Williamsburg [WNYC]
Brooklyn’s Weird Wacky-Tobacky Harvest of 1951 [Brokelyn]

Historical images from the Brooklyn Public Library; satellite images by Google Maps