Pratt Prof Expounds Heights Architectural History

I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and simply say he’s exaggerating. Long Island was populated–sparsely, yes, but with villages and farms and homesteads–as early as the late 1600s. There are families in Suffolk county that are some of the oldest in the country. What is considered Brooklyn today was in fact a thriving cluster of villages, situated as they were to facilitate trade and commerce between the farms stretching eastward and the growing city across the river. Brooklyn proper (today’s downtown, the Heights, Dumbo, Vinegar Hill, Wallabout, and Fort Greene) was already an established port village by the mid-18th Century. All except what surrounded the ferry landing were mostly frame houses and small farms, but it had a population of about six thousand by the turn of the 19th Century. It is true that growth did not accelerate in earnest until the 1820s, but like the growth of New York City, that coincided with the building and completion of the Erie Canal. By the time Brooklyn incorporated as a city in 1834, it was already well on it’s way to becoming a metropolis, and by the 1850s, it was becoming one of America’s largest cities. Think there’s a lot of development going on now? The Brooklynite of the 1840s would call this a snail’s pace!