For a book that deals so rigorously with the gritty minutiae of its subject, Brooklyn: The Once and Future City has a curiously fantastical feel. Perhaps this is due to the cover image: the ‘steampunk orb’ of Samuel Friede’s Globe Tower. Perhaps it is the map in the book’s endpapers, which resembles those often found in fantasy novels suggesting wonders and horrors – Dead Horse Bay, Luna Park, Battle Hill. How can such places exist within a modern metropolis? Or, as Campanella asks and answers with authority and verve: ‘How did Brooklyn become itself?’
Initially, the book seems to be a straight-forward attempt at a definitive history of the New York borough: an attempt to ‘exhaust a place’, as Georges Perec put it. There are chapters on waterfront trade, aviation, sports, warfare and so on. Each theme is linked to a particular area: the once foul-smelling Barren Island being, for example, ‘the isle of offal and bones’. The book begins in the glacial period and the famous Brownstone are born in the Late Triassic period. Somehow, Campanella succeeds.
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