Blog posts by Deborah

Vanderveer Park: When Flatbush Was a Suburb

Deborah,

Vanderveer Park entrance sign at Flatbush Avenue and Avenue F, with a few houses in the background and a one-horse shay, 1894. NEIG_0905, Brooklyn Daily Eagle photographs, Center for Brooklyn History
The last quarter of the nineteenth century brought rapid changes to many parts of Brooklyn, not least to the town of Flatbush and its environs. Flatbush (from the Dutch vlacke bos, flat forest or wooded plain) was one of the original 6 towns making up the city of Brooklyn, and became part of that city in 1894. Four years later Brooklyn would become part of…

From Castle Keeps to Community Spaces: The Evolution of Brooklyn’s Armories

Deborah

Three new buildings for Brooklyn … Harper’s Weekly, August 9, 1890, p. 616
Walking the urban landscape of New York, one comes upon buildings of different styles and periods—one of the great joys of living in an older city. Even in this wildly varied landscape the armories stand out. One can walk down a row of modest apartment houses and, turning the corner, confront one of these massive structures looming like an apparition from the middle ages. I had never seen an armory until I moved from the flat sprawl of my western city to Brooklyn, and at first had…

The mysterious affair of Stiles

Deborah,

 

Brooklyn Collection.
Editor’s note: New evidence has come to light to definitively identify our dapper statuette in the Brooklyn Collection. I am still delighted he came to us to provoke a deep dive into the fascinating life of Henry Reed Stiles but he is an altogether different author, William Makepeace Thackeray. We extend thanks to Joshua J. Friedman for discovering excellent examples of other statuettes from the same mold. Our example has the name burnished off but others, for example this one at the Boston Athenaeum, have a clear label. Some…

Rambunctious Brooklyn boy falls for bridge

Deborah,

Sunset behind the Brooklyn Bridge – Photo: Brooklyn Collection
  Bill Powers - photographer, writer, theater director and filmmaker - has donated 125 of his photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge to the Brooklyn Collection chronicling his 47-year love affair with the iconic structure. To accompany those materials he also recorded an interview with BPL’s Our Streets, Our Stories oral history project about growing up in Brooklyn. His stories describe a Park Slope very different from its quiet gentility today. The Bridge as…

"Let Me Make This Perfectly Clear...": Photo Retouching in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Deborah

Radio tribute to Brooklyn - Photo: Brooklyn Collection
Back in the days of analog (film) photography, there was a lag, serendipitous or frustrating depending on how you looked at it, between taking a photo and seeing the result. Once the prints were in hand, shuffling through them brought the realization of joyful accidents and unforeseen failures, like seeing a friend's portrait that seemed quite right when taken and in the print she sprouts a lamppost from her head. Now, with the advent of digital photography, we can…