CBH Talk | Capturing Brooklyn’s Gilded Age
The Gilded Age is often remembered for its mansions and millionaires — J. P. Morgan, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt. Our collective imagination, reinforced by popular portrayals like HBO’s The Gilded Age, lingers in those ornate ballrooms and formal portraits. But photographer George Bradford Brainerd captured a vastly different side of that era: street vendors, dockworkers, and ordinary Brooklynites, who lived a far grittier existence in a city on the cusp of change.
Using an ingenious handheld camera which he invented a full decade before George Eastman’s Kodak made photography accessible to the public, Brainerd’s images broke from the formal conventions of the era and documented the humanity often left out of Gilded Age narratives.
Join authors Erik Hesselberg (Candid New York: The Pioneering Photography of George Bradford Brainerd) and Esther Crain (The Gilded Age in New York) as they show Brainerd’s remarkable work and discuss the Brooklyn he captured on the brink of modernity.
Above images from the George Bradford Brainerd photograph collection, Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History. Clockwise from top: two women and a boy skating in Prospect Park, circa 1875, BRAI_0239; woman with bucket of bark, circa 1875, BRAI_0236; soap fat man, circa 1875, BRAI_0234
Participants
Erik Hesselberg is the author of Candid New York: The Pioneering Photography of George Bradford Brainerd. Hesselberg has been writing about the Connecticut River for 30 years, first as an environmental reporter for the Connecticut-based Middletown Press, and later as executive editor of Shore Line Newspapers in Guilford, CT. While he was President of the Middlesex County Historical Society, he developed the award-winning exhibit, A Vanished Port, about the colonial port of Middletown and its connection to the slave economy of the Caribbean Islands. His first book is Night Boat to New York; Steamboats on the Connecticut 1815-1932. Grandson of the Oscar-winning actor Melvyn Douglas, (born Melvyn Hesselberg) Erik also writes about the history of entertainment and popular culture.
Esther Crain is an author, historian, and native New Yorker. In 2008 she launched the website Ephemeral New York, where she writes and publishes stories every week that explores the city’s past. Her second book, The Gilded Age in New York, 1870-1910, has made Esther a popular source for information on Gotham during the Gilded Age. Esther speaks regularly on topics relating to New York City history, and she conducts historical walking tours of Riverside Drive, Ladies Mile, the Bowery, Gilded Age Fifth Avenue, and many more of New York’s hidden pockets and little-known corners.
