We’re back for our second season! Didn’t know we were going to have a second season? Didn’t know we even had a first season? Neither did we! We’ll get into our absence in a future episode, but in the meantime, we decided to kick things off live this summer down in Industry City with a good friend of the podcast: Henry Stewart.

You might remember Henry from our episode How Bay Ridge Became Bay Ridge. We sat down at Barrows Intense Ginger for another boozy book discussion, this time about Henry’s latest book: The Streets of Brooklyn, a compilation of late-1800s pedestrian walks and observations by a mysterious author known only as E.R.G.

So join us as we explore Henry’s new book… and the history of pedestrian Brooklyn from Bay Ridge to Vinegar Hill in the years after the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty. We’ll discover the origins of all crime, insult Manhattan, complain about dodgy biblical artifacts, and learn how Brooklyn aristocrats were superior to French botanists. Welcome back to the podcast, folks!

Audio Bookmarks

Show Transcript

Dan. Hello there and welcome to Radio Free Bay Ridge, your hyperlocal progressive podcast, focusing exclusively on Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. My name’s Dan and I am so happy to be back. We have a brand new season coming up for you all. Talks with progressives in the neighborhood, explorations and origins of various groups, discussions on civics, analyses, all the things you’ve come to know and love from us since… wow, 2017. We’re gonna get more into all of that, but today we’re gonna give you a special live episode that happened early this summer at Barrow’s Intense Ginger in Industry City, where we sat down with our good friend Henry Stewart, who just released his brand new book: The Streets of Brooklyn.

You might remember Henry and his book How Bay Ridge Became Bay Ridge, which we interviewed him about at the Owls Head Wine Bar. We’ll talk more about the return of the podcast and what that means and our plans for the future. But first, mix yourself a cool drink, sit down, relax, and let’s talk about The Streets of Brooklyn.

*ambient bar noises*

Dan. Hello, hello! Hey everyone. If you are here for a book launch about historic Brooklyn, you’re in the right place. If you’re just here for drinks… enjoy it anyway.

Henry. Get ready for a lecture about historic Brooklyn.

Dan. Alright, so quick introductions. My name is Dan. I will be interviewing Henry, who is right over here, over his new book right over there. *applause for Henry* Yeah. There are so many books. We’ll get into those books in just a second. But The Streets of Brooklyn is on the far right. Grab it. Henry, are you doing autographs at the end of this?

Henry. Absolutely not.

Dan. No autographs. *laughter*

Henry. Some. Some autographs.

Dan. Alright, so I guess we’ll start. I’m Dan, I’m the host of Radio Free Bay Ridge. And I’ve interviewed Henry once before for that book over there: How Bay Ridge Became Bay Ridge. It’s weird that I’ve done this twice.

Henry. And many more times, I’m sure.

Dan. So, Henry, we know each other pretty well, I think, having interviewed you before. But you’ve published many books, done deep dive articles about the history of Brooklyn. Before we dig into the latest book, The Streets of Brooklyn, maybe you could give everyone a little bit of background about who you are and why we should care about what you have to say about Brooklyn?

Henry. Hey everybody. Thank you for coming out tonight. Yeah, so I’m a journalist by profession. I’ve been a journalist for about 15 years. And I started to get into the history of Brooklyn when I discovered that the Brooklyn Eagle archives had been digitized. So suddenly there was this searchable database of primary source materials, that are a slog to go through, but can yield many books. So I started doing that for some websites and then I started compiling the stuff that I had done into physical, tangible books.

Is that good?

Dan. Yeah, that’s acceptable. Right?

So you have a couple here, like True Crime Bay Ridge, More True Crime Bay Ridge. How Bay Ridge Became Bay Ridge. You jump now, it’s The Streets of Brooklyn. You’re expanding out!

Henry. Yeah, I didn’t want to pigeonhole myself in Bay Ridge. ‘Cause you know, a lot of people don’t know Bay Ridge or respect Bay Ridge, so I wanted to… *Booing from the crowd* Agreed! But I wanted to prove my, you know, cred, in the larger borough wide history scene.

What is “The Streets of Brooklyn”?

Dan. Awesome. So let’s get right into The Streets of Brooklyn.

You handed me an advanced copy. It says “not for resale” which just increases its value. You handed it to me about a month and a half ago. And I think the first thing that I really noticed was… I was looking for the “by Henry Stewart” on the front and it says “by E.R.G.” Who’s E.R.G. and, and why did you steal their work?

Henry. Right. So most of the books that you’d see over here are books that I wrote. The Streets of Brooklyn is a book that I edited. It’s a collection of 28 newspaper columns from the 1880s by a columnist who somewhat mysteriously signed his columns “E.R.G”.

And so I typed them all out, which was time consuming work. And then, they are heavily annotated by me to explain all of the institutions and people and places that no longer really exist so that you fully understand what it is that he said.

Dan. ERG, was that common for columnists at the time? Like wouldn’t they just sign their names or…?

Henry. No, it was, it was pretty common. The Brooklyn Eagle usually ran little items that were bylined. They ran stories from other newspapers around the country, and around the world even. But at the time, their columnists mostly signed their columns with their initials.

There were, one or two, who actually signed their names. And there were a few that went by pseudonyms. One of them was “Saunterer” who wrote “Walks About the City”. “Recluse”, I think was one of them. But most of them would sign with their initials.

Discovering E.R.G.

Dan. So I do wanna talk about E.R.G., and we’re gonna get into who E.R.G. is and just how weird this guy is. But one thing that really struck me is how different he is from every other walking narrative I’ve read. You expect a normal walking tour, and it’s like: here’s a building. And then we go to the next block and here’s a building. And here’s a park, and here’s the history of the park. E.R.G. is extremely different, to put it lightly.

How did you first find this guy’s work?

Henry. I first came across E.R.G. in 2017. I had been working on a blog post about the history of Shore Road, which became the Shore Road chapter in “How Bay Ridge Became Bay Ridge”. And I was just trying to read anything and everything from the past to get a sense of how Shore Road was different back then and how and why it changed.

And I came across an E.R.G. column that he had written. He takes a long walk from his home in Southern Brooklyn and walks all the way down Third Avenue and then Second Avenue and then Shore Road. And I was really impressed by it ’cause it was so full of detail. It was so vivid and it was so well written that I ended up using almost the entire thing. Probably 2000 words. There are several pages in “How Bay Ridge Became Bay Ridge” that belonged to E.R.G.

But you know, the “E.R.G.”, it was a little mysterious. Sort of distinctive. And I just sort of filed that away. E.R.G… great column. Really talented guy.

And then it was a couple years later my wife had bought me a copy of Gowanus by Joseph Alexiou… because she correctly guessed that that was something that I would want to read. *laughter* And about halfway through, he quotes the Brooklyn Eagle. This description of the Gowanus Canal, and he’s like, “and it’s by ERG”. And I was like, “I know who ERG is! *laughter* He wrote that great column about Shore Road.” And so then I was like, “Oh, this is actually a person who wrote a bunch of columns.”

And I started digging into it and dug up the 28 columns that are reprinted here in the book. Some of which involved physically going through every issue of the Brooklyn Eagle from that time period because the text might be smudged or torn, and E.R.G. doesn’t always clearly read in the search function. So I had to go in and do it manually. But here we are.

Dan. Yeah. I imagine E.R.G. probably came up with a lot of false positives as it’s just three random letters

Henry. Yeah.

Dan. So other than how interestingly he writes (and again, we’re gonna get into that), out of all of the other columnists in this time period, why does he deserve a book compilation?

Henry. Well, he certainly sets himself apart from his contemporary columnists. He is very smart. A beautiful writer. And he really captures the living details of Brooklyn at that time in a way that no one else was. Most of the columns from this time period, which is 1886 and 1887, most of his fellow columnists at the time were pretty dull. And their work does not stand up today. But E.R.G.’s, I would say certainly does.

And why it’s a book? That’s because, essentially, I think it already was a book. He was writing these columns around a central thesis. There’s a through line. So it didn’t require a lot of creativity or invention from me to shape it into a book. It already was a book. I just had to literally turn it into one.

The Streets of “The Streets of Brooklyn”

Dan. So what kind of streets are in this book? Like where did E.R.G. walk in the 1880s? *Henry reaches toward his book* Ah, there we go. We got a reading, going through the table of contents! *laughter*

Henry. *laughing* Yeah, go to the table of contents here. He starts in Brooklyn Heights and Downtown Brooklyn, which is where Brooklyn itself sort of begins.

And then spreads out to the developing districts at the time, what we would now call Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Park Slope, and what he calls the Hill District: modern day Fort Green and Clinton Hill.

And then he goes back to the city center. There’s Sands Street, there’s Hicks Street, there’s Fulton Street, there’s Clinton Street, there’s Myrtle Avenue, there’s Washington Street, Smith Street, Fifth Avenue, Lafayette Avenue, Henry Street, et cetera, et cetera. That’s not all of them!

A Changing Brooklyn

Dan. You, you start off the book, not with E.R.G., but with Walt Whitman who was writing like 20 years earlier?

Henry. Yeah, 20 to 40.

Dan. Whitman writes, “Keep your woods O Nature, and the quiet places by the woods, Keep your fields of clover and timothy, and your corn-fields and orchards, Keep the blossoming buckwheat fields where the Ninth-month bees hum;”.

And then you go right to an E.R.G. quote, which I think really illustrates, like, how this guy kind of writes, which is: “Not one pedestrian a thousand has the eyes for the things around him.”

So I guess my question is: between Whitman in 1867 and E.R.G. in 1886, what had changed in Brooklyn?

Henry. The big historical context here is that the Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883. It had been under construction for decades, but it finally opened and ushered in an era of freer exchange for people and commerce between New York and Brooklyn, which at this point had still not unified to form the five boroughs of New York City. They were distinct cities.

And so these columns are written three to four years after the Brooklyn Bridge has finally opened. And it’s a time of great transformation in Brooklyn. Aside from the original colonial settlements of the 17th century, the big changes in Brooklyn were centered around transportation.

The first was in the 1820s when Robert Fulton’s steam ferry started going between New York and Brooklyn, making that trip easier than the old rafts… or whatever they were using. *laughter* And then sixty years later when they opened up the bridge. I found this report written in 1887. It said the year before, in 1886, 4,000 new buildings had been built. And that year, in 1887, another 4,000 buildings had been built.

So Brooklyn was very quickly spreading ou. That’s why suddenly, Park Slope was a thing. It’s a time of colossal transformation as opposed to Whitman’s time, which was kind of, you know…

Dan. Bucolic?

Henry. A bit. I mean, it was still a city. There were still streets and businesses and people, but not on the scale that it was when E.R.G was writing. I think the difference in population is like, fourfold or something.

The Most Changed Brooklyn Streets

Dan. So each one of the chapters in this book is a column in its entirety. And E.R.G. walks one end of a street to the other… most of the time. Sometimes he’s like, “I can’t be bothered with this part of the street”, and he just gives you his judgment on the rest of it.

But you’ve annotated every street. And every time he mentions a building or a lot, Henry, you’ve researched what that building is, where it was. Because E.R.G. isn’t really doing a walking tour, he is not telling you, “This specific corner is where this beautiful building is.” Because at the time, anyone could just walk down there and look at the buildings! You did that research. So what street do you think has changed the most from E.R.G.’s time?

Old (And Older) Sands Street

Henry. I would say there are two pretty good candidates. One of them would be Sands Street, which is funny because Sands Street has this notorious reputation from the early 20th century for alcohol and sex. It was a hotbed of gay sex… but that’s *laughter* after E.R.G.’s time.

But I did have to look that up. The reason for it was, they had moved the gate to the nearby Navy Yard. The gate to the Navy yard used to be on York Street. And then, sometime in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, they moved it to Sands Street. And so all of the liquor stores closed on York Street and moved to Sands Street! So if you were a sailor at the Navy Yard, you could just walk out the gate and all the vices that you wanted were right there in front of you.

I think that example is funny because Sands Street has this reputation that is now totally gone, ’cause Sands Street today is either taken up by highway infrastructure or public housing. So none of that period of Sands Street history remains.

But also, none of E.R.G.’s time on Sands Street exists either. It was once one of the most important streets in Brooklyn. It’s where a lot of historic families in the 19th century had settled. By E.R.G.’s time it had already changed, but remnants of that past remained. So that’s his tour of Sands Street.

I mean, almost all of the streets have changed, you know, right? There’s a chapter where he walks down Flatbush Avenue, when Flatbush was still a semi-rural village, and not the densely populated urban center of today.

The Cliffs of Furman Street

Henry. But I think another great example is Furman Street, which is the westernmost block in Brooklyn Heights that runs along the waterfront. Today, on one side, it is the different modules of Brooklyn Bridge Park. On the other side, it’s the cantilevered section of the BQE with the promenade on top.

But in E.R.G’s time it was a working waterfront. So the west side of the street was all storehouses offloading goods from ships that would dock in Brooklyn. And on the east side it was homes and businesses to cater to that working waterfront. None of that exists anymore.

Dan. Did Furman Street at that time still accommodate for the slope? It’s a big change in elevation. How did buildings at the time accommodate that?

Henry. Furman Street’s a very funny street, especially historically, because the next street over is Columbia Heights, which is one of the toniest, fanciest blocks in Brooklyn Heights (and always was). And it’s next-door neighbors with this rough and tumble workingman’s street.

But because of the differential in height, they were very separated, both spatially, culturally, and psychically. There’s a really great novel from the early 20th century called The Harbor by Ernest Poole, and I think one of the very first scenes is this little girl who lives on Columbia Heights with her family. She’s playing in their garden, and all of a sudden a hole opens up in the garden and this man sticks his head out with a mustache and laughs. She screams, and then he disappears. *laughter*

The reason that was possible is because the gardens on Columbia Heights, at least the houses on the west side of the street, were literally on the roofs of the tenements on Furman Street.

Dan. I remember E.R.G. harping about this one guy who has a telescope in his “garden”, but it’s actually on top of a factory!

Henry. Actually, on Furman Street, there was an observatory. I could find that it existed, but I couldn’t find any details about… like, whywas there an observatory? Who owned this thing? No one seems to have cared at the time, so they didn’t write it down. So I couldn’t tell you… except it’s on a map.

E.R.G’s Favorite Street: Clinton Street

Dan. Did you actually walk any of E.R.G.’s routes doing your research? Starting where he started, with the book open?

Henry. I didn’t do it with the book open in front of me, but I definitely walked all the places that he was writing about. One very intentional trip I made was down Clinton Street because it’s one of his favorite streets.

And so I did the walk from one end of Clinton to the other. It starts in Brooklyn Heights and it ends in Red Hook. That’s a street that physically remains the same as it was. There have been like modernizations of some of the brownstones and things on that block, but for the most part, you are seeing these 19th century homes the way, more or less, that they would’ve appeared to E.R.G.

But what you don’t really get is that the experience of walking down the street is very different now than it was for him, and not just because of the cars and yuppies. Clinton Street was for promenading. so all of the prettiest girls in Brooklyn would stroll down Clinton Street. And he thought it was such an agreeable, pleasant, positive experience.

And not that the people walking down Clinton Street today are ugly… *laughter*. Uh, some of them are, I guess. But they’re not out for strolls, intending to be seen. They’re people hurrying from point A to point B. So even though the buildings are the same the experience is very, very different.

How E.R.G. Got Started: Sackett Street

Dan. It’s funny that you mentioned the girls. He harps on that a lot. He has a whole section where he describes how homely Manhattan girls are. *laughter*

But he started off really simply. He starts off on his own street. Does it seem to you that he intended to make these columns into what would become a book? Or do you think like he just called the newspaper up and was like, “I have something to say about my street!” And then all of a sudden, it got popular?

Henry. He had started writing for The Eagle before the columns that appeared in this book. He had been writing a lot about parks, Prospect Park especially. And then he profiled a painter who lived on Sackett Street. He wrote about a vocational school in Greenpoint. He was writing about whatever.

And then, the column about the long walk that ends in Bay Ridge, which ends my book… that walk precedes his Street Profiles project. I don’t know, maybe it was that long walk, walking around Brooklyn and this surrounding towns. Maybe it inspired him to take a closer look at his own street, which was Sackett Street, and write a profile of it.

A lot of his Sackett Street profile is just… kids playing. Which is really fascinating. The games that little girls and little boys played, and the schemes to steal peaches from the tree that overhangs the sidewalk. But I imagine that column must have been popular, or at least well received, and the editor was like, “Hey, do another one of those!”

Getting Popular: Court Street and Ham’s Shoes

Henry. And he just kept going. There are 28 chapters in this book, which constitute all of his street profiles. There is a suggestion in one of them, I think it’s the Court Street chapter, where E.R.G. says that he thinks there was a rumor that he was going to Court Street soon, and that all of the shopkeepers intentionally put fancy things in their windows to make them look better than they were.

I think one of the stores claimed to have Ham’s shoes. Noah’s son Ham. His shoes, discovered on Mount Ararat. And they’re really just like from a scarecrow in Bay Ridge that were stolen by someone who escaped from the Inebriates asylum, who sold them for alcohol. *laughter*

But the idea that they would be trying to gussy up their storefronts ’cause they knew E.R.G. was gonna come and write up Court Street eventually… that suggests people were interested in these columns and reading them.

The Gowanus Canal: Hive of Scum and Villainy

Dan. So one of the other things I wanted to mention is something E.R.G. mentions in every other column. He absolutely goes off on this. I wonder if anyone can kind of guess, in the 1880s, what’s the one thing in Brooklyn you think E.R.G. hated? This guy loves Brooklyn. What’s the one thing in Brooklyn you think he hated?

*Shouts from the audience* Trolleys. Trolleys are a good one…. *more shouts* Horse droppings. He does go off on horse droppings quite a bit… he says “These horse droppings! There’s so much, it’s like a dirt road again! Why pave the roads if you’re not gonna pick it up?” But, nope, it’s not what he hated…

*Shouts about immigrants from the audience* That one we’re gonna go into, absolutely. He was a product of his time. But let me help you out.

It’s the Gowanus Canal. Every other chapter he finds a way to mention it. He could be out in Flatbush, and he’s like, “The Gowanus Canal ruined Flatbush.” So Henry, what do you think is like the most outlandish thing he blames the Gowanus Canal for?

Henry. Yeah, he basically blames the Gowanus Canal for all criminality in Brooklyn. *laughter*

There’s, uh, while he was writing there was this man, I think he was like, uh, an executive at a hat company and he lived in Bed-Stuy and he was murdered by a burglar who he caught like in his house. And E.R.G. blames the Gowanus Canal for that because all criminals in Brooklyn come from the Gowanus Canal. *laughter*

*Laughter and shouts from the audience about criminals spawning from the Gowanus*

And are they return to it right? *laughter* Yeah. No, they’re facilitated by the canal. I mean, the Gowanus Canal at the time was a working waterfront. Every inch of the Gowanus Canal was lined with lumber yards and coal yards and oil yards and tobacco wholesalers, and people getting goods delivered by boat from the canal.

But because these boats are coming from other places, and because you can’t really police or watched them, it’s easy, in his mind, for smugglers to be on those boats. And then hop off the boats. And now you’ve got smugglers in the streets of Brooklyn! He imagined them going as far as Bed-Stuy to murder hat executives. The point of entry for all criminals, for him, is the Gowanus Canal.

But you’re right in almost every chapter, he stumbles on the Gowanus Canal. There is one, I think it’s Bond Street… I don’t really know the geography of Brooklyn. *laughter* I think it’s Bond Street that runs like right next to the canal. And so he walks along, and he criticizes every single business that he encounters along the way because they keep their goods piled up in the street.

He’s angry because these are public streets and you can’t block them. They’re being used for private purposes. And he names them, one by one. Oop! Then there’s this lumberyard and all their wood is in the street! And then there’s this coal yard and all their coal is in the street.

Dan. He starts off just criticizing the industries. But as the columns go on, his Gowanus rage increases and becomes more outlandish. I think like near the end, he just suggests filling it in, and says if you fill in the Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn will return to like the best it can possibly be.

Henry. I mean, he was probably right.

Dan. I mean, we could have had no Gowanus Canal today if he had just gotten his way. ‘Cause he has all these little moments, where at first he’s just describing his streets, but then he starts like having pet projects.

Henry. *laughs* Right.

Dan. Later in his columns, he starts getting politic. Saying things like, “I think that we should like have wharfage fees on the Gowanus Canal!” And then I think he demands that Brooklyn get its own Customs House, and that Manhattan’s Customs House (and all of the commerce on Manhattan) is crap. And that Brooklyn’s the ideal dock.

Henry. I think he was right in that Brooklyn was actually getting more goods. You know, it was a busier port than New York was.

But New York had the Customs House, which meant it got the money and the tariffs. And so there was all this power in New York, even though it was really Brooklyn where all of the trade was being done. So he wasn’t wrong. That wasn’t fair. Manhattan was getting its way even if it doesn’t deserve it.

E.R.G.’s Pet Peeves: Smith Street

Dan. Other than the Gowanus Canal, are there any other things that E.R.G. writes about that, when you were annotating it, you said, “Whoah, that’s a weird thing to absolutely hate?” The thing that comes to my mind is that he really doesn’t like boys buying girls ice cream.

Henry. Well, he’s outraged by the obligation of young men to buy ice cream for young women. *Laughter* Specifically, there’s a chapter where he brings it up a a few times… but he keeps kind of circling back to it.

I mean, some of his ideas and outages are funny. There’s a chapter where he describes the merchants of Smith Street who drive their wagons up to Clinton Hill and call on the housewives who live there and tell them about the best produce they have, or the best cuts of meat. And the woman will say, “Great, sure. Bring it by and I’ll give you the money.” And he can’t stand this because women have an obligation to their husbands and their families to learn how to select the best produce on their own! *laughter* They are abdicating their family responsibilities! A whole generation of weak women who don’t even know how to select produce. It’s silly.

Especially 140 years later, there are things to chuckle about. But then… he has these insane etymological beliefs. I think there’s one chapter where he says that everyone who eats fish basically speaks the same language. *laughter* So this is the Native Americans on the East coast. It’s Iceland, Norway, Scotland. All of these people basically speak the same language, and so he’ll investigate native words and try to explain to you what they really mean. E.R.G. will claim, because we see this same word in Iceland, clearly that’s what it means in Algonquin.

Dan. Wasn’t it Wallabout? He was like, “I found a word in Icelandic that sound similar, so I will justify it.”

Henry. I think that there was a Native American settlement called… I mean, I can’t pronounce it, but Marechkawieck or something like that. He breaks apart all the different parts of the word.

So he’ll be like, “Because in Scotland, Rek means this… and in Iceland, Wieck means this…” So, he puts it all together. And he is like, “And that’s how I know that this is what it means.” Very confidently. Several pages of explanation later. And that’s kind of the book at its worst. I would recommend that you just skip those parts. *laughter*

Dan. You literally say that. Right in the footnote that starts that whole section. “You can safely skip these three pages.” *laughter*

E.R.G. the Polymath

Dan. That etymological discourse really shows how bizarre E.R.G. is. He often presents himself as a polymath. There’ll be a tree, and then he’ll be like, “And I know the exact genus of this tree and why it is a superior tree! And Manhattan has shit trees, and Brooklyn has these trees, which is why Brooklyn is superior!” And then he goes off on a botanist’s explanation. You’re I’m thinking, where did he study botany!?

Henry. France! In the introduction, I write, “He possessed deep knowledge of architecture, trees and the history of Brooklyn, and he was well educated and knowledgeable about the arts, quoting Shakespeare and the Mikado when the latter was just two years old.”

His knowledge of architecture is impressive. He’s very detailed. When he finds a building that he likes (or dislikes) he really, really gets into it and describes it to you. It would seem as though he had studied architecture.

He knows a lot about trees. He knows a lot about insects and beetles that are dangerous to trees. *laughter* He knows a lot about birds. He’s a very educated, well-rounded man.

There’s a part about locust trees that were in Brooklyn Heights. E.R.G. says, before it was Brooklyn Heights, it was covered in locust trees. He says in recent times, as in, the 1800s, a commission in France had discovered that locust trees are the best for combating erosion. No one, he claims, really knew this until the French discovered it in the 19th century.

But E.R.G. says that in the 18th century in Brooklyn, somebody was just walking around planting locust trees that prevented Brooklyn Heights from falling over. *laughter* It prevented the erosion and the collapse of Brooklyn Heights because the people who lived in Brooklyn, even going all the way back to the early Colonists, were the smartest, best people, who knew how to prevent erosion before the scientists knew it.

Things Brooklyn Is Better Than

Dan. I wrote down, in my copy of The Streets of Brooklyn, a running shit list of things that E.R.G. thought were inferior to Brooklyn. Not that he hated them, but it’s just that Brooklyn does it better (or is better) than these things.

So first one is: Bostonians. Chicago, as an entire city. French botanists. The Gowanus Canal. New York City, i.e. Manhattan. Genoa, for some reason. I think he says that the Promenade and like Brooklyn Heights does it better than Genoa.

Henry. Yeah. I think it’s Park Slope, because he imagines, what if Park Slope had been developed by the Italians? It would’ve been terraced. You would have these long staircases going from Fifth Avenue to Prospect Park West. The poor grocers would have to carry their sacks, or bring donkeys up with them. So in Brooklyn, they were smarter to just build it graded.

And then Furman Street, he imagined the Italians would have done a similar thing. It would’ve been terraced rather than having retaining walls.

The Bartholdi Statue

Dan. It keeps going. Thackeray, randomly, he thinks is inferior to Brooklyn for some reason. Sparrows as a whole are birds that he dislikes. Politicians in general, and especially Brooklyn politicians who he thinks don’t deserve Brooklyn. Modern fireworks operators, he really despises. The Statue of Liberty, which he never calls by name. He calls it, what does he call it? The…

Audience member shouting: Is it because she’s French?

Dan. Yeah, I think it’s ’cause it’s French, but he’s been to France, right?

Henry. He calls it the Bartholdi statue.

Dan. And he says that there are some places that have a good view of it, but Brooklyn has a bad view of it, so he doesn’t like it.

Henry. It looks okay if you look at it from the Brooklyn Bridge. But pretty much anywhere else, it stinks. *laughter* This was a time when the development of Brooklyn was very low-scale. So you could stand on Flatbush Avenue and see the Statue of Liberty. You could stand on Shore Road and see the Statue of Liberty. It was visible from everywhere, which is why he keeps coming back to it because he keeps seeing the damn thing. *laughter*

There’s a point where he says that they should have put the Statue of Liberty in Prospect Park *laughter* at the top of the tallest hill in Prospect Park, because then You would be looking up at the Statue of Liberty and it would have nothing behind it but sky and it would be majestic and triumphant. And now you’re always looking down at the Statue of Liberty.

Dan. And Jersey.

Henry. Yeah, with Jersey in the background. *laughter*

Dan. So, okay. The last couple of things he hates: cobble stones, which he says are way different than Belgian pavers. Bricks, as in, brick construction in general, he says Americans are inferior at using.

Henry. They don’t know what they’re doin’ with brick!

Dan. And bankers.

Henry. Yeah. But nobody likes bankers.

Blue-Collar Gilded Age Brooklyn

Dan. So despite his education and the fact that he always name drops, he really likes blue-collar Brooklyn. What are some of the blue collar scenes that stuck in your head?

Henry. He travels all over Brooklyn. There’s nothing that will stop him from going wherever he wants. So while he’ll go to Lafayette Avenue and look at all of the fancy villas, he’ll also go to the end of Columbia Street where people are living in shanties and report on the doings of the shanty people.

The Lost History of Cleveland Place

Henry. There weren’t a lot of black people in Brooklyn at this time. That really happens in the 20th century with the Great Migration. But there were isolated communities. There was Weeksville, which E.R.G. doesn’t visit. But one of the most valuable parts of this book, I think, is a section where he visits a street called Cleveland Place. It no longer exists, but was just west of Third Avenue, in the Gowanus neighborhood.

It had two neat rows of houses on either side of the street. And they were all lived in by middle-class black professionals and their families. Journalists, clergymen. The New York Public Library has a photograph of Cleveland Place, which is… interesting. But E,R.G. spends three or four pages on Cleveland Place, visiting the residents and seeing how their white ethnic neighbors harass them and interact with them.

And it’s the only record that anyone seems to have left behind of Cleveland Place. And it was E.R.G. ’cause he was just wandering around, and he was like, “What’s this? Cool.”

The Splitters of Navy Street: Rockwell Place

Henry. He goes to Navy Street. Navy Street had a disreputable reputation. A big part of it was new Italian immigrants and black laborers. But the southern end of Navy Street, for three blocks, had these “respectable” upper class white families on them.

So E.R.G. writes about how it’s kind of embarrassing for the white families. They’ll be at a party and someone will ask “Where do you live?” And they’ll say, “Navy Street.” Then everyone will give them a funny look. And they’ll say, “No, no, no! I live on the part of Navy Street with this respectable family and this respectable family.”

But it turns out, a few years later after this column was written, the white families renamed the southern part of Navy Street to Rockwell Place, which still exists to this day. And the reason that it’s called Rockwell Place is because the residents of that part of Navy Street felt embarrassed being associated with the rest of Navy Street. So I thought that was an interesting bit of history.

Fighting in the Footnotes

Dan. Doing all of your annotation, were there any moments where ERG talks a lot about something, but where you were like, “This guy’s full of shit?”

Henry. There were parts in the footnotes where I was fighting with him, and being like, “You jerk!” that I had to scale back a bit ’cause I didn’t want it to get too balefire-y.

The etymology is definitely the worst part. He is also just sometimes factually incorrect. There was a fort during the Revolutionary times called Fort Sterling and he says it was built by the British. No, it wasn’t. It was built by the Americans. And he says it was on this corner and it’s like, no, it was on this other corner. *laughter*

Dan. Native Americans too though, right?

Henry. On Native Americans, he’s just insane. I mean, he has *laughs* he has like no knowledge of Native Americans and yet very confidently pretends that he possesses all of the information. At one point he is like, “Of course, as everyone recognizes today, the Algonquin and the Aztecs were closely interrelated,” and it’s like, no. Like no one believes *laughing* No one thinks that’s true today!

It’s not like he’s saying “Here’s what people are thinking” or “Here’s an idea that’s gaining some traction.” He says it like, “And now we’ve proven once and for all that the Aztecs and the Algonquins were identical and maintained a highway across the continent to keep in touch! And we all know that Iroquois means ‘Followers of the True Serpent.'” And it’s like, that was one theory in the 19th century. One that wasn’t really widely credited, then or now. *laughs resignedly* But sure, yeah, everyone agrees.

Race Relations in Brooklyn’s Gilded Age

Dan. Other than the stuff that he’s just wrong about, he was a product of his time. To be much more blunt: he was a racist. How did you handle that? Was there anything on the cutting room floor? How did you handle like those moments where he goes… kind of off the rails?

Henry. Textually, I didn’t touch a lot. I changed some whiches to that. I added some commas, I cut some commas. But yeah, he, he, um… he’s definitely racist. *laughter*

I don’t think wanna couch this, not really. He’s definitely racist. But when it comes to black people, he is sort of aloof and condescending rather than vitriolic. There’s a chapter where he meets some black school children and rubs their head and doesn’t understand why they don’t like that. It’s that sort of thing.

He’s very sympathetic to the Irish in their shanties. There’s this long defense where he says, “Sure, they’re living in squalor, but who among us doesn’t hide dirt under our rugs!” So he’s very sympathetic to them.

But the one group that he, that he does not like are the Italians. He thinks they’re foul smelling. They’re the animalistic…

Shout from the back of the bar. They’re not wrong!

Henry. He’s Italian, he can say that. *laughter* E.R.G. thinks that Italians are a threat to the Republic because they cannot be civilized… or, he’s worried that they can’t be. He’s very skeptical of it and he is very worried about the future of the United States because of the Italians.

More shouts from the back of the bar. And look where we’re at!

Dan. Yeah, look where we’re at today. *applause*

E.R.G. in Modern Brooklyn

Dan. You’ve kinda resuscitated E.R.G. with this book. If he actually rose up from the grave and saw Brooklyn today, do you think he would still have so much Brooklyn pride? How do you think he’d interpret modern Brooklyn?

Henry. I don’t think that he would like the ways that Brooklyn has changed. He was a very human-scaled pedestrian, so I don’t think he would like cars or tall buildings. I don’t think he would like that you can no longer walk several miles from the center of Brooklyn to the countryside.

There’s a whole chapter where he walks to Bay Ridge, and he says the great thing about Brooklyn is that you can just start walking and eventually you wind up in the country and it’s beautiful… Unlike Manhattan where you have to cross a bridge to get somewhere nice.

Dan. Like Brooklyn.

Henry.Right.

Dan. Would he still be prideful of Brooklyn… compared to everywhere else?

Henry. Yeah, probably. Brooklyn has failed us in all these ways, but it’s still vastly superior to Manhattan, Boston, Chicago, the rest of the Midwest, certainly the west…. France.

The Secret Identity of E.R.G. (Probably)

Dan. You’ve been working on this book for how long?

Henry. It was about five years, on and off.

Dan. So you’ve had E.R.G. on your brain for about five years. And now I’m gonna ask the question that’s kind of the elephant in the room… ’cause it’s so awkward saying E.R.G. Do you have any theories on who he was?

Henry. No

[Audience boos]

No, I’m kidding. I do! So I was trying to approach this in different ways. I was looking at people who were buried in Greenwood Cemetery. And there were no pay stubs from the Brooklyn Eagle from the 19th century.

What I eventually settled on was city directories from the time. They were like phone books before phones. I looked at the directories from the years that we’re talking about. And I looked at people with the last initial G and the first initial E. I couldn’t find any journalists living on Sackett Street, which would’ve been a slam dunk. But I did find somebody named Edward Rowland Green, whose address is listed on Henry Street, which was his father’s house.

And so, there is no other candidate that could be E.R.G. It would be weird if such an erudite man was not in the directory. And so really the only candidate would be Edward Rowland Green, even if there are slight differences that create doubt, like his address.

He was a member of the same church that E.R.G. seems to have belonged to. Edward Rowland Green was a bachelor, which E.R.G. says several times that he’s a bachelor. So there were those kinds of small superficial coincidences, so I think it would have to be him.

But Edward Rowland Green was a lawyer. He always appeared in his business dealings as Edward R. Green used all three of his initials the same way that ERG did.

So it would seem to me that Edward Rowland Green, before he started practicing law, dabbled in writing columns for the Brooklyn Eagle, and then set it aside and pursued his law career for the rest of his life. He died a bachelor and was buried next to his parents in Greenwood Cemetery.

Dan. How old would he have been?

Henry. I think he was born in the 1860s, so when he was writing these columns, he would’ve been about 25. At first I thought that E.R.G. would have to be an older person because he writes so much about old Brooklyn and seems really familiar and immersed in that. But I think it was actually that he was getting that information from his father and from his neighbors, because one of the things is how much ERG walks. I mean, to imagine a 65-year-old man like walking 12 miles a day on unpaved country roads seems less likely than a young man doing the same thing, to me.

Dan. *Pointing at an illustration* That’s E.R.G. with a bushy moustache…

Henry. *Correcting* Edward Rowland Green!

Dan. I’m just gonna’ call him Eddie now. *laughter*

The Old Families of Brooklyn: Pierrepont vs Hicks

Dan. So, Eddie really seemed to like the old school Brooklynites. ‘Cause he was growing up as a lawyer, right? His father was reasonably well off, so he probably looked up to those guys. He really paints them as the movers and shakers that made the streets of Brooklyn. When he’s describing these streets, he almost describes it as if they were games of chess between these wealthy titans. One says, “I am putting my street down”, but aha! They were blocked by this other guy… Was that how streets in Brooklyn were laid out?

Henry. There have been colonial settlers in Brooklyn since the 17th century. But none of them really had much of an effect on Brooklyn as it is today until the early 19th century. And that’s when New York is growing and expanding, and there’s a desire for people to get out of Manhattan and maybe move across the river.

And so in the early 19th century, you have these developments starting to take place. These are the men who now have streets named after them, like Hicks, Pierrepont, Joralemon, Remsen. And there are some streets in Brooklyn that are ancestral, that are old native roadways, probably Fulton Street, maybe Myrtle Avenue, a street that no longer exists called Red Hook Lane.

But then in the 1830s, the city of Brooklyn decides to cut up the entire city of Brooklyn into a street grid, and that’s when you get every single street from Brooklyn Heights to Brownsville, from Dumbo to Sunset Park. Every street is drawn out.

But in between those two things, yeah, there was Hicks. Pierrepont. They were farmers. They had big pieces of land and they started to think maybe we could cut these up into lots and sell them to people who could build houses here. And those houses and lots would be placed along streets that they devised. And that’s why those streets are usually named after them.

But yeah, his highest respect is for Hezekiah Pierrepont, who was much smarter than Old Man Hicks and laid his streets out in a different way that capitalized on the breezes in the summer, and the way the air moved in the winter. It was just a much smarter way to build streets and houses than old man Hicks.

Dan. He ascribes to everyone who chose to live in Brooklyn as having a genius level intellect, versus living in Manhattan. So that’s why he has so much respect for the old Brooklynites: they saw the real place to settle, not Manhattan. ‘Cause he describes Manhattan as a fen of fetid bogs and mosquitoes and swamp land and shit washing up on the river. But Brooklyn! Brooklyn has hills… and our shit rolls downhill into the river, as opposed to those Manhattanites who live in a swamp. It’s like we invented hills.

Henry. Well, Old Man Hicks invented the hill!

Obscure Brooklyn Street Trivia from the 1880’s

Dan. I love Eddie’s love of Brooklyn. But at times it gets to be a little much, and gets in the way of the history. He loved Brooklyn so much that one of the through-lines through his columns is that he imagines constantly quizzing politicians and civil servants. He’s thinks every politician should have to go through a Brooklyn street trivia quiz that he made up.

Henry. I thought those were real civil service tests!

Dan. Wasn’t one of them that everyone who wants to run for office in Brooklyn should have to point on a map where #2 Court Street is?

Henry. Number One.

Dan. And it’s because it doesn’t exist, right? It’s all trick questions.

Henry. Yeah. He talks a lot about #1 Court Street, which doesn’t exist. There’s a #2, but on the other side of the street it’s City Hall, what’s now Borough Hall. And then there’s a park, so by the time buildings start on that side of Court Street, it’s already on the other side of the street up to #44. And so the first building on Court Street is #45 rather than #1… which he thinks is a very clever thing… to make sure people know. *laughter*

I think another one is what is the first street to cross Fulton Street?

[Shouts from the audience trying to guess]

Dan. He’s a jerk about it. You have to remember, E.R.G. is being a jerk. It’s the first street to cross.

Henry. When we’re talking about Fulton Street, we’re talking about Old Fulton Street and Cadman Plaza West, which historically were Fulton Street. Middagh Street crosses Fulton and becomes Sands. Jay crosses Fulton and becomes Smith. And that happens for every single street all the way down until you get to… Navy Street.

Great trivia. *laughter*

Dan. I think we should go into a reading to really get a feeling for E.R.G. But I think we’re gonna take a five, ten minute break and let everyone get more drinks, get a little liquored up, and we’ll do a little bit of Q&A and a reading, yeah?

Henry. Sounds good!

Dan. Grab some drinks, guys. We’ll be back in a little bit!

More transcript for the Q&A Session coming in the next few days (It takes a while… sorry!)