I was reading a real estate story that dealt with the subject of development sites in New York City and researching covenants and easements, but the topic that really grabbed my attention was the historical description of Brooklyn Heights as a place in the 1800s that had “the advantages of the country with the conveniences of the city.” One of the first thoughts that came to my mind was a recollection of photographing Brooklyn Heights from the South Street Seaport with the Brooklyn Bridge on the left, as seen above (photo credit: Manzo Dakota). It’s hard to imagine that land as “country” when you see all of the buildings on the other side of the East River, so I decided to see what I could find in historical documents.
My starting point for images was the public domain section of the New York Public Library’s Digital Collections. The first example of seeing Brooklyn Heights as “country” is this drawing from 1778 by Archibald Robertson, made on the Brooklyn Heights side looking over the East River to Manhattan, the opposite direction of my photo above. But you can see the rolling grassy hills and trees and not much more, but then again, this is 1778, so that’s not so surprising that it wasn’t developed then.
I guess I need some more perspective here, and wonder: when did Manhattan start to have skyscrapers? I see an initial 315 foot tall wooden tower named the “Latting Observatory” built at 6th Avenue and 42nd Street for the world’s fair in 1853. The “New York World Building” was completed near the Brooklyn Bridge in 1890 and measured 309 feet. The Singer Building, built between 1897 to 1908, went as high as 40 floors, so there were definitely buildings of significant size in Manhattan in the 19th Century while Brooklyn Heights was not yet building its own skyscrapers.
Here’s another view of Brooklyn Heights (from the area, again looking across the river towards Manhattan), this one a print from 1872 published by D. Appleton + Co., which shows the same Brooklyn Heights area as park-like or country with trees and grass and one visible building on the right side.
When one considers how expensive it is to buy property in Brooklyn now, it’s amazing to think that Hezekiah Beers Pierrepont (1768-1838) owned 60 acres and had a mansion in the area which was then called “Clover Hill” and is now Brooklyn Heights. He later decided to subdivide and develop his property, at which point he took out ads in Brooklyn newspapers promoting it as a getaway or retreat from Manhattan, a first suburb of sorts. He became an investor in Robert Fulton’s Steam Ferry Boat Company with the plan to run service for bankers and merchants working in lower Manhattan to come out to their “country” homes in Brooklyn Heights. One can read more about this man and his development of Brooklyn here and here.
Another historical image, this one a print from 1837 by artist J.W. Hill, shows a little more of a suburban feel with buildings and a promenade with a view of boats in the harbor and Manhattan in the distance.
Funny how one little real estate story about developing issues in Brooklyn would lead me down this rabbit hole. To come back to the near-present, I’ll present two more pictures from my own journeys in Brooklyn Heights last fall, one with a view of lower Manhattan from a park in Brooklyn Heights and another with a view of local streets and the higher-up area of the Heights to the right. I can’t say for sure if either of these locations in my photos would have once been Hezekiah Beers Pierrepont’s land, but it’s certainly a world away from grassy hills and “country” living.
