From a 1911 lithograph of Columbia Street (photo by Flatbush Gardener)

January 18, 2009
Recently Casey Baltes unearthed a remarkable artifact of Columbia Street history while sifting through the Brooklyn Public Library's online cache of old Brooklyn Eagle clippings. One hundred and twenty two years ago (almost to the day), an intrepid Eagle reporter going by the byline "E.R.G." traveled the length of Columbia on a comparably chilly day. What he recorded was a bit of a flourish, a mix of poesy and taxonomy, but it does serve as a counterpoint to what the street became, and what was lost after Robert Moses dropped the BQE in our midst, containerization made stevedoring obselete, and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel split Red Hook into two.

Titled "Contrasts of a Highway," the story--written at the height of the Eagle's influence (under the editorship of St. Clair McKelway)--is less documentary journalism than impressionistic meditation. The author, clearly a transplant from Chicago, likens the disparity between the street's termination points to the Illinois River of the late nineteenth century, which meandered from bucolic country stream to urban cesspool.

Back in 1887 Columbia Street officially began at Fulton Street near the base of the still young Brooklyn Bridge and continued unobstructed to the docks of Red Hook. Though the street has been renamed Columbia Heights between Fulton and Pierrepont, it still makes the steep climb up to the Promenade "at an increasing grade calculated to make horses [now joggers and Jehovah's witnesses] pant."

The BQE makes it difficult to imagine how grungy, dock level Furman Street related to Columbia above, but there is no doubting that the "swell" homes have survived far better than the working class neighborhoods south of Atlantic Avenue:

There is mosaic on the flooring; there are magnificent hanging lamps in the corridor, of which glimpses are caught by the observers when the door of the hall is opened; there are bay windows and side windows; there are massive door plates of hammered brass; there are curtains of rich damask looped up artistically with watteauish ribbons of the popular yellow.

Gardens stood atop the warehouses of Furman Street, hiding the commerce below and providing the pretense of nature in the city: "The inhabitants of the Heights are compelled to see the sky, which so few men ever look at. Here it is constantly before them, with all the changes of cloud forms, and the exquisite chiaroscuro of sunlight and shadow upon the masses of cumuli, and the fretwork and fairy penciling of faint cirri, and the great bars, crimson and gold, of stratocumulus."

Columbia picks up again at Joralemon Street, where a short segment is now orphaned by the modern expressway curving inward on its way to Cobble Hill. The video above shows this stretch, a hidden treasure of the Heights now called Columbia Place. For the author of the Eagle article, this block marked the boundaries of civilization, for "Columbia street south of Atlantic avenue is another matter."

Columbia between Atlantic and Hamilton are the familiar borders to our unnamed neighborhood and the bookstore stares upon the commercial docks that have operated here uninterrupted for centuries. But in 1887 Freebird's lot would not have had such an unhindered view. Instead the inhabitants looked on to a mirror image of shops and stoops. Until the city destroyed the area during the 1970s after an abandoned sewer line caved in and destablized the surrounding buildings, homes and businesses lined the western side of Columbia from Atlantic to Degraw, and over to Van Brunt (which then began at Atlantic not at Degraw as it does now) along the forgotten blocks of Sedgwick and Irving.

For our Eagle reporter this corridor warrents little attention: "Beyond the casual fact that there seemed to be an unusual number of candy stores, I observed nothing specially remarkable until I crossed Hamilton." Perhaps the January snow obstructed his view of the 43 saloons that lined the route.

What piqued his interest to the south was a "shantytown": "But now that Columbia street has opened its wealth of interesting facts to my astounding gaze, I am free to confess that I think that shanty towns must prevail very largely in communities where there is a formidable percentage of Irish population."

This Irish population lived in poorly constructed shelters made of "iron roofing and coarse planking," hinting at squalor:

The rusty stovepipe wandering in uncertain elbows around the ramshackle structure; multitudinous materials of the roof, held in their place by a choice of assortment of cobble stones; the absence of windows facing towards Columbia street; the peculiar arrangements for catching the rain water, and the tumble down appearance of the outer porch or hallway.

Compare that with the projects that dominated the same spot decades later as a solution to poverty. Quickly demonized as a failure of liberalism that spawned a new brand of urban blight, they now are a quiet backdrop for Manhattanites busing it to Ikea. An experimental farm now harkens back to when livestock roamed the Red Hook streets, caught by our intrepid reporter:

From the peculiar sounds that came from the wing of Honest Mike's villa I know that there were hogs in the calm enjoyment of their litter and their swill. Every hog I saw along the line of Columbia street, including the heroine of the ranges, was of a superior breed. They were either Chinese hogs or Berkshires or a cross breed between the two. The goats were of the true Harlem breed...The ducks that waddled on the ice in the road, or quacked vehemently under the shadow of a shanty wall at the sea end of Columbia street, were not common ducks, but of the genuine Muscovy variety. The dogs were sporting dogs, not curs, and had every appearance of being well supplied with bones.

In the end our Eagle reporter refuses to pass judgment on these humble folk, caught in the shadow of Columbia's northern heights: "I believe that the citizens of Shantytown, barring the dirt are living more natural, honest and comfortable existences than if each family had three rooms in a lofty tenement of the finest brick and terra cotta." His praise of Red Hook's isolated charms, set apart from the city and its myriad temptations and conveniences, could have been written by a Corcoran agent.

The salt grass may have been paved over, but what contemporary local could disagree with the Eagle's closing sentiment?: "There is dirt in Shantytown, there is sluttishness, but I am satisfied there is much material comfort and some undoubted superiority of moral feeling."

--Peter Miller