Brooklyn History and Culture Blog

How Arthur Miller Found His 'View' By Nathan Ward, Wall Street Journal

2010-12-17T11:03:00.000-08:00

Brando in "On the Waterfront"

How Arthur Miller Found His 'View' By Nathan Ward, Wall Street Journal
Wall Street Journal, January 27th, 2010

A biographical sketch of Arthur Miller's exploration of the Brooklyn waterfront which led to his writing The Hook which then became the "inspiration" for Bud Schulberg's screenplay for On the Waterfront directed by Elia Kazan.(Excerpted from original article.)

In many ways, it is Miller's best-observed work. Not only is the atmosphere based on his own dockside wanderings, but the play's scandalous crux—will Eddie, driven by his attraction to his own niece, do something disastrous?—turns out to be based on a true tale. It was shared with Miller by his friend Vincent "Jim" Longhi, who was then a Red Hook waterfront lawyer like Alfieri, the play's narrator that he inspired.
About a year after Miller's death in February 2005, and a few months before Longhi passed away, I happened to interview the lawyer about the old waterfront. Unlike his "portly" stage likeness Alfieri, Longhi was, at 90, a tall, trim and elegant man. Sitting in his Manhattan law office on lower Broadway, he recalled how his friend Miller, who lived in picturesque Brooklyn Heights in the late '40s, "often thought about that mysterious world of the Brooklyn Italian waterfront. . . . But he being an intellectual, who's gonna talk to him? Nobody." In his autobiography, "Timebends," Miller remembered wondering, on his daily walks, about "the sinister waterfront world of gangster-ridden unions, assassinations, beatings, bodies thrown into the lovely bay at night." But, he was forced to admit, "I could never penetrate the permanent reign of quiet terror on the waterfront hardly three blocks from my peaceful apartment."

That's where Longhi came in. They met during Longhi's 1946 antimob campaign for Congress in Brooklyn's 12th District. (Miller's first great success, "All My Sons," would open later that fall.) "How can I help?" Miller asked the young candidate. "Make a movie!" Longhi answered, and, working with the director Elia Kazan, they tried over the following months to make a waterfront film. Longhi told Miller tales of the criminal docks, and particularly of his great hero, the martyred rebel longshoreman Pete Panto. Miller remembered touring the homes of longshoremen, "tuning my ear to their fruity, mangled Sicilian-English bravura." When Longhi brought Miller down to Red Hook's Columbia Street to show him men lining up to be picked in the morning shape-up, the young playwright was thoroughly shocked. He saw men herded docilely together, "waiting for the hiring boss, on whose arrival they surged forward and formed in a semicircle to attract his pointing finger and the numbered brass checks that guaranteed a job for the day," Miller remembered. Reacting to another visit where men were "tearing at each other's hands" in "a frantic scramble" for the morning's last few work checks, "America, I thought, stopped at Columbia Street."

His script about Longhi's hero, Panto, was called "The Hook," and it might have been made by Columbia Pictures' Harry Cohn had it not been for some changes the studio requested that Miller found untenable. In 1950, reflecting the political climate of the time, Cohn had the screenplay reviewed by the FBI. The studio head offered to greenlight Miller's waterfront story as long as its controlling racketeers were recast as Communists. Miller refused and, according to Longhi, "threw the script into a trunk." (Kazan would soon find another docks project with writer Budd Schulberg—what later became "On the Waterfront." Many regard "A View From the Bridge" as Miller's personal answer to Kazan for his 1952 House Un-American Activities Committee testimony and for making a masterpiece without him.)

Miller first heard the story that became "A View From the Bridge" while on a trip with Longhi to Sicily in 1948. "Longhi mentioned a story . . . of a longshoreman who had ratted to the Immigration Bureau on two brothers," Miller wrote, "his own relatives, illegal immigrants who were living in his very home, in order to break an engagement between one of them and his niece." Longhi told me, "it happened to my client . . . who turned to me and said, 'I'm going to kill so-and-so,' and then it turned out that I figured he must be in love with the kid. And I told this story to Miller and he said, 'What an opera!'"

Read the rest of the article here
Mr. Ward is author of "Dark Harbor: The War for the New York Waterfront," to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in June.

Brooklyn: The Brand By Steven Stern, New York Times, December 15th, 2010

2010-12-17T10:15:00.000-08:00

Illustration by Bruce McCall
Brooklyn: The Brand By Steven Stern, New York Times, December 15th, 2010

By STEVEN STERN
Published: December 14, 2010

For a place selling beer and pulled pork sliders, the Brooklyneer has provoked a lot of controversy. This new bar is dedicated to all things Brooklyn, particularly, the menu declares, the borough’s “newly-emerging food artisans.” There are Brooklyn hot dogs and Brooklyn pickles and Brooklyn whiskey. You can order toast points spread with Boerum Hill-made ricotta and Carroll Gardens-jarred jam, slam oyster shooters with Greenpoint-brewed kombucha.

The problem with the Brooklyneer? It’s in Manhattan. This strikes some as a particularly cynical bit of appropriation: a grass-roots food scene turned into a theme-park facsimile, just a few subway stops away.
The New York food blogs started sniping months before the bar opened. Last month, it inspired a mock-indignant rant in The Daily News, which saw in the new place “the end of Brooklyn cool.”

“We all think it’s pretty hilarious, the amount of press it’s generating,” said Aron Watman, an owner of the Brooklyneer. Mr. Watman and his two partners, Billy Waite and Neena Dutta, claim their motives are pure: they are Brooklyn residents themselves, and merely wanted to share the food and drink they love with the rest of the city. A Brooklyneer, in their lexicon, is “someone who admires Brooklyn.”
Read the rest of the article here.

H. P. Lovecraft's 'The Horror at Red Hook' (1925) (Excerpt)

2010-12-08T21:01:00.000-08:00

H. P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft and Sonia Greene

H.P. Lovecraft' sojourn in Brooklyn was not altogether a happy one. Brooklyn's polygot cauldron of humanity was almost too much for the author to bear while he lived in Brooklyn Heights at 169 Clinton Street away from his wife Sonia Greene. Lovecraft's delicate state of mind was all the more affected by his struggles as a writer in New York at the time.

Despite these pressures Lovecraft managed to write one of his greatest short stories 'The Horror at Red Hook' (1925), while living in Brooklyn. The story paints an exotic image of Brooklyn as peopled by strange admixtures of cultures beyond the pale of society and provides a vivid window into Brooklyn society of that time despite Lovecraft's rampant xenophobia.

H. P. Lovecraft's 'The Horror at Red Hook' (1925) (Excerpt)

“ He had for some time been detailed to the Butler Street station in Brooklyn when the Red Hook matter came to his notice. Red Hook is a maze of hybrid squalor near the ancient waterfront opposite Governor’s Island, with dirty highways climbing the hill from the wharves to that higher ground where the decayed lengths of Clinton and Court Streets lead off toward the Borough Hall. Its houses are mostly of brick, dating from the first quarter to the middle of the nineteenth century, and some of the obscurer alleys and byways have that alluring antique flavour which conventional reading leads us to call “Dickensian”.

The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements impinging upon one another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not far distant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to answer the lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies of the harbour whistles. Here long ago a brighter picture dwelt, with clear-eyed mariners on the lower streets and homes of taste and substance where the larger houses line the hill. One can trace the relics of this former happiness in the trim shapes of the buildings, the occasional graceful churches, and the evidences of original art and background in bits of detail here and there—a worn flight of steps, a battered doorway, a wormy pair of decorative columns or pilasters, or a fragment of once green space with bent and rusted iron railing. The houses are generally in solid blocks, and now and then a many-windowed cupola arises to tell of days when the households of captains and ship-owners watched the sea.

From this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence the blasphemies of an hundred dialects assail the sky. Hordes of prowlers reel shouting and singing along the lanes and thoroughfares, occasional furtive hands suddenly extinguish lights and pull down curtains, and swarthy, sin-pitted faces disappear from windows when visitors pick their way through. Policemen despair of order or reform, and seek rather to erect barriers protecting the outside world from the contagion. The clang of the patrol is answered by a kind of spectral silence, and such prisoners as are taken are never communicative. Visible offences are as varied as the local dialects, and run the gamut from the smuggling of rum and prohibited aliens through diverse stages of lawlessness and obscure vice to murder and mutilation in their most abhorrent guises. That these visible affairs are not more frequent is not to the neighbourhood’s credit, unless the power of concealment be an art demanding credit. More people enter Red Hook than leave it—or at least, than leave it by the landward side—and those who are not loquacious are the likeliest to leave.

Malone found in this state of things a faint stench of secrets more terrible than any of the sins denounced by citizens and bemoaned by priests and philanthropists. He was conscious, as one who united imagination with scientific knowledge, that modern people under lawless conditions tend uncannily to repeat the darkest instinctive patterns of primitive half-ape savagery in their daily life and ritual observances; and he had often viewed with an anthropologist’s shudder the chanting, cursing processions of blear-eyed and pockmarked young men which wound their way along in the dark small hours of morning.

One saw groups of these youths incessantly; sometimes in leering vigils on street corners, sometimes in doorways playing eerily on cheap instruments of music, sometimes in stupefied dozes or indecent dialogues around cafeteria tables near Borough Hall, and sometimes in whispering converse around dingy taxicabs drawn up at the high stoops of crumbling and closely shuttered old houses. They chilled and fascinated him more than he dared confess to his associates on the force, for he seemed to see in them some monstrous thread of secret continuity; some fiendish, cryptical, and ancient pattern utterly beyond and below the sordid mass of facts and habits and haunts listed with such conscientious technical care by the police. They must be, he felt inwardly, the heirs of some shocking and primordial tradition; the sharers of debased and broken scraps from cults and ceremonies older than mankind. Their coherence and definiteness suggested it, and it shewed in the singular suspicion of order which lurked beneath their squalid disorder. He had not read in vain such treatises as Miss Murray’s Witch-Cult in Western Europe; and knew that up to recent years there had certainly survived among peasants and furtive folk a frightful and clandestine system of assemblies and orgies descended from dark religions antedating the Aryan world, and appearing in popular legends as Black Masses and Witches’ Sabbaths. That these hellish vestiges of old Turanian-Asiatic magic and fertility-cults were even now wholly dead he could not for a moment suppose, and he frequently wondered how much older and how much blacker than the very worst of the muttered tales some of them might really be.”
Read the rest of this story here.

Sources: Lovecraft's New York Circle edited by Mara Kirk Hart and S.T. Joshi

From Brooklyn’s Heights: An Early 19th-Century Artist and His Skyline View By Alexandra Peers June 15, 2010 |

2010-12-07T18:16:00.001-08:00

View from Brooklyn Height (19th century) by J.W. Hill

From Brooklyn’s Heights: An Early 19th-Century Artist and His Skyline View
By Alexandra Peers for the New York Observer June 15, 2010

Who's the next hot young Brooklyn artist? How about collecting one of the first ones instead.
J. W. Hill arrived in America in 1819 at the age of 7 and learned much of his trade-engraving aquatints-at the Brooklyn studio of his father, British émigré artist John Hill
J.W.'s images, unlike Dad's, were of where he grew up, New York City and State. Turning into something of a Big Apple version of John James Audubon. Hill illustrated a sweeping tome on the zoology of New York State, among other natural history projects. And in 1837, he painted New York, from Brooklyn Heights, in a landscape that showed a couple and their young children gazing at the Manhattan skyline. From the family's spot at the apex of Furman Street, St. Paul's, Trinity Church, City Hall and the Fulton Fish Market are visible.

The image became famous and was eventually adapted by William James Bennett into a lithograph that was printed and widely distributed by the prolific publishing firm of Currier & Ives.
Read the rest of the article here

Mohawk Roots in Brooklyn - Reaghan Tarbell's "To Brooklyn and Back: A Mohawk Journey"

2010-11-24T10:31:00.000-08:00

From Reaghan Tarbell's "To Brooklyn and Back: A Mohawk Journey" 1940's photo of Reaghan Tarbell's grandfather Wisa Diabo, Reaghan Tarbell's mother, aunts and uncle in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, 1040's. Photo credit: Reaghan Tarbell

Reaghan Tarbell's documentary film “To Brooklyn and Back: A Mohawk Journey" is an extraordinary personal family memoir and history about the Kahnawake Mohawk people who settled in Brooklyn. Many Mohawk men worked as steelworkers on New York skyscrapers while living in Brooklyn and helped build important New York landmarks such as the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge the Seagrams Building, and the Time & Life Building.

A common misconception is that the women simply followed their ironworker husbands to the city. The truth is many left the reserve by themselves to find work in Brooklyn, just like the Mohawk men. Reaghan's late grandmother, Ida Meloche, was one of them. At the age of 16, Ida moved to Brooklyn with her elderly mother in search for work and a "golden opportunity."

Reaghan’s film takes us on a journey back to the Kahnawake Mohawk Reserve near Montreal, Canada on the St. Lawrence River where Reaghan’s family members still live. Mohawk women and men in Kahnawake speak about the Quebec Bridge disaster that took place on August 29th, 1907 when thirty-three Mohawk steelworkers died when the bridge collapsed. An annual remembrance ceremony is held in the Kahnawake Reserve for the spirits of the men lost on that tragic day. We learn how this tragedy caused Mohawk men to spread out in the 1920's to find work elsewhere in faraway places including New York and Brooklyn.

The Mohawk steelworkers as most New Yorkers know are a legendary presence in urban folklore. Mohawk men worked alongside other Native Americans as steelworkers on New York City construction sites on many large-scale projects.

The words of Reaghan's extended Mohawk family on the Kahnawake Mohawk Reserve illuminate the complex difficulties that Mohawk women and children faced while adapting to life in downtown Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Mohawk neighborhood became know as Little Caughnawaga (a modification of Kahnawake.)

The Cuyler Presbyterian Church on Pacific Street held services in the Mohawk language led by Rev. Dr. David Munroe Cory who learned the Mohawk language. There was an exclusively Mohawk bar called the Wigwam at 75 Nevins Street, which was also like a community information center where Mohawk men could get leads on jobs, pick up mail and catch rides back to Kahnawake.

Most Mohawk families eventually moved back to the Kahnawake Reserve over the years preferring to live amongst their own people and to have their children retain their cultural roots.

Sources: New York Times article An Indian Community Flourished and Faded In a Section of Brooklyn
Published: December 28, 1996

The Brooklyn Accent; Fugehdaboudit by Burkhard Bilger, excerpted from: " Brooklyn, A State of Mind" by Michael W. Robbins and Wendy Palitz

2010-11-07T16:15:00.000-08:00

The Brooklyn Accent
Fugehdaboudit!

By Burkhard Bilger

Excerpted from Brooklyn, A State of Mind by Michael W. Robbins and Wendy Palitz
Copyright © 2001 by Michael W. Robbins and Wendy Palitz
Used by permission of Workman Publishing Co., Inc., New York
All Rights Reserved

The Brooklyn Accent
Fugehdaboudit!

By Burkhard Bilger

That cramped space, and the mass of immigrants within it, has turned New York into a linguistic witch’s cauldron. In the late 1600s, Dutch and Belgian settlers, forced to speak their conquerors’ English, probably gave Brooklynese its “muddas and faddas,” “deses and doses” - though some language experts attribute the d/th swap to the Germans and Irish. After the Revolutionary War, Yankees who relocated from New England encouraged Brooklynites to drop the “r’s” from the ends of words, yielding nuggets like “watuh” and “drivuh.” Then in the 1850s Irish immigrants continued the vendetta against “th” sounds. In their mouths, “think” became “tink” and “thumb” became “tumb.” Over time, the “oi” sound in the middle of words became similarly endangered, giving us “liar” for “lawyer.”

Finally, Southern settlers gathered up all those orphaned “oi’s” and found new homes form them in words like “noive” (nerve) and “woim” (worm.

A GLOSSARY OF BROOKLYNESE - Excerpted from Brooklyn, A State of Mind by Michael W. Robbins and Wendy Palitz

2010-11-07T15:50:00.000-08:00

Brooklyn, A State of Mind by Michael W. Robbins and Wendy Palitz
Excerpted from Brooklyn, A State of Mind by Michael W. Robbins and Wendy Palitz
Copyright © 2001 by Michael W. Robbins and Wendy Palitz
Used by permission of Workman Publishing Co., Inc., New York
All Rights Reserved

A GLOSSARY OF BROOKLYNESE

Brooklyn has always been a borough of immigrants and for immigrants the “th” sound in English is a bitch. As a vocal noise,"th" is practically unique to the ancient Anglo-Saxon language, in which it had its very own letter of the alphabet, known as the “thorn.” The French, for example, when attempting to pronounce this sound make do with “z.” (“Is zat so?”) But in Brooklyn the letter “th” at the end of a word (as an ultimate fricative consonant) are invariably pronounced like a “t”:

bath = bat
both = boat
Smith = Smit
with = wit
tooth = toot
truth – troot

When the letter “th” come at beginning of a word., Brooklynites sometimes pronounce them as “t”…

three = tree
third= toid
thrill = trill
thing = ting
throw = tro
but more often they were a “d.”
that = dat
them = dem
there = dere
this = dis
those = dose
they = dey

Sometimes in ethnic Brooklyn pronunciation of the short “o” is “hypercorrected” into a cross between a drawl and a whine:

coffee = cwafee
dog = doowaahg
God = Gwoddd
or,
walk = wooawk
talk = tooawk

The letter “r” is seldom pronounce anywhere in the Northeast, from New Hampshuh to Hahvud to New Yawk. In Brooklyn, “more” is “moowuh,” “door” is “doowuh,” and “her” is “huh.” “Brooklyn” itself comes out (something like) “Bwookn,” while “Canarsie” is “Cnawsee.” Furthermore, the vowel sound that precedes the unpronounced “r” sound is pronounced “oi.”:

Bensonhurst = Bensonhoist
bird = boid
first = foist
girl = goil
heard = hoid
murder = moiduh
nerve = noive
perfect = poifect
world = woild
certain = soitun

No one really knows is so in The American Language, H.L. Mencken attributes it to the influence of Yiddish. Anyway, and perversely enough, in Brooklyn the “oi” sound itself is pronounce “er”:

boil = berl
Greenpoint = Greenpernt
noise = nerse
oil = erl
oyster = erstuh

Thus, when Dodger knuckleballer Hoyt Wilhelm dropped to his knees after being stuck by a line drive, the Ebbets Field crowd gasped as one, “Hert’s hoit!” - Sean Kelly

Take Me to the River. Finally. By NATHAN WARD - New York Times, July 2, 2010

2010-07-05T07:48:00.000-07:00

Take Me to the River. Finally.
By NATHAN WARD
New York Times - July 2, 2010

THIS summer, with the debut of the Brooklyn Bridge Park, as well as the expansion of Manhattan’s Hudson River Park and Governors Island, New Yorkers have celebrated the reclamation of the waterfront. But the effort, laudable though it is, obscures a not-so-insignificant historical misunderstanding: we are in fact claiming the waterfront, not reclaiming it.

From New York’s early days as a port to its receding days as a manufacturing town, the waterfront was never a place most people wanted to be. It was always a rough, strange world separate from the city it surrounds.

In the Colonial era, the waterfront was the province of those who wanted to go to sea, or at least to unload ships. Cargo-laden clipper ships entering the harbor produced a call for “Men Along the Shore!” — longshoremen. Back then, those men with the patience to keep alert for the flare or flag of an approaching vessel and the physical strength to “bull” cargo were really the only people allowed near the docks.

During the 19th century and early 20th century, the docks were a place of dangerous work done by often desperate men, many of them immigrants. In the 1915 study “The Longshoremen,” the sociologist Charles Barnes described an occupation that “involves such constant risk that a man becomes ‘work hardened’ or indifferent to the dangers around him.” Barnes authenticated 309 longshore accidents on the Manhattan waterfront, 96 of them fatal, in a single year.

By the middle of the 20th century, New York Harbor was the greatest port in the world, with more than 900 working piers. But as commerce boomed, so too did crime. The small-time heists by pre-Prohibition gangs gave way to territorial murders and organized pilferage. (Pier 45 at West Street, now a pastoral portion of the Hudson River Park, was so gang-ridden it couldn’t be rented out.)

Malcolm “Mike” Johnson, whose investigations for the old New York Sun won a Pulitzer Prize in 1949, called the city’s docks at the time a “waterfront jungle.” Murders, he wrote, are “commonplace, a logical product of widespread gangsterism.” Stealing was so rampant it amounted to an unofficial — and hefty — tax. One steamship company, the Grace Line, lost nearly $3 million in 1948 alone, 80 percent of it from its New York piers. The bolder pier heists of the era included an entire truck-sized electrical generator and a 10-ton shipment of steel.

The authorities were hampered by a waterfront “code” against squealing that was no Hollywood invention. “A man could be killed in broad daylight before half a dozen witnesses and nobody would testify about it,” wrote William Keating, a New York assistant district attorney. “On the waterfront, to talk was to rat, and to rat was to stand exposed and unprotected.” Dozens and dozens of murders went unsolved.

Not surprisingly, in 1931, when The New Yorker sent Alva Johnston to Irishtown — now the loft country of Dumbo — to investigate the deaths of 21 Brooklyn stevedores, he discovered that there had been no arrests, “not because there is anything secret or underhand about these murders, but because the witnesses won’t talk.” When detectives asked the wounded Red Donnelly, the Brooklyn dock boss, what enemy had balehooked and shot him in a waterfront shanty on Bridge Street, he coughed out, “John Doe” — and died pure.
Read the rest of this article here:

I’m From Brooklyn, She Said in Her Southern Drawl - NY Times 6/27/10

2010-06-27T13:13:00.000-07:00

I’m From Brooklyn, She Said in Her Southern Drawl
By Dvora Meyers

As a 27-year-old single woman living in Brooklyn, I enjoy the communal events that warm weather brings: summer concerts in Prospect Park, street fairs, outdoor dining with friends. But with the social spirit comes an uptick in street-side proselytizing by evangelists for Brooklyn, who insist that theirs is the one true borough. They are even more grating than the subway preachers who roam the cars on Sundays. I’d much rather listen to a sermon than an ode to a utopia that doesn’t remotely resemble the place where I grew up.

I spent most of my girlhood in Canarsie, where the L train goes after all the hipsters and artists debark. I took two city buses to my school in Midwood, passing Flatlands Avenue and the Arch Diner, the local mob hangout. I saw no cheese or coffee shops, which is why I don’t live in Canarsie anymore.

I left for hipper pastures, like Los Angeles and the Upper West Side, but I eventually returned — not to the Brooklyn of my childhood, but to “Fakelyn,” a k a Clinton Hill, where I moved last August. The neighborhood had everything I wanted: reasonable rent, good subway coverage and a nearby Target. I’m also keen on all the stores with monosyllabic titles, like Cloth and Bliss. And I love that the only Brooklyn accent I regularly hear is my mother’s on the phone.

My neighbors, most of whom aren’t from around here, can’t admit that their New York experience isn’t authentically gritty. Worse still, most have developed amnesia and have forgotten their pre-Brooklyn existence. When I lived in Los Angeles, I never claimed to be an Angeleno, but when I ask a Brooklyn resident where she hails from, she immediately answers, “Brooklyn.” In a strong Southern drawl.
Read the rest of this article here:

1907 Brooklyn Bridge Night View Postcard

2010-06-15T11:25:00.000-07:00

1907 Brooklyn Bridge Night View Postcard

Clinton Irving Jones - Period Brooklyn Photographs

2010-06-05T01:24:00.000-07:00

This collection of Clinton Irving Jones photographs was exhibited at the Underbridge Gallery curated by David Sokosh. These period photographs taken by Clinton Irving Jones between 1905 - 1911, capture the fading vestigial remnants of Brooklyn's old Dutch architecture and provide a glimpse of Brooklyn when farmhouses and barns were part of the Brooklyn landscape.

Photos Courtesy Underbridge Pictures

For more information about this collection, please read the New York Times article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/nyregion/thecity/29farm.html?ex=1319778000&en=c0211f73e1ced434&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Clinton Irving Jones - Snerderken House

Clinton Irving Jones - Gerritsen's Tide Mill House

Clinton Irving Jones - Old House at 1224 Fulton Street

Clinton Irving Jones - Schenck-Crooke House

Clinton Irving Jones - Schenck-Crooke House Interior

Clinton Irving Jones - Houses on Franklin Avenue

Photos Courtesy Underbridge Pictures

David Sokosh Tintypes Exhibition

2009-12-09T13:51:00.000-08:00

Victory's Trumpet, Brooklyn

16 x 16 Inches (Image Size), Silver Print on Paper, Edition of 10

Brooklyn-based photographer David Sokosh is exhibiting some of his remarkable tintype black & white images at MDH Fine Arts located at 233 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10011. GALLERY HOURS: Tuesday - Friday 12-7, Saturday 12-6, Closed Sunday & Monday. ANGELS - A group show featuring works by Miranda Girard, Robert Goldstrom, Michael Henry, John Neely, Charles Ramsburg, Alfred Schatz, Jimmy Shack, David Sokosh and Tatiana Zayka. Show begins on Tuesday, December 8th and will run through Thursday, December 31st.

Brooklyn Historical Society Photography Collection

2009-11-13T08:57:00.000-08:00

John D. Morrell Photograph Collection
Photographer Morrell, John D., 1921-1988
Date 05/18/1959
Description North side of Montague Street between Clinton + Henry Streets looking northwest. Taken from window of #156 Montague Street.

The Brooklyn Historical Society Photography Collection has placed hundreds of Brooklyn streetscapes photographs from its extensive Brooklyn photography archives online. From this broad assortment of period photos the viewer can get a glimpse of Brooklyn's architectural assortment from several decades of photographic imagery.

East River Scene by Elisha Taylor Baker

2009-05-31T00:10:00.000-07:00

"Sunrise from Chapman Dock and Old Brooklyn Navy Yard, East River, N.Y."
by Elisha Taylor Baker, 1886 - Oil on canvas.

Brooklyn and Manhattan Population Statistics 1790 to 1920

2009-03-10T16:02:00.000-07:00

Brooklyn & Manhattan Population Statistics 1790 to 1920
(Data from Decennial U.S. Census)

Year ---------- Brooklyn------------------- Manhattan

1790 ------------ 5,000 ------------------------- 32,000
1800 ------------ 6,000 ------------------------- 61,000
1810 ------------ 8,000 ------------------------- 96,000
1820 ----------- 11,000 ------------------------ 123,000
1830 ----------- 21,000 ------------------------ 203,000
1840 ----------- 47,000 ----------------------- 313,000
1850 ----------- 139,000 ---------------------- 516,000
1860 ----------- 279,000 ---------------------- 814,000
1870 ---------- 420,000 ----------------------- 942,000
1880 ----------- 599,000 ---------------------- 1,165,000
1890 ----------- 838,000 ---------------------- 1,441,000
1900 --------- 1,617,000 ---------------------- 1,850,000
1910 --------- 1,634,000 ---------------------- 2,332,000
1920 --------- 2,018,000 ---------------------- 2,284,000

View from Brooklyn, 1898

2009-03-09T15:44:00.000-07:00

View from Brooklyn, 1898 - Library of Congress

Brooklyn Movies: Memories of Tomorrow By John B. Manbeck

2009-02-21T20:43:00.000-08:00

Brooklyn Movies: Memories of Tomorrow

By John B. Manbeck
A Brooklyn historian

Throughout the year, movie production companies sprout on the streets of Brooklyn Heights. Annoying as the habit is to motorists seeking parking spaces, the custom accompanies a certain pride knowing that a Brooklyn neighborhood will be there on the big silver screen in next year’s film crop.

Sometimes, those movie pictures fool you, though. In 2001, Kate and Leopold opened with a scene of the Brooklyn Bridge under construction followed by a race through cobblestoned Brooklyn Heights streets. In truth, the movie company spent weeks in DUMBO shooting around the Brooklyn Bridge caisson. But when the production got to the editing room, the tower was de-constructed by computers to its 1880s look.

For the 2005 re-working of The Honeymooners story, the Brooklyn Bridge again made an entrance. It was real but a real set only: parts of the Bridge had been re-constructed in Dublin , Ireland , where the rest of Ralph Kramden’s apartment materialized.

Of the new dozen or so Brooklyn films, one will command attention because of its concept. The musical comedy written and directed by Brooklynite John Turturro, Romance & Cigarettes has unique qualities and cast. (John even has a small acting role.) Shot in Bensonhurst, Red Hook and other NYC locations, it deals with a working class family and the cost of relationships to the individual. Whenever characters become frustrated, their subconscious escapes into song.

Romance & Cigarettes, directed by John Turturro

And now the cast: James Gandolfino, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemi, Christopher Walken, Mary-Louise Parker, Elaine Stritch, Tony Goldwyn and a host of other Turturros. This United Artists film was produced by Ethan and Joel Coen. It sounds like a glorious tribute to Brooklyn genius.

Another Brooklyn celebrity who is appearing in film circles is Jonathan Lethem. His Motherless Brooklyn, from the novel about a detective with Tourette’s syndrome, will star and be produced by Ed Norton. One more drama from a Lethem short story will be retitled Tonight at Noon which explores random encounters between people in clubs and bars around NYC. Among the featured players are Joan Chen, Rutger Hauer and Ethan Hawke.

Two remakes will re-appear this year. The Little Fugitive has been built up from its simple storyline and now stars Peter Dinklage as the jailed father of the errant brothers. While some of the shooting took place in Gateway National Recreation Area around deserted barracks, the original Coney Island scenes have vanished into historical never-never land.

Brooklyn baseball remains a popular theme. In 1999, there was Crossing White Lines, about the race issue in the Brooklyn Dodgers. Still in production is Jackie Robinson with Robert Redford playing Branch Rickey and also, the story of Robinson’s support by Pee Wee Reese in The People’s Choice.

Other Brooklyn settings dot the cinematic landscape with largely unknown casts starring in unpredictable movies. One unusual Brooklyn movie made last year was Block Party, Dave Chappelle’s mysterious 2004 concert which transported unknowing Ohio spectators to Downing Street in Brooklyn where they heard The Fugees.

Evidently, Brooklynites become introspective when faced with life’s dilemmas. In the drama, Brother’s Shadow, the main character returns to Brooklyn from a self-imposed exile to the Alaskan fishing industry. When he finds his brother has died, he assumes his identity—and his wife—which exposes him to new problems. Judd Hirsch has a supporting role.

Two films with the same working titles, Superheroes, are in production, both filmed in New York . The Brooklyn one deals with a teen who steals camcorders from tourists, then fantasizes about their travels. In his fantasy life, ordinary people cross between human and superhuman characters. Hence, the title. (The other Superheroes deals with Iraqi war vets and their emotional scars.)

Another so-called drama, High Life, centers on a Brooklyn artist and his friends, a group of slackers discussing and searching for goals. The title gives you the gist of the story. One more drug tale—film makers still have negative feelings about Brooklyn natives—titled December Ends deals with a dealer who gets involved with his boss’ girlfriend. Sounds like a wintry tale.

Then there’s West of Brooklyn, about a Brooklyn boy who travels to Hollywood to escape personable tragedies and, voila!, he makes new friends in LA. Another story still in production is Made in Brooklyn. It’s a comedy/drama involving four short films that tell a single story a la Rashamon.

Several new Brooklyn films coming out are shorts, which mean that you may see them if they win awards or if you frequent film festivals. Orange Bow is about a Brooklyn teen on his way to a birthday party with a so-called unpredictable conclusion. Another is Bagelized, a comedy about trading company secrets about making bagels. This stars an Italian cast. Now THAT’S funny!

The final entry is a seasonal documentary called The Kings of Christmas. Produced by Bergen Street Films, it deals with a creator of Christmas lawn ornaments and the competition created among the merchants and the home owners.

So that’s the lineup for this year. Over the holidays, we can watch and see which of the new Brooklyn films fall and which are the winners.

© 2006 John B. Manbeck

“Historic Photos of Brooklyn” Text and captions by John B. Manbeck,

2009-02-18T23:12:00.001-08:00

“Historic Photos of Brooklyn” Text and captions by John B. Manbeck

“Historic Photos of Brooklyn”, with text and captions by John B. Manbeck is an extraordinary piece of historical documentation which will hold Brooklyn aficionados and scholars alike spellbound.

Turner Publishing has issued this important pictorial collection of historical images drawn from the archives of the Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn Public Library-Brooklyn Collection, Kingsborough Historical Society, Library of Congress, New York State Archives, the author’s personal collection of Brooklyn sources as well as a very modern resource, the Internet.

This well chosen collection of photographs draws back the curtains of history onto grand vistas of a rising industrialized modern city with gleaming Victorian architecture, bustling thoroughfares teeming with carriages, trolleys and Brooklynites vigorously engaged in work and play.

Many of the striking images clearly convey an impression of a robust and dynamic city, which was never a place for the faint of heart, yet combined refined gentility with gritty resilience and a knowing sophistication.

With photographs spanning the mid-1850’s to the early 1960’s, ‘Historic Photos of Brooklyn’ is an important piece of visual history that clearly conveys the fast-moving pace of Brooklyn’s development and the character of the people of Brooklyn through changing times.

The Bay Ridge house photographed in the late 1800's stood near Densye Ferry.

Brooklyn pedestrians (possibly South Brooklyn).

Brooklyn in Film by Prof. Joe Dorrinson

2009-02-18T20:21:00.000-08:00

On The Waterfront - 1954

Brooklyn in Film by Prof. Joe Dorrinson

Coney Island, a special place for "R and R," beckoned to moviemakers. In many ways a freak show in the early years of mass entertainment, it became a vital part of popular culture--and, of course, fodder for the movies. A 20th Century Fox movie starring Betty Grable capitalized on both name and association. Perhaps, the best film inspired by Coney was a semi-documentary, The Little Fugitive about a little Bensonhurst boy, Richie Andrusco who runs away from home and school. Made in 1953, it won rave reviews among the cognoscenti.

Coney's Brooklyn neighbors invited cinematic treatment too. The Brooklyn character answered deep-rooted needs in the kaleidoscope that is American culture. Often pegged to the lowest common denominator, shades of Phineas T. Barnum, Hollywood moguls offered national audiences a proliferation of dumb blondes, laconic cowboys, precocious children, refined Englishmen, and a host of other gargoyles. They took certain recognizable traits and magnified them as the Brooklyn New York type.

This lovable but inept character--Jimmy Durante in many roles and Jack Carson as the dumb cop in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)--triggered laughter, sold tickets, and invited repetition. A cinematic version of a Broadway hit play by Joseph Kesselring provided Frank Capra a last chance to display his gift for frenetic comedy before World War II and his conversion to arch-propagandist for the war effort. The movie starts with a brawl sparked by a bad call in Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers' baseball team. "Brooklyn," the narrator warns "is a place where anything can happen and usually does." Starring Cary Grant as a suave theatre critic, the movie features an ensemble of brilliant thespians: Josephine Hull, Jack Carson, Peter Lorre, Raymond Massey (impersonating Boris Karloff), et al. Grant's two dotty aunts are eliminating the homeless problem by poisoning stray males with elderberry wine laced with arsenic. Uncle Teddy (after Roosevelt also a bit daft), who believes that they have succumbed to yellow fever, inters the victims. Although Grant escapes the genetic curse of madness that dominates the family when he discovers that he was adopted at birth, the movie promotes the notion that lunacy, exemplified by the Brewster family, grows in Brooklyn.

Victor McLaglen personified an endangered species, the working class male as sandhog, not fugitive, in Under Pressure. While many actors have assayed the role of comic proletarian, no one outperformed William Bendix in this personification. Born in Manhattan, Bendix probably acquired the manner from his Brooklyn-bred mother. Before he rose to The Life of Riley, Bendix played Tim McGuerin in Brooklyn Orchid (1942) followed by The McGuerins of Brooklyn (1942) and Taxi, Mister (1943). In the original, Bendix portrayed an upwardly mobile yet earthy, muscular cabdriver whose attempts at gentility flunk the Emily Post test. Peering into a mirror while his prissy valet, Stirling tries to transfigure him into "my fair gentleman," McGuerin bellows: "Stoiling, I feel like a joik!" Regaining self-esteem, he saves a "dame" bent on suicide by reshaping her self-image, shades of Henry Higgins. In Don Juan Quilligan (1945), big Bill appears as a barge captain who maintains two wives in two different ports, Brooklyn and Utica, New York. Does bigamy also grow in Brooklyn? Even as a knight in King Arthur's Court flanking the Connecticut Yankee, Bendix could not escape his New York roots. Bendix polished his persona in World War II films, particularly Wake Island (1943), Lifeboat (1944) and Guadalcanal Diary (1943). In the latter, he is felled by enemy fire. As this former Brooklyn cab driver lies dying, he hears over the short-wave radio that his beloved Dodgers have won a critical game. He dies, happily.

Even as we faced global war, as an Oscar-winning reminds us, life is beautiful in B films. A mailman, smitten by the love bug, is fired. Aided by his friends in Joe and Ethel Turp Visit the President (1939), he regains the job and the girl. The Turps, characters created by Damon Runyan and played to perfection by William Gargan and Ann Sothern, are true romantics in the tradition of Lord Byron, Hector Berlioz, and Lucille Ball. They face the future happily ever after the red tape is unsnarled and love conquers bureaucracy.

As unsung war hero, the Brooklyn soldier surfaced as a vital force, élan vital in the national melting pot. In countless films featuring the universal platoon, the type-casted New Yorker is courageous, colorful, and continually--indeed compulsively--funny. Equal to any challenge, battle-tough and street-smart, he rises to rank of sergeant, no higher. Did this betoken a lack of ambition or was it a logical expression of the egalitarian spirit? His aspirations never matched his courage. Somewhat complacently, in 1945 as war ended, he sang: "Goin' back to Brooklyn--to be a bum for the rest of my life." The late poet laureate of Brooklyn, Norman Rosten complained: "The Brooklyn boy became the village idiot of show biz. All over the world wherever our cinema culture surfaced, gullible foreigners learned to laugh at the slob from Brooklyn, and pretty soon we were all slobs."

On the flip side of the comic coin in cinema, one discovers that criminality also flourishes in Brooklyn. Out of the Fog (1941) featured an evil thug, John Garfield who preyed on Sheepshead Bay fishermen. In Wonder Man (1945), Danny Kaye played twins: one, an entertainer, who is murdered by the mob in Prospect Park; the other, a nebbish who avenges his brother's murder. Kaye's dual role deftly captures the schizoid qualities of the local type. When Irving Shulman's best selling novel, The Amboy Dukes was translated to the silver screen, the movie downplayed ethnicity but highlighted garbage, ramshackle housing and pervasive punk violence. Retitled City Across the River (1949), the film featured Steve McNally as a two fisted heroic cop (in stark contrast to current imagery) who gallantly tries to clean up Shulman's begrimed Brownsville.

Do contract killers and violent psychopaths thrive in "our town"? Hollywood answered affirmatively. Witness The Enforcer (1951) with Humphrey Bogart as the ultimate tough guy, On the Waterfront (1954), The Mugger (1959) and Murder Inc. (1960). In the latter, Peter Falk portrayed Abe Reles, a crazed killer whose weapon of choice is an ice pick. Wearing a floppy raincoat and mumbling a la Marlon (Brando), he turned informer. While under police custody, Reles jumped--or was pushed (take your pick)--from a window in Coney island's Half-Moon Hotel. Upon learning that, paraphrasing Eugene O'Neill, the Ice Man came, his associates quipped: "This 'boid' could sing but he could not fly!" Later, Jack Nicholson upheld Prizzi's Honor (1985). Director John Huston played the Mafia for laughs but in the climactic scene, Nicholson's inamorata, Kathleen Turner, also a contract killer who sizzles with "body heat" is sacrificed on the altar of necessity coupled with expediency. ‘Tis a far, far better thing, the movie affirmed in action, to honor your father than to cherish your wife. In this world of Brooklyn comic opera, men are still on top.

Nevertheless, women carved out a vital niche in Brooklyn-oriented films. That luscious lump of libido, Mae West wiggled her famous fanny while inviting male suitors up to her apartment. She evaded heavy-handed censors with cleverly crafted puns and double word plays. Ann Sothern played a brassy Maisie who rises above her white collar role; Judy Holiday, a dizzy blonde Billie Dawn who arises from intellectual slumber with the aid of an intellectual Pygmalion, Lana Turner, a vulnerable "Flatbush;" Rosalind Russell, a Yiddishe Mama on a cruise with a gentleman from Japan; and a moon-stricken Cher, in search of love. All of these earthy New York women, rooted in Brooklyn, seek fulfillment in a loony tunes environment.
The Brooklyn woman--"Broad" as in "Broadway Baby"--took flight in 1928 with Alice White in Show Girl (1928) followed by Alice Faye in Girl from Brooklyn (1938), Betty Grable in Coney Island (1943) and in Sweet Rosie O'Grady (1943), Rita Hayworth in Cover Girl (1944) and Joan Blondell in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945). A magnificent movie based on a poignant novel, A Tree... cultivates a recurrent theme, namely, the pursuit of success and upward mobility. This quest sparks a conflict between Brooklyn (initially rural) and Manhattan (always urban). Thus, "making it" with Norman Podhoretz and that other "walker in the city"--Alfred Kazin inexorably leads to exodus: across the river and into the asphalt. The film, brilliantly directed by Elia Kazan before he aped Victor McLaglen as “the informer,” ends on the roof of their Williamsburg tenement where Francie (Peggy Ann Garner) and Neeley, her brother (Ted Donaldson) share secrets and voice dreams. Seeking reassurance, the adolescent Francie wants to know if she is pretty. Tactfully, he responds: "You'll pass." The dirt below recedes from view as the camera pans on New York's magnificent skyline signaling "the green light" of Fitzgerald's "orgiastic future." Successful at last, the Nolans will leave Brooklyn for Queens where their stepfather owns property.
The Brooklyn Bridge serves as both conduit and metaphor. Millions watched John Travolta cross over the Bridge in Saturday Night Fever (1977) in quest of a new life. As Joseph Gelmis demonstrates, this famous landmark played a role in movies of every genre. Johnny Weismuller took the plunge from the Bridge in Tarzan's New York Adventure (1942), Frank Sinatra crooned a love-song to the Bridge in It Happened in Brooklyn (1947), he danced across it with Gene Kelly and Jules Munshin in On The Town (1949) and Meryl Streep as Sophie chose to drink champagne with Peter MacNichol as Stingo and Kevin Kline as Nathan on a high perch in Sophie's Choice (1982).
Escaping from Hollywood clichés, New York filmmakers developed their own style. They used authentic New York locations and established local actors. Witness Marty (1955), 12 Angry Men (1957), A View from the Bridge (1962) and The Pawnbroker (1965). Developed and directed under the aegis of Sidney Lumet whose father Baruch starred in Yiddish theatre, this genre mixed television technique, and city lights and street scenes. Film historians, Gerald Mast and Bruce Kawin attribute this unique approach to cinematographer, Boris Kaufman. Television and theatre helped to restore New York to a place of centrality in American filmmaking.

"Making It" continued to fascinate filmgoers. A new wave of such movies issued from The Lords of Flatbush (1974). A bittersweet nostalgic nosh offered a taste of Brooklyn, circa 1957. Sylvester Stallone fashioned his Rocky persona flanked by future stars, Perry King and Henry Winkler. Stallone is trapped into marriage with his pregnant girlfriend. When the leader abandons Brooklyn and his buddies, the old gang disperses. Paul Mazursky escaped from Brooklyn and a predatory mother in Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976). The best of this bunch, Annie Hall (1977) won Oscar honors across the board for best picture, director and screenplay. Alvy Singer emerges from Coney Island where he lived with bad vibrations emanating from the famous roller coaster and domineering parents, heavily salted with Jewish flavor. Brilliantly, Allen vividly contrasts Jewish-Goyish, New York-Los Angeles, Brooklyn-Manhattan sensibilities. Rejecting Los Angeles, he jibes: "I won't move some place where the only cultural advantage is that you make a right turn on a red light."

Suggested reading:
Readers seeking more comprehensive information on Brooklyn films should explore "The Brooklyn Film", edited by John B. Manbeck and Robert Singer, issued in 2003 by McFarland & Company.

"New York City" by Prof. Joe Dorinson and Prof. George Lankevich

2009-02-08T15:56:00.000-08:00

NEW YORK CITY
Editor by Peter Rollins, published by Columbia University Press.
New York is America's metropolis, a quintessential urban drama where the dreams, disappointments, and dangers of life are naked and intense. Its enduring power has made the city a favorite subject for both historians and filmmakers, and images from Gotham's history fill the minds of Americans. One of the oldest cities on the continent, Manhattan offers a panorama of themes ranging from wilderness post to revolutionary sparkplug, from vibrant seaport to immigrant ghetto, from capital or the United States to core of capitalist enterprise. As we enter the new millennium, New York's position as "capital of the world" is unquestioned and the city revels in its fabled diversity. It is equally home to international bankers and street peddlers, diplomats and drug dealers, fashion models and displaced persons, the frightened newcomer and the establishment WASP.

Change is built into the very fabric of New York, a continuing process of "creative destruction" which reflects its position as the heart of capitalism. Manhattan is physically a continuous "work-in-progress," a site for architectural innovation that contains more skyscrapers than any other world metropolis. Incessant change makes New York difficult to love, because it is constantly obliterating its own heritage. Beyond such construction is the constant flow of immigration which has characterized the city for over two centuries and made it a melting pot of peoples: Germans, Irish, Jews, Italians and Slavs in the nineteenth century, Puerto Ricans, Vietnamese, Dominicans, Chinese and Russians in contemporary times. A composite so many forces, New York is unique and the endless source of fascination for historians who research its past and artists who seek its hidden dramas.

The diversity of New York demands historical analysis. More than 1100 volumes have attempted to illuminate facets of local history. Arguably, the most impressive of these studies arrive in 1995 when the Encyclopedia of New York City brought together 680 authors to write 4300 articles about the national metropolis. If a single theme emerged from their efforts it was that the infinitely complex "Big Apple" eluded comprehensive description even in a tome of 1320 pages. In 1999 Edwin G. Burrows and Mile Wallace won a Pulitzer Prize for Gotham, a text of 1236 pages which New York's story only up to1898. The authors concluded that their subject was best defined commercially where "sharp practice and money making and real estate lie somewhere near the core of New York's genetic material"(xv). Despite vast erudition and enormously length, neither of these justly acclaimed volumes exhausted their subject. The collision of dreams and reality, shifting yet constant, will no doubt provide the substance of many more studies each year.

History's inability to capture the essence New York furnished an opportunity for filmmakers who probed the "naked city" through the individual stories of its people. Film, more than words, had the ability to convey the dynamic of a "city that never sleeps." Since the American film industry was born in New York, it is only fitting that the great metropolis has been movie makers’ favorite setting throughout the twentieth century. On May 9, 1893, two years before the Lumiere Brothers thrilled Paris, Thomas Edison demonstrated his kinetoscope process to a packed audience at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. The first film showed men hammering an anvil, and then having a beer. Within a year, Charles Chinnock filmed a boxing match from a Brooklyn rooftop, and, as early as May 1895, eidoloscope shorts were being shown in Manhattan. Edison developed a portable camera so that crews could film everyday city wonders, from bucolic Central Park to elevated trains to the joys of Coney Island; hundreds of popular nickelodeons were in business by 1910. For over a century, from flickering kinetoscopes such as Around New York in 15 Minutes (1905) to modern documentaries such as The New Metropolis: A Century of Greater New York (1998) and Ric Burns’ magnificent twelve hour paean to New York (1999), the city has been a star of American movies.

Until 1920 New York was also the center of movie production. The first version of Ben Hur (1907) was shot in Brooklyn and film’s first Romeo and Juliet (1909) met at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. Companies such as Biograph, Vitagraph, Kalem, and Pathe were among 30 New York companies attempting to monopolize movie production, but the creation of Hollywood after 1910 ended that dream. Nevertheless, corporations such as Universal (1912) and Fox (1914), and moguls like Samuel Goldfish (Goldwyn) began in New York before going west. As late as 1922, 12% of the industry was in New York with William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Studio, Fox, and the Astoria Studio being the largest; Astoria alone made 110 silent films before temporarily closing in 1927. It was in Manhattan that the Fox Corporation tested audio techniques and where Movietone News premiered in 1927. In that same year, The Jazz Singer (the first “talkie”) traced the rise of a nice Jewish boy from the Lower East Side to stardom. Yet the move to California was inexorable, and by 1937 not a single feature film was made entirely in New York. But politically-charged documentary films flourished, and classics such as New York Hooverville (1932), The City (1939) and Native Land (1941) were all produced in the city.

Nevertheless, the WPA’s New York Panorama (1938) was correct when it concluded that “the influence of New York on the cinema constitutes a unique cultural relationship”(284). In a real sense Americans have two hometowns, their own and New York City. Every citizen knows the harshness of immigrant life, the elitism of Park Avenue, the crassness of Madison Avenue, the rowdiness of the Bowery, and the glitter of Broadway even if these New York locations were never experienced personally. The earliest American films had a New York edge, dealing openly with urban problems, assimilation, and social conflict. D.W.Griffith's, The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) and Intolerance (1916), and those offshoots of Fritz Lang 's Metropolis (1926), certainly offered different views of the city but both recognized its inherent dramatic possibilities. From glorious penthouse to squalid slum, New York provides directors with extremes of success and failure, altruism and social pathology, danger and romance. The city had everything for filmmakers, but it also could repel ordinary Americans. Movies warned them that New York was best experienced at a distance; it was Sodom on the Hudson, a city of ambition, vice and cruelty where virtue counted for little. Yet it was endlessly fascinating. It is not surprising that the American Film Institutes list of the 100 best films includes 23 set in the city, from #1 Citizen Kane to #100 Yankee Doodle Dandy.

It was New York that taught America that “going to the movies” could be a special occasion. By the time of World War I, when personages such as Gloria Swanson, Marion Davies, Norma Talmadge, and Pearl White lived in Manhattan, it was essential that studios have theaters as spectacular as their stars. The first movie “palace” probably was Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel’s 1800 seat Regent Theater (1913) in Harlem; by 1927 he would open a “cathedral” to motion pictures on Broadway where 6000 patrons watched shows in refrigerated comfort. Every studio created its own version of filmgoer’s heaven, and so the Strand (1914), the Rivoli (1917), the Capital (1919) and the Paramount (1926) were born. After 1920 the Loews Corporation built dozens of lavish theaters in every city borough to present the films of MGM. The culmination of all this effort came on December 27, 1932 when the Radio City Music Hall opened, offering film and stage shows (Rockettes) that thrilled audiences for 50 years. Unlike most of the palaces, Radio City survives today with its restored interior designated a New York landmark.

As Americans made movie going their greatest source of entertainment, what did they learn about New York? “All the nations under heaven”—Frederick Binder and David M. Reimers observe—gravitate to New York City, drawn to Gotham in search of success, love, adventure, escape, or privacy. In the 1930s, as Depression engulfed the nation no other city offered the immigrants, the poor, the ambitious, and the already rich a greater sense of opportunity. It was the one place offering everyone a new deal. King Kong (1933) established a checkered pattern in black and white: of innocence in conflict with corruption. Wrenched from his natural habitat, Kong retaliates against a cruel city but is brought down by technology and by unrequited love for beauty as represented by Fay Wray. In the climactic scenes, the Empire State Building—completed only in 1931 and already symbolic of New York—is equally the star and it easily survives Kong’s assault. Busby Berkeley charted happier endings in his musicals, especially 42ND Street (1933) where chorus girls start as understudies and come out as stars. The Empire City represents survival of the fittest, but the hard city would always reward talent. All around glittering Broadway were dark, horrific slums such as Hester Street (1975). Whether immigrant or native-born, troubled teenagers like the Dead End Kids discovered that grinding poverty and a hostile environment could often lead to crime. Life in New York could alienate anyone: like Babyface Martin (Humphrey Bogrart) in Dead End (1937), Vito Corleone in The Godfather (1972), and Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976). Hollywood did try to teach the kids that crime does not pay. In Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), two boys from the slums take different paths. Pat O’Brien becomes a priest and James Cagney, a criminal. Because sociologists in the 1930s stressed the environment (nurture) over heredity (nature), Father Jerry Connelly converts the Dead End Kids through basketball but needs help from Cagney to die doing a “good deed.” Abandoning his usual strut and swagger, Cagney complies. Feigning panic and fear, he goes to the electric chair as an object lesson.

The films of the 1930s began the long relationship of New York with the crime story for in the metropolis Crime, according to Daniel Bell, functions as “a queer ladder of success." Its pervasive presence reflects a distortion of American values (128). Robert Warshow describes the urban gangster as the contemporary “tragic hero” (86-88). The modern New York criminal comes in many versions: John Garfield preyed on local fishermen in Out of the Fog (1941); Humphrey Bogart played a psychopathic killer in The Enforcer (1951); Lee J. Cobb portrayed a vicious labor racketeer in On the Waterfront (1954); Peter Falk embodied a crazed killer, Abe Reles, who jumped or was pushed to his death in Murder Inc. (1960). All, however, show the baleful effects of having to succeed by any means. More bureaucratized crime was presented by Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, and Robert DeNiro who put their stamp on Mafioso portraiture in The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather, Part II (1974). Harvey Keitel hooked up with DeNiro as a petty crook to walk the Mean Streets (1973) of Greenwich Village while Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta joined DeNiros’s criminal fraternity in Goodfellas (1990). In pursuit of international drug traffickers, Gene Hackman starred in the greatest car chase ever filmed in The French Connection (1971) under the McDonald Avenue El in Brooklyn. But Hackman’s Popeye Doyle was a flawed cop. The city seems to corrupt even its sworn defenders as indicated in Detective Story (1951), Serpico (1973), Fort Apache, the Bronx (1981), A Bronx Tale (1993), and Cop Land (1997).

If life in Manhattan burned with intensity, the movies discovered that ordinary life could be found in the outer boroughs. Brooklyn became the perfect example of a city, nestled in New York, where release, recreation, and happiness beckoned. Betty Grable starred in Coney Island (1943), a film that captured the glory of America’s first amusement area. Subsequently, Coney Island is featured such movies as The Little Fugitive (1953), about a little Bensonhurst boy who runs away from home—and school. Ten years later, Shirley Clarke’s Cool World (1963) traces the odyssey of a black youngster who descends into a now seedy Coney Island in search of adventure. In the classic “buddy movie,” Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), both party in Coney Island before departing for their crime spree in South America. From the streets of Brooklyn, recognizable film types emerged. Cops, cab drivers, sports fanatics and fools are personified by Jimmy Durante, Jack Carson, Frank Sinatra, Danny Kaye, Sam Levine, William Bendix, Richard Conte, Woody Allen, Phil Silvers, Mae West, Martha Raye, and Lana Turner. No World War II film was complete unless its “universal platoon” featured a resident of “the borough of churches.” William Bendix became the quintessential Brooklyn soldier in Wake Island (1943) and Guadalcanal Diary (1943). His fatal trip in Lifeboat (1944) showed how a gritty Brooklynite faces death, stoically.

New York films have always honored strong women. Alice White in Show Girl (1928), Alice Faye in Girl from Brooklyn (1938), Betty Grable in Sweet Rosie O’Grady (1943), Rita Hayworth in Cover Girl (1944) showed how independent women could master both men and the metropolis. Joan Blondell in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945) sensitized Americans to the triumphs and tribulations of ordinary women while Rosalind Russell successfully addressed every problem of urban existence in My Sister Eileen (1942), Auntie Mame (1958) and A Majority of One (1962). The tradition of the smart, talented and complex New York woman is continued by Faye Dunaway in Network (1976), Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman (1978), Tracy Camilla Johns in She’s Gotta Have It (1986), Cher in Moonstruck (1987), and Rene Zwelliger in A Price Above Rubies (1998).

It is appropriate that the Statue of Liberty (1886), symbolic of New York City, is a woman. This beacon of freedom coupled with that magnificent skyline makes you want to sing, in harmony with a sound track emitting the unforgettable melodies of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, and Richard Rodgers. In the 1930s, Americans longed for fascinating rhythm and yearned for happy days. It was Swing Time (1936) that propelled Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers into super-stardom. The New York musical embraced many of the clichés issuing from the “American Dream”-- including the challenges and the dangers of success. Witness Tin Pan Alley (1940), Ziegfield Girl (1941), Babes on Broadway (1941), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Cover Girl (1944), On the Town (1949), The Band Wagon, Kiss Me Kate (both 1953), Guys and Dolls (1955), The Joker Is Wild (1957), Bells Are Ringing (1960), West Side Story (1961), Funny Girl (1968), Sweet Charity (1969), and New York, New York (1977). These films trumpeted the inspiring American success story, which Frank Sinatra captured in the memorable lyric: “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.”

In addition to its unique people, Brooklyn has a bridge that illuminates many films. Completed in 1883, the great bridge is both a conduit and metaphor as American Studies scholars David McCulloch and Alan Trachtenberg have demonstrated. The Brooklyn Bridge made the consolidation of greater New York inevitable. “The City,” however, is located on one end of its imposing span. Manhattan is the destination for New Yorkers on the make. Thus, John Travolta had to cross over the bridge after Saturday Night Fever (1977) possessed him. Johnny Weismuller, the “Ape Man,” jumped from the bridge in Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942). Frank Sinatra was inspired to croon a love-song in It Happened in Brooklyn (1947). Gene Kelly danced across in On the Town (1949) and doomed Meryl Streep drank champagne on it in Sophie’s Choice (1982). Other means of transport are available to ambitious New Yorkers. Melanie Griffith took the Staten Island Ferry to Wall Street for fame, fortune and the Mr. Right. She had a Ford (Harrison) in her future. And the lonely, homely Bronx butcher, Marty (1955) took the subway to find love in a Manhattan ballroom. Paul Mazursky rode the subway to sever umbilical ties to a predatory mother in Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976).

Directors love New York because its well-known locations immediately establish sense of place, class, status, and ambience. It is a city of the “haves,” “have-nots,” and “wannabes.” Their respective life-styles elicit the style and substance of most film scripts. The intersection of high, low, and middle has always generated enormous profit for Hollywood. Starting in 1934, a series of six Thin Man films coupled William Powell and Myrna Loy as high society detectives who glide through society exuding charm, wit while consuming copious amounts of alcohol. Vicariously, viewers enjoyed the end of spoiled rich girl, Claudette Colbert’s journey into the muscular, bare chested embrace of Clark Gable in It Happened one Night (1934). Viewers also laughed at the role reversals in My Man Godfrey (1936) which featured William Powell as a rich man pretending to be poor--a rich man who devotes himself to helping his new friends from the "Hooverville" along the East River.
Obviously, New York, the microcosm of America, believes that rich is better. Morris Townsend (Montgomery Clift) made money his goal in the futile pursuit of plain but wealthy Catherine Sloper (Olivia DeHaviland) in The Heiress (1949); years later, the haunting Henry James saga reappeared with the more apt, original title, Washington Square (1997) . Truman Capote’s Holly (Audrey Hepburn) does “it” lightly for money in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). For the love of money, Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) sleeps with old ladies and cons them out of their savings in The Producers (1968). Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) almost convinces the audience and nearly seduces the idealistic Buddy Fox (Charlie Sheen) to believe that “greed is good” in Wall Street (1987). Money is power and power in New York is always intimidating. Citizen Kane (1941), Meet John Doe (1941), The Great Gatsby (1949, 1974), Executive Suite (1954), The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and Network (1976) all preach the gospel of success! Rarely does the “little man” (what now?) strike back unless he is a Prince among paupers like Howard (Woody Allen) in The Front (1976).

Whether engaged in pride, prejudice, or patriotism, New York has always fought for the American way of life. Spying and subversion became a concern in the fight against fascism. Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), All Through the Night (1942), Saboteur (1942), The House on 92nd Street (1945)—the latter, a brilliant example of semi-documentary filmmaking—established the genre. The films crafted during the Cold War, however, seemed devoid of such creative fire: sparked more by the “great fear” of communist infiltration than a love for artistic presentation. This foible also pertains to the allegedly subversive A King in New York (1957) by an aging Charlie Chaplin and Daniel (1983) based on a novelized account of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Beyond a stirring On the Waterfront (1954)—Elia Kazan’s cinematic rationale (or rationalization) for informing—the rest of the anti-Communist films like I was a Communist for the FBI (1951) can be cast into a trash heap in New Jersey.

During these turbulent years, New Yorkers continued to cope with “lives of quiet desperation” as in The Lost Weekend (1945), Marty (1955), 12 Angry Men (1957), A View from the Bridge (1962), The Pawnbroker (1965), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Taxi Driver and Network (both 1976) that sometimes erupt in rage (“I am mad as hell and won’t take it anymore!”) and violence. We learn from The Last Exit to Brooklyn (1990) that for many, like Jean Paul Sartre, there is no exit. A creative and desperate soul could change genders like Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie (1982) to impersonate a soap-opera queen. A destructive and desperate soul man could start a riot on a steamy, summer's day with Spike Lee in Do the Right Thing (1989). Suddenly, one summer, art imitated reality when a distraught white man robbed a bank in Brooklyn and took hostages on a Dog Day Afternoon (1975).

Hollywood shunned the New York proletariat. For a glimpse into how the other half lived, viewers had to tune in to television. The Goldbergs led by matriarch Molly; The Honeymooners, Ralph and Alice; and All in the Family of Archie and Edith provided the only mass-mediated slice of working-class life in New York. Later police dramas like N.Y.P.D. Blue sustained this tradition. Most viewers, however, were exposed to middle-class singles or upper-class professionals like CPW, The Cosby Show, Spin City, Veronica’s Closet and Friends. Perhaps, the need for escape into fancy matched the concern for profit.

It was after World War II that America experienced social engineering with Hollywood in tow: charting the route out of the asphalt and into the trees. New York’s planning czar, Robert Moses paved the way with new roads. Thousands of urban residents followed the exodus into suburbia. There, one found splendor in the crab-grass frontier where Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948). The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1954), however, soon discovered that he could not escape from trouble. Goodbye Columbus (1965) meant farewell to New York City and hello to Westchester. Though Philip Roth’s novel originally pitted Newark against Short Hills, New Jersey, Hollywood shifted locales because of New York’s universality. White flight, urban blight, territorial fights ensued. The tax base eroded. The city pitched toward bankruptcy in the early 1970s. No film has fully chronicled that story although the machinations of Al Pacino’s City Hall (1996) seem to demonstrate that this, too, will come.

What saved the city? The clue to survival, embedded in history, can be found in the films that chronicle city life across the decades. More than any other, New York has the power to laugh at itself. Staccato bursts of laughter issued primarily from the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera (1935). Fortified with S.J. Perelman scripts, Groucho--the “shnorrer” as explorer--and his brothers plunged into gleeful nihilism. “When I came to this country, I didn’t have a nickel in my pocket. Now, I have a nickel in my pocket.” To that pillar of piety and symbol of WASP stolidity, Margaret Dumont, in A Day at the Races (1935), he proposes: “Marry me, and I’ll never look at another horse.” In response to one of her inane comments, Groucho quips: “That remark covers a lot of territory. As a matter of fact, you cover a lot of territory. Is there any truth to the fact that they’re going to tear you down and put up an office building?” No one—person or profession—remained safe from Marx’s demolition derby. The tradition of Jewish humor animates Neil Simon in The Odd Couple (1968), Plaza Suite (1971), The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1974) and The Sunshine Boys (1975) and the films of Woody Allen: Play It Again, Sam (1971), Manhattan (1979), Stardust Memories (1980), Broadway Danny Rose (1984), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Radio Days (1987). Arguably the best film of this brilliant if neurotic New Yorker is Annie Hall (1977), which paints a vivid contrast between Anglo-Saxon and New York urban-ethnic culture. Alvie Singer (Woody himself) refuses to move (unlike the Dodgers and the movies) to Los Angeles where “the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light.” He knows that the air is clear there only because “they take their garbage and make it into television shows.”

Sports provide both social identity personal escape. In the arenas, people of all classes, ethnicities and cultures gather. They speak a common language and build community. In addition, sports heroes serve as role models for youngsters. Gary Cooper gave a fine interpretation of Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees (1942) while Babe Ruth still waits for an actor equal to his gargantuan stature in baseball. Both William Bendix in The Babe Ruth Story (1948) and John Goodman in The Babe (1992) proved unequal to the task. Trailblazer Jackie Robinson played himself opposite Rube Dee as his beloved wife, Rachel in The Jackie Robinson Story (1950). Paul Newman put on a new face to play boxing champ Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956). When three major New York sports teams crested in 1969-70--the Mets in baseball, the Jets in football, and the Knicks in basketball--they brought city residents together and no doubt contributed to Mayor Lindsay’s successful bid for reelection. Later, Ken Burns crafted a compelling documentary on baseball with New York City as a major focal point. The best of this genre, Martin Scorcese’s Raging Bull (1980) provided a gritty look at the boxing game through the troubled life of Jake LaMotta.

Even today, New York remains the city of immigrants and their children. From early settlers seeking their fortune to the more recent Yuppies, Gotham continues to lure the “huddled masses” and the upwardly mobile classes. This trend is effectively, indeed comically, related in a film tradition that began with The Immigrant (1917). Modern variations on this theme resonate in America, America (1963), Moscow on the Hudson (1984), Coming to America (1988), The Green Card (1990) and the low-budget “sleeper” The Brothers McMullen (1996) while Hester Street (1975) and Little Odessa (1994) transmit discordant notes in the movement toward Americanization.
Beyond money and power, New York also fulfills the romantic needs of “strangers in the night.” Whether in the clutches of The Seven Year Itch (1955) or ensnared by The Goodbye Girl (1977); unable to blot out An Affair to Remember (1957) or erase Stardust Memories (1980), Eros thrives in Gotham. If love seems better the second time around, casual sex can be prohibitively expensive in All About Eve (1950), The Apartment (1960), Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Fatal Attraction (1987). America’s love/hate affair with city continues in cinematic makeovers. The Out-of-Towners (1970) projected a dangerous city unleavened by Neil Simon’s humor. A remake in 1999 starring Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn was less funny to be sure; but the new version etched a less acid, more positive portrait with a happy ending. Despite the obligatory mugging, Martin gets the job and Hawn, the luxury apartment. In short, they take Manhattan. Love, tolerance, and tourism convey an up-beat message. New York can arouse the Sleepless in Seattle (1993); overcome fake orgasms in When Harry Met Sally (1989) and provide true orgasmic feasts in the world’s best restaurants. Here in the global city, one finds an open-door policy towards single mothers, ailing children, gay men and women, creative eccentrics, and the process of metamorphosis through love experienced by Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt in As Good As It Gets (1997), a James Brooks film which projects the miracle of resurrection. Like the proverbial phoenix emergent from the ashes, New York is back because of its gritty, resilient, immigrant "never say die" populace.

The Turning Point (1977) serves as metaphor for that pivotal decade: the 1970s. New York became the dominant subject for filmmakers. The Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences awarded Oscars to Midnight Cowboy (Hall 1969), The French Connection (1971) Godfather (1972), Godfather II (1974), Annie Hall (1977), Kramer v. Kramer (1979). In addition to inspiring the best American movies in the last decades of the twentieth century, Gotham recaptured its lost status as a producer of films as well as Hollywood’s prime location. Astoria Studios reopened in 1975 and has produced such films as Thieves (1975), Ransom (1996) and First Wives Club (1996) as well as an abundance of TV shows. During the long tenure of Mayor Ed Koch (1978-1990), the city joyfully welcomed film companies and in the 1980s no less than 60 films were shot annually. Labor costs and recalcitrance caused a downturn early in the 1990s, but, as the century ended, New York was the locale for 213 features in 1997, 221 in 1998. In the process, filmmaking enriched the city by $3 billion a year. By 2000 Queens alone had four studios. Chelsea Pier attracted filmmakers and a major sound stage development was planned for the government-divested Brooklyn Navy Yard. Fittingly, the Museum of the Moving Image (1988) chose to locate itself in New York, a city that has more film students than the rest of America. Like authors such as Woody Allen, Martin Scorcese, Sidney Lumet, and Spike Lee, these students will never have to leave New York to examine the great spectrum of human possibility. The city will remain vital to the history of film in America--and the essence of American identity.
Joseph Dorinson & George Lankevich

SOURCES

Filmography

a. Films discussed: See text

Annie Hall (1977, F)
Arsenic and Old Lace (1944, F)
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945, F)
Bye, Bye Braverman (1968, F)
City Across the River (1949 F)
Cover Girl (1944 F)
Dead End (1937, F)
Do the Right Thing (1989, F)
Dog Day Afternoon (1975 F)
Don Juan Quilligan (1945 F)
Guadalcanal Diary (1943 F)
Joe & Ethel Turp Visit the President (1939 F)
King Kong (1933 F)
Murder Inc. (1960 F)
Wonder Man (1945 F)
On the Town (1949 F)
Manhattan (1979, F)
On the Waterfront (1954 F)
The Blackboard Jungle (1955 F)
The McGuerins of Brooklyn (1942 F)
The Little Fugitive (1953 F)
The Producers (1968, F)
Prizzi’s Honor (1985)

b. Additional films to consult: See text

An Affair to Remember (1957 F)
Coney Island (1943 F)
Great Expectations (1998 F)
Lost in Yonkers (1993 F)
Love on the Run (1936 F)
Miracle on 34th Street (1947 F)
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1946 F)
My Sister Eileen (1955 F) Nobody's Fool (1995 F) Scent of a Woman (1992 F)
Year Itch (1955 F)
Silent Movie (1976 F)
Sleepless in Seattle (1993 F)
Tales of Manhattan (1942 F)
Weekend at the Waldorf (1945 F)

Documentaries: Films for the Humanities

New York: A City Silhouette #BVL8849
The Biggest Jewish City in the World #BVL3372
I Remember Harlem #BVL170
Divided City: The Route to Racism #BVL7674
Side Tracks: Homeless in New York #BVL8488
Greenwich Village Writers: The Bohemian Legacy #BVL 3021

Bibliography

a. History

Berrol, Selma C. The Empire City: New York and Its People. New York: Praeger, 1995.

Binder, Frederick M. & David M. Reimers. All the Nations Under Heaven: An Ethnic and Racial History of New York City. New York: Columbia UP, 1995.

Burrows. Edwin G. & Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.

Dorinson, Joseph. "Brooklyn: The Elusive Image." Journal of Long Island History. 1.2 (1989): 128-135.

Douglas, Ann. "All Singing, All Dancing, All Gotham." The New York Times. 28 May 1999: E24.

Freeman, Joshua B. Working Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II. New York: The New Press, 2000

Lankevich, George J. American Metropolis: A History. New York City: New York UP, 1998.

Stamler, Bernard. “Will New York Be Necessary in the 21st Century?” New York Times 2 January 2000, CY 1+

White, David Manning & Richard Avedon. The Celluloid Weapon: Social Comment in the American
Film. Boston: Beacon Press, 1972.

b. Film

Basinger, Jeanine. The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre. New York: Columbia UP, 1986.

Belton, John. American Cinema/American Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994.

Bennett. Michael et al. Rediscovering New York…. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995.

Burns, Ric, and James Sanders with Lisa Ades. New York: An Illustrated History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Borzoi, 1999.

Cowden, Gary. Editor. A Political Companion to American Film. Lakeview Press, 1994.

Durgnat, Raymond. The Crazy Mirror: Hollywood Comedy and the American Image. London: Faber & Faber, 1969.

Fraser, George MacDonald. The Hollywood History of the World... New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1988.

Fyne, Robert. The Hollywood Propaganda of World War II. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1994.

Maltin, Leonard. Leonard Maltin’s 1999 Movie @ Video Guide. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1999.
Works Cited:

Bell, Daniel. “Crime as an American Way of Life: A Queer Ladder of Social Mobility” in The End of Ideology. New York: Free Press, 1964. 127-150.

Bergman, Andrew. We’re in the Money: Depression America and Its Film. New York: Harper Colophon, 1971.
Desser, David & Lester D. Friedman. American-Jewish Filmmakers: Traditions and Trends. Urbana, IL: Illinois UP, 1993.
Gelmis, Joseph. “Brooklyn in the Movies” Brooklyn Bridge 4.8 (1999): 58-63.
Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.
Jackson, Kenneth T. Editor. The Encyclopedia of New York City. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995.
Manbeck, John & Mike Olshan, “Brooklyn in the Movies.” New Brooklyn 5.3 (1983): 58-62.
Mast, Gerald & Bruce F. Kawin. A Short History of the Movies. Sixth Edition. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1996
Rollins, Peter C. Editor. Hollywood as Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context. Lexington, KY Kentucky UP, 1998.

Stern, Lee Edward. The Movie Musical. New York: Pyramid, 1974.

Warshow, Robert. The Immediate Experience. New York: Doubleday, 1962. 86-88.

Period Brooklyn Photos by Aldo Tambellini

2008-11-12T22:45:00.000-08:00

Atlantic Avenue & Flatbush Avenue in 1972 by Aldo Tambellini

Woman Crossing Atlantic Avenue, 1972 by Aldo Tambellini

Three Men on a Sidewalk in Brooklyn, 1972, by Aldo Tambellini

Looking East on Atlantic Avenue at Dusk in 1972 by Aldo Tambellini

Brooklyn History

2007-12-15T21:40:00.000-08:00

Brooklyn has a rich history dating back to the earliest periods when the Dutch and the Lenape Indians first encountered each other.