15
INTRODUCTION
with writer and friend Truman Capote living in a nearby basement apartment on 70 Willow Street.13 Brooklyn Heights, wrote Capote at the time, “stands atop a cliff that secures a sea-gull’s view of the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges, of lower Manhattan’s tall dazzle and the ship-lane waters, breeding river to bay to ocean, that encircle and seethe past posturing Miss Liberty.”14 Earlier, in the 1920s, a brilliant young poet named Hart Crane was living in an apartment belonging to the father of a friend at 110 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn Heights (the same apartment from the windows of which Washington Roebling supervised the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge) while working on a long narrative poem about the bridge. In a letter written to his mother and grandmother in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1928, Crane described the spectacular view from the window of his apartment on the bluff above the shoreline: “Just imagine looking out your window directly on the East River with nothing intervening between your view of the Statue of Liberty, way down the harbour, and the marvelous beauty of the Brooklyn Bridge close above on your right! All of the great new skyscrapers of lower Manhattan are marshaled directly across from you, and there is a constant stream of tugs, liners, sail boats, etc. in procession before you on the river! It’s really a magnificent place to live!”15 In the “Proem” to his great epic poem The Bridge, Crane converted his passion for the river, the bridge and the shorelines that it connected into myth: O sleepless as the river under thee, Vaulting the sea, the prairies dreaming sod, Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend And of thy curveship lend a myth to God.16
ROBERT MOSES
FIGURE 3 (TOP)
Dock workers near Fulton Landing, 1924. C OURT ES Y OF B R OOK LYN H I STOR I CA L SOC I ET Y
FIGURE 4 (BOTTOM)
Brooklyn piers, 1934. P H OTO BY SA MUEL H. G OT TSC H O. C OURT ES Y O F L I B R A RY OF C ON G R E SS
In 1941, New York City’s powerful parks commissioner, Robert Moses, announced his plans to construct a four-lane highway (to be known as the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway) right through the middle of Brooklyn Heights along Hicks Street. The proposed construction was part of Moses’s ambitious plans to rezone and rebuild extensive sections of the city’s infrastructure. Moses’s proposal, if enacted as planned, would have transformed Hezekiah’s Pierrepont’s tranquil, suburban neighborhood into a busy, modern commercial thoroughfare. The planned construction was vigorously opposed by local residents, however, many of them young professionals who had recently followed the first wave of bohemians into