Brooklyn Timeline: Brooklyn Heights
1930s-50s: Depression-Era Brooklyn Heights and Its Re-Birth Out of the Mental Loins of Robert Moses
The twentieth-century did not start off with too much of a bang for Brooklyn, in general, or for Brooklyn Heights, specifically. Possibly it was getting lumped in with Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island as part of the City of New York that was so demoralizing. Or maybe it was the advent of all the bridges and the accompanying derogatory term “bridge and tunnelers.” Or maybe there were many social, political, and economic reasons that Brooklyn Heights began to experience the flight of its wealthier inhabitants? Who can say, really? Whatever the reasons, by the time of the Great Depression, “one-third of the dwellings in the Heights were boarded up due to bank foreclosures, and the rooming house population began to include prostitutes an drug addicts.” Now, while this might sound like a more interesting population demographic than the Brooklyn Heights of today, it was not the cheeriest of situations.
Luckily, the Depression ended because there was a war. Lucky! And artists and writers started migrating from downtown Manhattan into the Heights. But trouble was coming. Trouble that starts with “T” which rhymes with “C”, which stands for “city planning.” It was Robert Moses. That’s what kind of trouble was coming. Moses wanted his beloved Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to plow right through Hicks Street, destroying Brooklyn Heights. Community opposition was so strong though that the plan was abandoned for the much better one of building “two levels of highway topped by a cantilevered esplanade were built along the western edge of Brooklyn Heights. The esplanade, now called the Promenade, was dedicated in October, 1950.” Thousands of people walk on the Promenade every year, to breathe in the car fumes, and look at the Statue of Liberty and pretend they’re living in a postcard because THAT is the American dream right there. A lungful of exhaust fumes and an eyeful of lady liberty. God bless America.