The 9 Best Kept Secrets In Brooklyn
Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims: The Grand Central of Brooklyn
It is sort of sad that Brooklyn doesn’t have anything to match the architectural majesty of Manhattan’s Grand Central Station, but it does, in a sense, have its very own Grand Central—one which might be even more majestic, in its way. Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims on Orange Street in Brooklyn Heights was known as the “Grand Central Depot” for its importance as a stop on the Underground Railroad leading up to and during the Civil War. Although slavery was legal in New York as late as 1827 (and much of Brooklyn’s farmland was worked using slave labor), Brooklyn still had a strong enough abolitionist movement that by 1849, Plymouth Church asked Henry Ward Beecher (famous abolitionist and brother to Uncle Tom’s Cabin novelist, Harriet Beecher Stowe) to be its preacher. Beecher’s sermons were so renowned that no less a personage than presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln went to hear the preacher way back in 1860.