Brooklyn weekly facts and trivia

November 29, 2012 David Ansel Weiss The Daily Eagle
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It’s interesting to note that regarding the names of the two Long Island counties, Nassau was named by the Dutch, Suffolk was named by the English.

The first department store in the metropolitan area to offer home delivery was Brooklyn’s Abraham & Straus.

Yes, there is a Livingston buried in Green-Wood cemetery, but it’s not the Philip Livingston who had a summer house in Brooklyn Heights and who owned a distillery at the end of what is now Joralemon St. Rather it is his cousin William Livingston, onetime governor of New Jersey.

Broadway legend George M. Cohan wrote two songs about Brooklyn—“Over the Bridge“ and “Born and Bred in Brooklyn,“ but unlike most of his other songs, neither became popular.

Unlike most baseball players in the big leagues, a large number who played for the long-remembered Brooklyn Dodgers were either born or lived in the town they played for. Among them: Sandy Koufax, Tommy Holmes, Waite Hoyt, Joe Judge, Chuck Conners, and Bob Aspromonte.

Don’t get alarmed if you are looking for—and can’t find— a major-league ballplayer with the number 42 on his uniform. There has been no such number since 1997, when on the fiftieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s entrance into baseball, that number was retired and banned from being used by all big-league baseball players.

In 1937 there were no less than 23 grocery stores in the Brooklyn Heights area. The leading chain was Roulston’s with outlets on Atlantic Ave., Court St., Fulton St., Montague St., and Hicks St. (2 stores), followed by Bohack’s with stores on Henry St., Hicks St., Fulton St,, and Montague St. , and Peter Reeves with outlets onClinton St., Henry St., Hicks St., and Montague St.

Did you know that architecturally speaking today’s Dutch colonial house is a direct descen- dant of the original Dutch farm houses in Brooklyn?

The Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Fort Greene did more to help out in the ef- fort to free the slaves than serve as a stop on the Underground Rail Road. During the Civil War leading local abolitionists met in the church’s basement where they drafted a version of an emancipation proclamation, which when completed they took to the White House where it provided input for the final Emancipation Proclamation that President Lincoln is- sued on September 22, 1863. 

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