Brooklyn: The Once and Future City | Book review
With “Brooklyn: The Once and Future City,” author and Brooklyn native Thomas Campanella has written the unqualified best and most thorough history of our city-turned-borough. He will talk about it at the Brooklyn Historical Society on November 7.
The book takes the reader in exquisite detail from the 17th century to today’s popular Brooklyn Point. It grabs you from its cover of a fantastical globe tower designed by Samuel Friede as the “world’s tallest building” to hidden moments from Brooklyn’s storied past.
Campanella’s decade-long research has unearthed many original facts from Brooklyn’s lore as the “storied underdog.” A professor of urban studies and city planning at Cornell University, the author utilizes creative chapter titles and selected quotations — some imaginatively interpreted — to introduce pages crowded with detail. Chapters, arranged thematically, jump through time and are peppered with illustrations: historic photos, sketches, design drawings, period ads. The coverage is balanced and readable although the type is dense.