Along the Shore: The Landmarks of Brooklyn's Industrial Waterfront

FAIN: BI-50151-11

CUNY Research Foundation, NYC College of Technology (Brooklyn, NY 11201-1909)
Richard Hanley (Project Director: March 2011 to May 2014)

Two one-week Landmarks workshops for fifty community college faculty members to study the diverse and historically rich Brooklyn waterfront through the changing lens of historic preservation.

"Along the Shore: The Landmarks of Brooklyn's Industrial Waterfront" consists of two one-week NEH Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshops held during summer 2012 for fifty community college faculty members on the diverse and historically rich Brooklyn waterfront through the changing lens of historic preservation. The program focuses on Brooklyn's waterfront by exploring its preservation history and the questions it raises about the meaning of landmarks. Participants study such prominent sites as Brooklyn Bridge and Coney Island, as well as the architecture of Charles Bulfinch, whose work in the former Brooklyn Navy Yard (now a burgeoning industrial park) exemplifies some of the workshop's complex issues. The group also examines how industrial landscapes, such as the environmentally damaged Newtown Creek, exist alongside diverse and changing neighborhoods, from Greenpoint to Brooklyn Heights. Readings and lectures span architectural and environmental histories, maps, and poetry. Richard Haw, Francis Morrone, and Shelley Smith discuss Brooklyn's diverse architectural history, supported, for example, by Haw's Art of the Brooklyn Bridge and John Kasson's Amusing the Millions: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century. Geoff Zylstra, Roberta Weisbrod, and Daniel Campo address the area's environmental history as participants read articles on specific sites, EPA documents, and NOAA maps. Debby Applegate's biography of Henry Ward Beecher, Joshua Freeman's Working Class New York, and Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" illuminate some of the social and literary topics to be treated by Mark Noonan and Carolyn Hellman. This program features access to the Brooklyn Historical Society's extensive manuscript, map, and image collection.

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