My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm

by Manny Howard

  Back at the mattress, I towel the rich mud off my feet and get back into the bag and listen to the storm as it fails to drown my field. Imagining Brooklyn without cement has always been a favorite activity of mine. Once even the anarchic paved ribbon of man and machine that is Flatbush Avenue, seven blocks from here, was little more than a narrow wooden boardwalk. Church Avenue was nothing but a rutted, often impassable two-track. A vital thoroughfare then and now, the two routes intersect half a mile from where I rest, listening to the rain on the new dirt. It is the crossroad where the storied tradition of farming in Kings County came to an end. Western Long Island (now Brooklyn) was the vegetable basket for much of the East Coast, having its trading center in the town of Flatbush and, to a lesser extent, the other four Dutch townships that sat for more than one hundred years on the southern border of Brooklyn.

  In 1872, Brooklyn’s Committee of One Hundred, all landowning farmers, all Big Men descended from Big Men, prepared a bill approving the annexation by the City of Brooklyn of the five townships that made up the seventy-two square miles of Kings County. Unlike the villages at the core of the other four townships, Flatbush had developed a nearly urban core by the 1870s. The Big Men, or Lords of Flatbush, all of them Dutch, all from the families of original settlers, were convinced that joining with Brooklyn would be a profitable enterprise. In short order, the notion acquired an aura of inevitability.

  But annexation was unthinkable to the Boer farmers in Flatlands to the east. Located in the southeastern corner of Kings County, at the time of the first annexation battles in the 1870s there was only one person for every four acres. Flatlands is low-lying terrain just east of Prospect Park Ridge, bordering Flatbush in the west and stretching to Hempstead in the east. At the time of annexation Flatlands (now the area including the neighborhoods Canarsie, Bergen Beach, Mill Basin, and Marine Park) was dominated by fields and woodlands. It had few roads. Its southern reaches, where the territory juts into Rockaway Inlet and Jamaica Bay, had an extended heath on which sheep grazed. Here, the marshland—interrupted regularly by creeks and small bays—was almost entirely uninhabited. Canarsie, the lone, tidy residential pocket, was centered in the lowlands, on the crossroads that is today Kings Highway and Flatbush Avenue. Settled in 1624, the town was first called New Amersfoort by its Dutch founders, after their homeland’s even lower-lying southern region.

  Not only did the Dutch Flatlanders find comfort in the familiar terrain, they used their technical expertise to build a system of dikes that improved and increased the arable lands used for crops, including tobacco. Cattle grazed on the abundant spartina cordgrasses native to the saltwater meadows. Trade flourished with the native population—the Jamaica nation—living on the Rockaway Peninsula’s bay side.

  Flatlanders harbored a robust distrust of the modernizing ways of Brooklynites—most all of whom were, by then, no longer Dutch. The Flatlanders certainly had no use for modernity’s accompanying convenience—luxuries such as gas streetlights, running water, and paved roads.

  Still, on February 11, 1873, the first in a series of annexation bills was filed in the state Assembly. This one, a test of sorts, called only for the annexation of the town of New Lots. An important farming center with nearly as many residents as the four other townships combined, New Lots had been created when the sons and daughters of farmers in Flatbush went looking for their own land to harvest. In addition to the old farming village itself, New Lots consisted of the larger towns of Brownsville, Cypress Hills, and the industrial center East New York. Its people were almost entirely of Dutch and German descent. The very next week a second bill was introduced, intended to annex the county’s three most rural towns, Flatlands, Gravesend, and New Utrecht. The county commissioners were unanimously in favor of the bill, and the residents were universally opposed. A war was imminent.

  The appointed representatives of each township were all wealthy farmers. They elected as their president the wealthiest among them, the representative from Flatbush, the most prosperous of the townships, John A. Lott. A farmer only inasmuch as he owned the most farmland in Kings County, Lott was not only a descendant of one of the most prominent Dutch families, one that had farmed here for two hundred years, he was also the wealthiest lawyer in the county. He was the embodiment of modernization and urbanization in Kings County. The Lott residence stood directly across the Flatbush Road from Erasmus Hall Academy and next door to the Protestant Reformed Dutch Church of Flatbush. By the 1870s the church, the school, and Lott’s impressive homestead were the three institutions upon which the town of Flatbush was built.

  During a public career that began in 1838, John A. Lott served as a judge on the Kings County Court of Common Pleas, a member of the state Assembly and later the Senate. Eventually Lott sat on the state Supreme Court and later on the Court of Common Appeals. He ended his career in public service as chief commissioner of the Commission of Appeals from 1870 to 1875. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. is said to have considered Lott the “ablest lawyer” in Brooklyn. Lott’s long, successful public career was paralleled by his success in the private sector. Lott maintained real estate holdings far beyond Kings County. He was president of one railroad and no fewer than five companies or boards, including the Long Island Safe Deposit Company and Flatbush Gas Company. Lott was also the director of two insurance companies and a trustee of the Flatbush Fire Company on Church Avenue.

  In 1870 Lott owned 253 acres of farmland within the five townships he was single-mindedly attempting to urbanize. John Lott believed so completely in annexation and urbanization that he promoted the abolition of the rural town names once they became part of Brooklyn. At first glance his vision of what he called “one city, one government and one destiny” seems at odds with his agrarian financial interests, but it is likely that his income from commercial ventures and legal pursuits eclipsed that of his farms. Because, unlike many of his neighbors, he was already diversified, he stood to profit substantially as he subdivided his rural holdings. Lott’s allies in the cause of modernization were Peter Lott (a cousin), representative of Flatlands, and William Bennett of Gravesend, the only British settlement in Kings County. Like Lott, they had already abandoned their farms for other, more portable and profitable pursuits.

  Opposing John Lott was Teunis Garret Bergen. If not pilloried then certainly parodied in the press as an agrarian troglodyte and an obstinate old-world Dutch primitive who lived farther south on the family’s homestead out on the Bay Ridge, “Uncle Tune,” as he was commonly referred to in newspapers, was as dedicated and tenacious a rejectionist as Lott was a modernist. A wealthy farmer who preferred speaking Dutch even if his audience could not, Bergen was also a surveyor and a genealogist, a member of the New Utrecht Commission of Excise, the New Utrecht Highway Commission, and the New Utrecht Board of Health, and a shareholder in the Brooklyn & Flatbush Turnpike. He had been New Utrecht’s town supervisor for fifty-three years running. Bergen was also a delegate to the New York State constitutional convention and served one term in Washington, D.C., as a congressman.

  Like Lott, Bergen owned farmland throughout the county and beyond its borders. He had substantial holdings across the harbor in New Jersey. His homestead, like those of his closest relatives, was on the banks of New York Harbor just below the narrows. It is possible, and has been suggested, that because Bergen had not diversified his wealth to the same extent as Lott and his allies in anticipation of the wave of modernizing fever, Bergen’s opposition was a stalling tactic designed to give him the time he required to broaden his holdings. But if he had not prepared for modernization, he had more than prepared to oppose it. When the bills to annex the five towns were introduced in the state Assembly, Bergen made certain that those bills were accompanied by a petition rejecting the proposal signed by 95 percent of the residents of his district, New Utrecht. The battle had been joined.

  In all likelihood, Teunis Bergen’s sole motivation was not to protect the region’s agrarian past. But, the role of the rural stalwart—o
ne he made it easy for people to believe—did provide the cover he needed while he prepared to profit more completely from the inevitable change. So he was probably secretly delighted when he was satirized as a backward, drunken hayseed in the anonymous epic poem “The Wrath of Bergen,” published in the pro-annexation newspaper the Brooklyn Eagle.

  Bergen, as Uncle Tune, the malevolent clown, drunk on applejack, barrels into Flatbush from the Bay Ridge waving his clay pipe, railing against the progressive efforts of well-meaning local politicians to draw Flatbush and surrounding townships toward modernity.

  Marching over hill and moor, Uncle Tune protested as fiercely as Peter Stuyvesant before him, excoriating the gentle majority in an effort to protect the frozen swamp and swales, breaking coveys of timid, starving quail as he marched along the frozen roads and through the swamps choked with bulrushes and over the frozen fields of rotting turnips of his ancestral Flatlands. So dogged was his defense of farmland and wilderness that even good friends, and, importantly, fellow highborn Dutchmen such as Martin Schoonmaker, failed to recognize their once cheerful fellow gentleman farmer.

  The appointed hour has come

  When Brooklyn, Gravesend and Bay Ridge

  Are melted into one.

  Even Flatbush, where Judge Lott resides,

  Is equally undone.

  No more we hear the bullfrogs sing,

  Nor bob for eels at night;

  Our swamps will very soon be drained,

  And gas lamps give us light.

  Adieu to clams and pollywogs

  And heaven defend the right.

  With that he raised his old time horn,

  And blew so long and loud,

  That even the silent silver moon,

  Dodged in behind a cloud.

  Then up came John C. Jacobs,

  And with him Dominick Roche,

  And pledged that no city lot

  Should upon the swales encroach,

  Nor any street surveyor

  The clams or eels approach.

  Then Uncle Tune simmered down,

  Resumed his former smile,

  And Martin thanked these new friends

  In periods of a mile.

  So all things stand in status quo,

  The bullfrogs still can sing,

  And night owls, o’er the stagnant beach,

  Still flap their lazy wing,

  And Tunis from the Neighboring marsh,

  His eels at midnight bring.

  However, the condescension that Bergen bore in the cruel lampooning of “Uncle Tune” worked in his favor. He appears to have outmaneuvered the sophisticated, modernizing wannabe urbanites numerous times. Bergen argued strenuously and presciently that the increase in the property tax would quickly bankrupt any small farmer who dared to hold out against speculators for a more reasonable price. Bergen’s march was not without its stumbles; his parochial objections about taxation—“Why should I pay for a dock or a school house which is four miles away from my property?”—seem ludicrous today. But in the end, continually repeated protests like this and fearmongering about the social ills of urban expansionism—the anarchy, degradation, and disease that would result from an invasion of urbanizing foreigners—carried the day.

  On Election Day, November 4, 1873, predictably 85 percent of Brooklynites voted in favor of annexation. But the initiative was killed when 83 percent of the voters in the five townships rejected inclusion with the boomtown to the north. Uncle Tune strode victorious, abroad in the countryside, sporting his marsh boots and pulling cheerfully on his pipe, momentarily heroic. He made his way back home to the Bay Ridge. The envy of every present-day critic of Our Age, Bergen’s triumph was unrepeatable; he had made his stand against modernity and its mirage of limitless choice at its dawn as it closed all around him, just moments before its inevitability was a foregone conclusion. Perversely, a larger proportion of voters in John Lott’s Flatbush opposed the plan than in Bergen’s New Utrecht stronghold.

  The very next year, to John Lott’s horror, the citizens of Flatbush erected a new town hall and continued to resist the urbanizing press of Brooklyn.

  Bergen, too, continued to resist annexation, though even he came to see annexation as the inevitable outcome for the county. On the occasion of the opening of the Bay Ridge & Manhattan Railroad, he commented, “We are between two fires. Brooklyn tries to devour us, and New York tries to swallow us.”

  Hunting parties from Brooklyn often traveled the Flatbush Toll Road on weekends to traipse the marshes, woodlands, and fields of Flatbush for duck, high-holders, woodcock, snipe, and quail. When a drunken member of one such group shot and murdered a farmer who denied the men access to his land, Bergen took up the nativist opposition with renewed vigor. No longer tethered to a theoretical argument about the future property-tax burden, Bergen now argued that with development came debauchery, mayhem, and even murder. These were the values of the city, warned Uncle Tune, and they would bring ruin to paradise.

  Into this maelstrom strode Dean Alvord. A newly minted real estate man with modernist dreams of upper-class enclaves for even more freshly minted wealthy Brooklynites, an outlander in a peculiarly tight-knit community that could easily, and often did, trace its lineage to the first settlements, Alvord was precisely the type of carpetbagging speculator Bergen feared would set his sights on rural Kings County. Alvord’s Prospect Park South (a gated sixty-acre block of luxurious, grand homes), and developments like it, were heralds of an urban future that Teunis Bergen deplored but was ultimately powerless to halt. By 1912, civic reformers were lamenting the urbanization of America, asserting that cities with more than three hundred thousand residents were unsustainable without interruption by planned, protected, productive green belts and the local farms within to support them. But by then Alvord, president of the Dean Alvord Co., had moved on, heading east, cutting a swath of luxury living as he went, through Laurelton, Queens, and along Long Island. By 1910 he was promoting Belle Terre, his exclusive summer colony on Port Jefferson Harbor. Three years later he was in Clearwater, Florida, building the state’s first planned residential community.

  By 2003, when we moved to Alvord’s Prospect Park South, with its planned greenways and well-managed tree population, it was a verdant, if prettified, oasis in a sea of cement. The Brooklyn I grew up in had been abandoned to fend for itself by both the municipal and state governments. In 1975, President Gerald Ford made it official, refusing to fund a federal government bailout, and in so doing infamously told the entire city, so the New York Daily News declared, “Drop dead.” The City—Abraham Beame’s City Hall specifically, and later, when run by Ed Koch—in turn washed its hands of the four other boroughs, unleashing the latent cronyism of the borough presidents and encouraging unprecedented independence in order to free itself from responsibility in this new sink-or-swim reality of urban America. The decades of corruption that resulted and the blight that greed bore crippled the borough. Now Brooklyn, like Queens, Staten Island, and The Bronx, was no longer the problem of any government that had the capacity or resources to rescue it. Our rivers did not catch on fire—though that’s probably only because of their strong currents—but the streets cratered, facades crumbled, entire buildings collapsed. One of my most vivid memories growing up then was visiting a town house on the corner of State and Hicks streets. Early one evening the north wall that ran along State Street peeled away from the rest of the house and fell in a dusty heap into the middle of the street. The building’s interior was exposed like a dollhouse. A visit to the site was easily ten times more fun than a trip to the shambolic South Street Seaport maritime museum. Hell, it was even better than television. As we stood at the gray police barricades, for us, the kids in the neighborhood, the atmosphere was more carnival than catastrophe. We delighted in shouting out the rumor that the man of the house had been in the bathtub when the wall came down. Naked! Delirious at the thought of the physical collapse of our world, we pointed to the details of the family’s life no
w on view for all. My mother told my sister and me that the mom who lived in the house had defied the police and reentered the wreckage to retrieve her dissertation. We were rapt by the story, never mind we had no idea what a dissertation was or if it could be carried by one person or not. My sister, Bevin, grabbed the arm of my duffel coat, gasping and pointing at the gape where the living room was. Gesturing to the sideboard, she whispered conspiratorially, “Look. The wineglasses are all still on the shelves.”

  The decay all around us was never more vividly wrought and caused giddy delight. Twenty-five years later, after Lisa and I purchased a co-op on State Street, just one block from the famous collapse, I learned that under the crust of tarmac, a spring runs off the cliffs that dominate the neighborhood and down the length of State Street, slicing through the sandy soil and leaching through the city’s subcutaneous gravel, sand, and clay into the East River, forever undermining the foundations of all the houses along its shifting route. Only a year after our purchase the engineers delivered the news that our building was the latest victim of that subterranean (well, subpavement) brook. When other members pooh-poohed the engineer’s report, insisting that walls don’t just peel off houses, I told them the story about the Giant Dollhouse. We sold our unit shortly after repairs had begun.

  In the 1970s, neither the city nor the state nor the country nor its citizens were responding to what environmental critics were already calling the poisoning of our planet. But my best friend, Matt Prosky, and I, both latchkey kids, didn’t mind at all. Dying or not, Brooklyn was our despoiled, ramshackle, often darkly mysterious, occasionally downright venal playland. Brooklyn never failed to produce entertainment. Rumored invasion of the neighborhood by the almost entirely black, marauding orphans who lived in Saint Vincent’s Home for Boys was a perennial favorite and was always good for a few hours of hysterical headlong, screaming retreats ending in hiding out, with deliciously skinned knees, in a mountain of someone else’s uncollected garbage bags.