Greenpoint Brooklyn's Forgotten Past, by Geoffrey Cobb
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Greenpoint Brooklyn's Forgotten Past, by Geoffrey Cobb
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Other authors have covered local history, but Geoffrey Cobb's "Greenpoint Brooklyn's Forgotten Past" unearths a wealth of local history never published previously in one volume. The result of extensive research, forgotten events and characters re-emerge to create a lively and entertaining portrait of the neighborhood's colorful past.
Greenpoint Brooklyn's Forgotten Past, by Geoffrey Cobb- Amazon Sales Rank: #254143 in Books
- Published on: 2015-05-17
- Original language: English
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .98" w x 5.25" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 390 pages
About the Author Geoffrey Cobb is a Brooklyn high school history teacher with more than two decades of experience. Mr. Cobb has lived in Greenpoint and studied its history for almost a quarter century. A licensed tour guide who gives local history walking tours, Mr. Cobb is also the author of the popular local blog: http://historicgreenpoint.wordpress.com
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Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. A Walking Tour Through Time and Space By Benjamin Alexander How do you take a neighborhood, write its history, and make it relevant to a general readership without getting the reader mired in a dense fog of “and then this happened,” “and then that happened”? Author Geoffrey Cobb, with his new book Greenpoint, Brooklyn’s Forgotten Past, has found the answer, and the fact that he is a licensed tour guide undoubtedly played no small part in the formula he devised. By the time you finish this flowing and highly accessible work, you know the streets of Greenpoint well, you have a vivid picture of many colorful characters who once walked along those streets—as well as others who made their mark before the area had streets—and you’ve learned a lot more American history than you ever thought a book about one New York neighborhood could tell you. Each chapter is a self-contained anecdote, but intricate threads link them all together. Through it all, some colorful personalities emerge. There’s Pete McGuinness, boisterous and tireless politician from the neighborhood who took on Tammany Hall in the World War I era. Jack Kilrain, celebrated pugilist of the late nineteenth century, also gets some spotlight. We learn that Mae West grew up in Greenpoint and made her debut as a young child on a Brooklyn stage. We meet a number of individuals and families who built up the neighborhood’s industrial and banking structures in the formative years—the Meserole family of farmers and then bankers, the Smiths who made their fortune in Greenpoint from porcelain, Neziah Bliss who gave the area a bridge and a shipbuilding industry, the oil magnate and philanthropist Charles Pratt—and some others who just make cameo appearances, like the infamous Aaron Burr, whose brief visit for a romantic tryst Cobb wryly chronicles. Authors, artists, civil rights advocates, Irish revolutionaries, Mafiosos, some famous and some hitherto obscure, have their stories woven through the chapters of this book. The organization of the book may seem puzzling at first—not chronological, and only thematic in an esoteric sense, but it works! Different chapters have different pieces of running stories, like the political education of Charles Evans Hughes, the celebrated prize fight between between Jack Kilrain and John L. Sullivan, and the progression or regression of baseball from fun to commercial, and a strong skillful voice makes the whole thing clear and coherent. You don’t have to have ever gone anywhere near Greenpoint to appreciate this book, but by the time you’re doing reading it, you’ll feel as if you have.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Living History Block by Block By Amazon Customer Cobb's book is at the top of my gift list this Christmas for old friends who lived in the neighborhood and new friends who recently moved here. There's so much fascinating insight in this book about one of New York City's long neglected Brooklyn areas. Details such as why Greenpoint was ever called the "Garden Spot of the World" are answered instantly when you learn that the core of the neighborhood was actually an orchard, beloved by early New Yorkers, before being carved into city streets. Living history is revealed almost on every block not least the labor strike and riots at The American Manufacturing Company, a two-story mill for making rope, the world's largest, right along the river. The mill was neighbors with the Knickerbocker Ice Company, a lumberyard, and the Continental Iron Works, which would go on to build the USS Monitor, the first ironclad warship requested by the U.S. Navy during the Civil War. (Fortunately a waterfront park is being developed to preserve that history.) The rest of the waterfront -- located directly across the East River from the Manhattan -- is like its neighbor Williamsburg awash with development plans for condos, rentals and a hotel. Cobb's book is packed with well researched details, which he presents in a narrative style that keeps you turning the pages. It is a joy to read especially for those of us who live here and know the area well (for me 40 years). This is our best opportunity to really learn about the characters that went before -- one chapter at a time. The book works especially well because the author choose the stories not the chronology of history to hang his tales. He breaks up the history -- what could have been a dry narrative format is a myriad of essays that are riveting and can be read at random. But in the end its the history he presents that makes the difference. And to think all the action happened within a few city blocks in this small neighborhood, still pretty much intact as it was when it was first developed less than two hundred years ago. Great writing. Great storytelling. Excellent read.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. I found it particularly amazing (and amusing) to read that Greenpoint native Mae West ... By Joe Doyle Geofrey Cobb tells the history of the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint in deftly interwoven "you-are-there" vignettes: hunting with the Mespeatches (Native Americans) in Greenpoint's primeval marshes; cutting timber from those same marshes with Dirck "The Norseman" Volckertzen in the 1630s; constructing the famed Civil War ironclad, the Monitor, in a Greenpoint shipyard; fielding championship baseball teams in the nation's "first fully enclosed baseball stadium" (in 1862!). Oil refineries (spawning epic pollution) made Greenpoint an industrial powerhouse -- then incinerated a wide swath of Brooklyn in 1884. In that same decade, gangs ruled the neighborhood's "Dangertown" slums -- and a local dynamite expert led a band of Greenpoint Irish nationalists to London for a bombing campaign. I found it particularly amazing (and amusing) to read that Greenpoint native Mae West turned Broadway upside down in 1927 with her play "Sex." Altogether a fascinating, page-turner of a book.
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