Blog posts by Dee Bowers

POTW: An Unusual Ride to School

Dee Bowers

[Children riding to school in pony cart], circa 1947. Kasper Family Collection, BCMS.0080. Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History.
Today's photo of the week comes from the recently processed Kasper Family Collection. The Kasper family lived at the Manhattan Beach Veterans Housing Project in South Brooklyn in the late 1940s. The Manhattan Beach project was one of many veterans housing projects that the city created in the late 1940s to respond to a surge in demand as soldiers returned from overseas. As this 2011 Brooklynology blog…

POTW: Brooklyn's Lost Saltwater Oasis

Dee Bowers

[Hotel St. George pool], 1930. Photographs from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, NEIG_1455.  Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History.
As a summer heat wave kicks off the last few days of Pride Month, our Photo of the Week takes us to an elegant indoor pool at the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn Heights. The Hotel St. George was once the city's largest hotel and a glamorous spot to see and be seen. It was also a known cruising and gathering space for gay men, some of whom resided at the hotel. As such, it has been featured in two of…

POTW: A Mother's Immigration Story

Dee Bowers

The Gottlieb family. Mother holding baby girl in an urban park on the Lower East Side. BJHP_0173, 1947; Brooklyn Jewish History Project, Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History
This is a photo of Regina (Rivka, nee Kanner) Gottlieb and her daughter Madeline in a park on the Lower East Side in 1947. The joy on both of their faces is palpable, despite the difficult years that preceded this photo. Regina and her husband Alexander were both from Poland, Alexander from Borislaw and Regina from Lodz Ghetto. They had both survived …

POTW: Cleaning Up the Waterfront with N.A.G.

Dee Bowers

Photo of Neighbors Against Garbage (N.A.G.) litter cleanup, GEHP_0193, c. 1990s; Greenpoint Environmental History Project; Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History.
In the early 1990s, residents of Greenpoint and Williamsburg were fed up with the city neglecting their neighborhoods. A number of grassroots community organizations sprang up in response to various issues, including development, community board planning processes, and excessive litter. One such organization was Neighbors Against Garbage (N.A.G.), founded in 1994 in a local…

Web Archiving at BPL: Saving Brooklyn's Web Content One URL at a Time

Dee Bowers

Did you know that Brooklyn Public Library has a web archive? In 2017, the Brooklyn Collection (now part of the new Center for Brooklyn History) joined the Internet Archive’s Community Webs program, in which public libraries around the country are given the funding and support to start and sustain web archives. We have been archiving Brooklyn web content through this program for over three years now.  Web archiving is how we describe the process by which we save and preserve websites and web content in a stable and static archival format. This is…

Reading Against the Grain in the Montauk Club Collection

Dee Bowers

The Brooklyn Collection is now part of the Center for Brooklyn History! Learn more about this historic partnership here. This post is a collaborative effort of historian Dylan Yeats, Vice President of the Montauk Club and co-chair of its History Committee, and archivist Diana Bowers-Smith, who processed the Montauk Club Collection at Brooklyn Public Library along with librarian and archives volunteer Kreya Jackson. Founded in 1889, when Brooklyn was still an independent city, the Montauk Club is a social club in the Park Slope neighborhood. Its landmarked Venetian Gothic clubhouse,…

The Fierce Women Skaters of Roller Derby's Heyday in Brooklyn

Dee Bowers

In honor of our current exhibit Empire Skate: The Birthplace of Roller Disco, I decided to look into some older roller skating history in Brooklyn. The sport of roller derby has seen a surge of women's teams and leagues emerge nationwide since its 21st-century revival in Austin, Texas in 2001. It was introduced to a wider audience with the release in 2009 of the feature film Whip It, which starred Elliot Page and was Drew Barrymore's directorial debut. What contemporary fans of the sport may not know is that its first heyday of mainstream popularity started in New York City in 1948, and…

Seeking Tsuneko Tokuyasu

Dee Bowers

Here at the Brooklyn Collection, one of our biggest collections is the records of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper. The eagle statue from the newspaper's downtown building has perched in the lobby of Central Library for over 20 years on long-term loan from the Brooklyn Historical Society, and you might have heard that due to a post on this very blog, the eagle was recently made a permanent gift to the library, where it will nest in perpetuity. In addition to the eagle sculpture, we hold clippings and other materials from the Eagle offices, including over 200,000 photographs from their "…

The Eagle Above Our Doorway

Dee Bowers

If you've been to BPL's Central Library, you may have noticed that there is a large eagle sculpture presiding over the inside of the front entrance, and if you've taken one of our building tours, you know that the sculpture came from the headquarters of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper. The records of the Eagle have been at BPL since 1957 and are still a large part of the Brooklyn Collection's holdings, so the eagle looms large here in more ways than one. There's been some debate about the eagle sculpture amongst our staff…

The Many Faces of the Brooklyn Bridge

Dee Bowers

Yesterday was the birthday of John Augustus Roebling, who designed the Brooklyn Bridge. In honor of that occasion, here is a selection of images of the bridge from our collections. Search our historic photographs here for more images of the bridge through the years.

Front page of the Brooklyn Eagle on the Brooklyn Bridge's opening day, May 24, 1883.
George Bradford Brainerd, c. 1870s
Julius Wilcox, c. 1880…