Blog posts by Nalleli Guillen

POTW: Celebrating the Next Million Possibilities!

Nalleli Guillen

Button, 1997; M1999.17.1, Center for Brooklyn History
In 1997, Brooklyn Public Library celebrated its 100-year anniversary serving local readers, the first free public library in Brooklyn having opened in 1897 inside Public School 3, in the neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant. This button is one example of our extensive button collection. In the 1980s and 1990s there was a substantive push to collect more community ephemera, and pin-back buttons such as this one are excellent examples of the importance of ephemeral social and cultural history. Last week we announced that…

POTW: Fall(ing) into an Odd Brooklyn Autumn

Nalleli Guillen

The "Camperdown elm," circa 1950; Brooklyn photograph and illustration collection (V1974.5.3405), Brooklyn Historical Society
With temperatures falling, the beloved (or controversial) smell of pumpkin spice in the air, and the autumnal equinox passed on Tuesday, fall has officially arrived! While the “vehicular-ly” blessed may head upstate or into New England for their annual “leaf peeping” pilgrimages, Brooklynites looking for a taste of fall foliage need only head to Prospect Park. Home to tens of thousands of trees, the one that, perhaps, best embodies our mood in 2020…

POTW: No To-Go Cocktails Allowed: Brooklyn's Temperance Village

Nalleli Guillen

Map of South Brooklyn Temperance Village in the 8th Ward of the city of Brooklyn; Map No. B P-[184-?].Fl
Before Prospect Park, before the “Slopes,” before the brownstones, there was “Temperanceville,” or the “South Brooklyn Temperance Village.” This little remembered planned community was part of the first wave of residential development that transformed Brooklyn’s 8th Ward beginning in the early 1830s. This map, probably printed about 1849, advertises available lots for sale between Fourth Avenue and Seventh Avenue, and 12th and 15th Streets. On a current neighborhood map,…

Lesson Learned? Considering the Draft Riots of 1863 for Today

Nalleli Guillen

The arrival of 4,000 Union troops in Manhattan on Thursday, July 16, 1863, marked the beginning of the end to four days of civic unrest and racial violence throughout New York City, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. That week, hundreds of buildings had been ransacked and burned. 119 people had been killed (although some estimates push that number closer to 500) including 19 African Americans, 11 of whom had been publicly lynched.At the height of the Civil War, the events that came to be known as the Draft Riots ignited simmering class and racial tensions in a city–and country–spiraling in the wake…

POTW: A Reckoning for Brooklyn's Philip Livingston: Slaver, Trader, and Signer of the Declaration of Independence

Nalleli Guillen

Attributed to Thomas McIlworth, Philip Livingston, circa 1764; M1974.72.1, Brooklyn Historical Society
We are witnessing a moment of reckoning sweeping across the globe. The simultaneous power and fragility of historical narrative is being exposed as communities reject public monuments erected by past generations. Sculptures of Confederate generals, of Christopher Columbus, of American presidents including Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt are being scrutinized, the “great deeds” they memorialize weighed against the histories of racial oppression and violence they ignore.…

“Spanish Influenza” in Brooklyn and What We Can Learn from Our History

Nalleli Guillen

We turn to the history of the “Spanish” influenza pandemic, which swept through New York City in several waves between 1918 and 1920. Today, insights from this past may help us cautiously begin this next chapter in our present.

New York State’s Regional Monitoring Dashboard New York State’s Regional Monitoring Dashboard, https://forward.ny.gov/regional-monitoring-dashboard
On Friday, May 15, New York State will begin the gradual process of rolling back the Executive Order known as NY Pause. This ten-point…

POTW: Keeping New York in Motion

Nalleli Guillen

Flatbush car barn, circa 1885; Early Brooklyn and Long Island photograph collection (v1972.1830), Brooklyn Historical Society
This week we honor the transportation workers who are keeping New York City connected in this time of global crisis. To the bus and subway operators and drivers, engineers, mechanics, and tradesmen, along with cleaning staff, thank you for what you are doing to keep our essential workers and others still commuting daily safe. We are devastated by reports, including this recent opinion piece from the New York Times, of transit workers getting sick and…

POTW: Doing Your Part to Take Care of Brooklyn

Nalleli Guillen

Annual Report, American Red Cross, Brooklyn Chapter, 1943-44; American Red Cross, Brooklyn Chapter collection (1985.091), Brooklyn Historical Society
Are you Taking Care of Brooklyn? In these unprecedented times, support our front line healthcare providers by doing your part: Practical Social Distancing; Stay home; Wash your hands; Avoid touching your face. BHS’s recent public history project and exhibition of the same name, Taking Care of Brooklyn, explores the history of women as caregivers, both in the home and in the workforce. In the late nineteenth century, the…

POTW: A Mother's Rights

Nalleli Guillen

Collections storage at BHS
This week’s POTW takes you behind the scenes, inside BHS collections storage!Hanging on our paintings rack is an unusual portrait of Brooklynite Rachel Hardy Ray that depicts her nursing a child, not something you see too often in nineteenth-century American portraits. It's almost as if her baby was carefully placed to keep the artist from capturing a full #freethenipple moment!As unusual as it may seem, breastfeeding has actually been a traditional motif in art for centuries, used to represent maternal protection and fertility. It was a common trope…

POTW: Brooklyn Women Rule the Road

Nalleli Guillen

Woman in car, 1910-1925, V1981.283.3.89; Burton family papers and photographs, ARC.217; Brooklyn Historical Society
Sexism in driving is as old as the American automobile industry. At the turn of the twentieth century, as Americans began purchasing personal vehicles, social commentators immediately dismissed female drivers, assuming the “fair motorist” was timid and hindered by “woman’s natural distaste for mechanics.” Luckily, photographs like this one from the Burton family papers and photographs show that women have ruled the road just as long as men! As the Brooklyn Daily…

POTW: Emily Roebling's Bridge

Nalleli Guillen

Brooklyn Bridge, circa 1901; Early Brooklyn and Long island photograph collection, V1972.1.1278, Brooklyn Historical Society
When it opened in 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge immediately became one of New York City’s most iconic landmarks, a symbol of American ingenuity and technological prowess. Did you know it likely never would have been completed without the steadfast management of one great woman? Emily Warren Roebling (1843-1903) took over daily oversight of the bridge’s construction in 1872. That year, her husband Washington Roebling developed decompression sickness, “the…

POTW: Hunterfly Road and Brooklyn's Weeksville

Nalleli Guillen

Eugene L. Armbruster, Hunterfly Road, circa 1922; V1987.11.2, Brooklyn Historical Society
Certain houses, streets, or neighborhoods have the ability to transport passersby back in time. The three houses in this photograph, today home to the Weeksville Heritage Center, preserve the memory of Brooklyn's once thriving nineteenth-century free African American community, Weeksville. The earliest of these houses (the single story duplex in the middle of the photograph) dates to the 1840s. The house was built not even two decades after New York State outlawed slavery, when many…

POTW: Williamsburg families

Nalleli Guillen

Lucille Fornasieri Gold, Williamsburg families, 1980-1985; V2008.013.73, Brooklyn Historical Society
Brooklyn-born photographer Lucille Fornasieri Gold said of her photographs, “I engage the social and moral questions, but I don’t try to answer them.” Through her photographs, Fornasieri Gold documented everyday life in Brooklyn, her portraits and street scenes encouraging viewers to consider the stories captured on camera. This image of a quiet moment shared by two families in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood in the 1980s unlocks a complex local history. Fueled by…

POTW: Desegregating Brooklyn's Classrooms

Nalleli Guillen

Group portrait of boys in a classroom, circa 1905, photographic print, v1972.1.739; Brooklyn Historical Society.
This class portrait was taken in about 1905 at Brooklyn's P.S. 134. Of the thirty-two young faces captured in the image, one is African American (visible just left of center). During Black History Month, this unnamed young man’s matriculation at P.S. 134 in the early twentieth century is a reminder of the long struggle to desegregate Brooklyn’s public schools, one that continues into the present day. In the 1800s, Brooklyn’s public school system was strictly…

POTW: A Leather Pocketbook

Nalleli Guillen

bhs_m1983.201.2_3of5_a (1)
This leather pocketbook once belonged to shipmaster Elihu Smith (1771-1825). Although he moved to New York City in 1810, Smith was born near New Bedford in Bristol County, Massachusetts. When he came of age, he quickly rose through the maritime ranks. His illustrious sailing career purportedly took him to China, England, and domestically, on frequent trips between New England and New York. Smith family manuscripts (also in the BHS collection) show that Elihu and his second wife Catharine both descended from old American Quaker families, hers from…

POTW: A Souvenir Bell Cast from the Fire

Nalleli Guillen

bhs_m1990.33.1_1of6_a (1)
In 1895, Brooklynite James Dunne (1842-1915) commissioned the manufacture of several miniature bells like this one. Inscribed "Brooklyn City Hall, Feb. 26, '95," they were forged from the remnants of the great bronze bell that once hung in Brooklyn's City Hall (today known as Borough Hall). Originally hung in 1859, the bell weighed 8,626 pounds and was cast in Boston by the ironworks of Henry N. Hooper & Company. Tragedy struck in the early morning hours of February 26, 1895, when the building caught fire. The blaze originated from a…

A Voice from the Past

Nalleli Guillen

Preserved in Brooklyn Historical Society’s collections is a wax audio cylinder from 1927 with a big story to tell.Intent listeners will just make out the soft voice of a woman identified as “Mrs. Hunt.” She thanks the congregation of Plymouth Church for inviting her to Brooklyn Heights to celebrate “the memory of one whose name always seems to me to be the complement of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher.”Although a somewhat obscure figure today, Mrs. Hunt, (also known as Sally Maria Diggs, Rose Ward, and, troublingly, "Pinky," throughout her life), shared a unique…

An End of Summer Tribute: Coney Island and the Wonder Wheel

Nalleli Guillen

Imagine this: It’s a cool summer day and you are the first in line with your friends for the Ferris wheel on Coney Island. The operator opens the gate and you hop on a blue passenger car and sit facing the beach. Your pod slowly rises and starts to shake; the higher and higher you get, the more clearly you can see the boats floating on the horizon, and as you sit behind your friends you see a wonderful view of the Verrazano Bridge, then the pod…drops! The wind blows heavy as you swing in the air. You scream, but also laugh it off because you go on the Ferris wheel every time you’re here but…