Download E-books Of Cabbages and Kings County: Agriculture and the Formation of Modern Brooklyn PDF

No one this day thinks of Brooklyn, long island, as an agricultural middle. but Kings County loved over centuries of farming prosperity. Even as overdue as 1880 it was once one of many nation's major vegetable manufacturers, moment merely to neighboring Queens County.

In Of Cabbages and Kings County, Marc Linder and Lawrence Zacharias reconstruct the historical past of a misplaced agricultural neighborhood. Their research specializes in rural Kings County, the location of Brooklyn's large enlargement throughout the latter a part of the 19th century. specifically, they query even if sprawl was once an important of yank industrialization: may perhaps the rural base that preceded and surrounded the town have survived the onrush of residential actual property hypothesis with a little bit foresight and public rules that the politically outnumbered farmers couldn't have secured on their own?

The first a part of the e-book reports the county's Dutch American agricultural culture, particularly its conversion after 1850 from broad farming (e.g., wheat, corn) to in depth farming of marketplace backyard plants. The authors learn the becoming pageant among neighborhood farmers and their southern opposite numbers for a percentage of the massive big apple urban industry, evaluating farming stipulations and elements equivalent to exertions and transportation.

In the second one a part of the booklet, the authors flip their awareness to the forces that finally destroyed Kings County's farming—ranging from the political and ideological pressures to modernize the city's rural atmosphere to unplanned, market-driven makes an attempt to facilitate transportation for extra prosperous urban dwellers to leisure retailers on Coney Island and, as soon as transportation was once at hand, to exchange farms with residential housing for the city's congested population.

Drawing on an unlimited diversity of archival assets, the authors refocus the heritage of Brooklyn to discover what was once misplaced with the growth of the town. For this present day, as city planners, ecologists, and agricultural builders reevaluate city sprawl and the necessity for greenbelts or agricultural-urban stability, the misplaced possibilities of the prior loom larger.