Of Cabbages and Kings County

by Linder, Marc; Zacharias, Lawrence

• ISBN13: 9780877457145
• ISBN10: 087745714X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-12-01
• Publisher: Univ of Iowa Pr

Summary

No one today thinks of Brooklyn, New York, as an agricultural center. Yet Kings County enjoyed over two centuries of farming prosperity. Even as late as 1880 it was one of the nation's leading vegetable producers, second only to neighboring Queens County. In Of Cabbages and Kings County,Marc Linder and Lawrence Zacharias reconstruct the history of a lost agricultural community. Their study focuses on rural Kings County, the site of Brooklyn's tremendous expansion during the latter part of the nineteenth century. In particular, they question whether sprawl was a necessary condition of American industrialization: could the agricultural base that preceded and surrounded the city have survived the onrush of residential real estate speculation with a bit of foresight and public policies that the politically outnumbered farmers could not have secured on their own? The first part of the book reviews the county's Dutch American agricultural tradition, in particular its conversion after 1850 from extensive farming (e.g., wheat, corn) to intensive farming of market garden crops. The authors examine the growing competition between local farmers and their southern counterparts for a share of the huge New York City market, comparing farming conditions and factors such as labor and transportation. In the second part of the book, the authors turn their attention to the forces that eventually destroyed Kings County's farming-ranging from the political and ideological pressures to modernize the city's rural surroundings to unplanned, market-driven attempts to facilitate transportation for more affluent city dwellers to recreational outlets on Coney Island and, once transportation was at hand, to replace farms with residential housing for the city's congested population. Drawing on a vast range of archival sources, the authors refocus the history of Brooklyn to uncover what was lost with the expansion of the city. For today, as urban planners, ecologists, and agricultural developers reevaluate urban sprawl and the need for greenbelts or agricultural-urban balance, the lost opportunities of the past loom larger.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction: Urban Removal of Agriculture	1	(18)
PART ONE The Rise and Fall of Kings County as Vegetable Capital of the United States
Kings County Farms	19	(33)
Competitiveness and the ``Courageous Capitalist''	52	(27)
Labor Supply: Agricultural Workers and Labor Relations	79	(30)
PART TWO From Farms to Suburbs: The Real Estate Market-Induced Sellout and the Resistance
Comparative Demographic and Economic Development in Brooklyn and Rural Kings County	109	(15)
The Prehistory of the Conversion of Rural Kings County Farms into Suburban Real Estate	124	(32)
Modernizers Thwarted: The Great Annexation Debate of 1873	156	(29)
The Impact of Property Tax Laws on Deagriculturalization	185	(17)
Were All Kings County Farmers Descendants of the Original Dutch Settlers? The Farm-Tenure Structure	202	(18)
What Was the Dutch Farmers' Price? Profits, Taxes, Land Prices, and Incomes	220	(25)
Case Studies in Suburbanization	245	(33)
Conclusion: Is Urban Agriculture Oxymoronic?	278	(23)
Tables	301	(36)
Abbreviations	337	(2)
Notes	339	(98)
Bibliography	437	(30)
Index	467