131 Miles and Countless Stories: Finding the Lost Histories of Brooklyn’s Waterfront

Several years ago, in the thick of research and development for a Brooklyn Historical Society project about Brooklyn’s waterfront, I found myself calling a long list of New York City government phone numbers. My goal was simple but elusive – to figure out exactly how many miles of coastline there were in the borough of Brooklyn.

I had scoured books and articles – to no avail. City reports on the waterfront are plentiful – especially in the years after the devastation of Superstorm Sandy – yet still no luck. But I’m a historian, and we historians can be pretty dogged about research. About ten phone numbers into my list of government agencies, I hit the jackpot - Michael Marrella, Director of Waterfront and Open Space Planning at the Department of City Planning, picked up his phone, and I had my answer (131 miles).

Since 2014, I, along with a team of Brooklyn Historical Society historians, have been digging deep into the untold histories of Brooklyn’s waterfront. We have looked at thousands of years of the waterfront’s history through the lenses of social history, environmental history, art and culture, race and ethnicity, queer and gender studies, and much more. We have drawn on the robust resources at Brooklyn Historical Society’s landmark Library & Archives, and at dozens of other repositories around the country and the world.