Just up: Brooklyn By Name Website.
New York Universiy Press has just now released a new book on Brooklyn. Here are some advance quoes:
“An excellent guide to Brooklyn. Explaining Brooklyn’s often mystifying names (like Force Tube Avenue and Dead Horse Bay) allows the streets to speak their stories. Walkers in the borough should not leave home without it.”
—Mike Wallace, co-author of “Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898″
“From Albemarle Road to Zion Triangle, the history of Brooklyn place names revealed in “Brooklyn By Name” is as fascinating as life in the County of Kings itself. By putting faces to the names of our streets, parks, and neighborhoods, Benardo and Weiss bring to vibrant life hundreds of places where Brooklynites live, work, and play every day. Whether we’re called Breukelen, Brookland, or Brooklyn, there’s no place like it in the world!”
—Marty Markowitz, Brooklyn Borough President
“This beautifully researched, lucidly written and compulsively readable book will have readers bouncing from entry to entry. By focusing on the derivation of Brooklyn’s place-names, the authors have subtly traced the borough’s rich history of politics, power, greed and idealism.”
—Phillip Lopate, author of “Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan”
“Taking off from neighborhood names, this page-turner of a book tells of the successive waves of settlers and immigrant arrivals who have given Brooklyn its distinctive flavor. Here are the men and women whose fantasies, foibles, and otherwise-fleeting fame find permanency in the pavements, parks and place-names of the borough that almost wasn’t part of New York. Nicely illustrated with an exceptional folio of new photos and unusual old illustrations, and peppered with vivid stories and obscure facts, this book will fascinate even the most provincial of non-Brooklynites. You don’t have to live there to love this book.”