A Weekly Column of Trivia and Observations

By David Ansel Weiss
(cumb3@aol.com)

Ask anyone you see at Commodore Barry Park on Navy Street and Flushing Avenue what the first public park in Brooklyn was, and you will get a different answer than someone will give you at Fort Greene Park. Seems the Barry Park — originally named “City Park� and renamed after the Father of the U.S. Navy in the 1950s — is on land that the village of Brooklyn purchased in 1836, 11 years before Fort Greene Park, usually considered Brooklyn’s first public park, was built.

If you want to see what the living room of poet Marianne Moore looked like — she of the tricornered hat and black cape — you will find it re-installed as an exhibit in the Rosenbach Library and Museum in Philadelphia.

Charles Ebbets may have excelled as an owner of a major-league baseball team, but as the team’s manager, well, he wasn’t exactly a whirlwind. The one year he actually managed the Dodgers — it was 1898 — they finished last in the National League.

The first “super� theater built in Downtown Brooklyn was the Orpheum on Fulton Street, a vaudeville house considered the most magnificent theater in Brooklyn when it opened on December 31, 1900. As years passed, it added movies and then became part of the RKO chain, but its importance waned after the RKO Albee Theater was built in 1925, and in the 1950s it was shut down and demolished, its site later becoming the parking lot for the BAM-Harvey Theater.

Not everyone mourned the loss of Coney Island’s Elephant Hotel when it burned down in 1898. Although this seven-story hotel of tin and pine — with a saloon and shops on the ground floor and rooms above in the elephant’s body and trunk head — was an outstanding attraction, its critics maintained its clientele was not always “socially acceptable,� particularly when the hotel’s owners started renting out rooms by the hour.

Yes, it is true. For over a half century — until the 1940s when the service as discontinued — you could get to Manhattan via the Myrtle Ave. El, its trains going over the Brooklyn Bridge to a station in Park Row.

If you think Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux suggested putting sheep in Prospect Park’s Long Meadow for a scenic effect, you are mistaken. The reason for the sheep was to help keep the grass trimmed.

It wasn’t until 1979 that the major organizations in the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences — i.e. the Brooklyn Museum of Art (now the Brooklyn Museum), the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the Brooklyn Academy of Music (now BAM) — became truly independent of their parent organization.

In Green-Wood Cemetery are buried the two men who helped make the black-face minstrel show America’s most popular form of theatrical entertainment in the second half of the 19th century — Thomas D. “Daddy� Rice whose famous song-and-dance comedy routine was “Jump Jim Crow� and E. P. Christy whose Christy’s Minstrels was the nation’s No. 1 minstrel group.

Much of the rapid decline of the Lenape Indians in our area can be traced to the Native Americans themselves. True, such factors were involved as disagreements over land rights, their lack of immunity to European diseases, etc., but a major factor was that they had so energetically pursued supplying furs to Dutch fur traders that they wiped out all the beavers in the vicinity, to the point the fur trade moved northward and westward to the detriment of their own people and their Dutch partners.

It was one of the worst riches-to-rags scenarios of the 19th century, the story of Gabriel Furman. Born to wealth, he started out brilliantly as a successful lawyer, holder of several state political offices, a noted antiquarian, and the author of several historical treatises, including the first authoritative history of Brooklyn. But then as time went on, he became increasingly eccentric and reclusive, some say addicted to opium, and ended up in poverty, dying in a city hospital.

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