Gowanus by Joseph Alexiou

Author:Joseph Alexiou
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2015-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

Traffic and Commerce in New Gowanus

As the appointed keeper of the Hamilton Avenue Bridge, John Anglim was well known in South Brooklyn. His job was to maintain the vital bridge and, possessing the only key, open and close the swinging conveyance as traffic required. In the spring of 1871, however, many local pedestrians, train conductors, and boat captains made numerous complaints against him. They had too often been stuck in place, waiting for the bridge, sometimes for nearly forty-five minutes while Anglim was nowhere to be found.

“We pay the keeper $25 per mouth, and have done so for a long time, as an inducement to him to facilitate the passage of our cars,” Thomas Sullivan, president of the Brooklyn City Railroad, told an Eagle reporter in mid-April. “Vessels are often very slow in going through, being poled or hauled by hand, and sometimes towed through by a steam tug not having power enough. By paying the keeper we thought to make him more careful and prompt than he otherwise would be, and that he would see that vessels were all ready to go through before he opened the draw.”

A conductor on the Greenwood train line—which, in theory, crossed the Hamilton Street Bridge every fifteen minutes—believed that Anglim regularly collected bribes and “did pretty much as he pleased.”

“Too often he left the bridge in charge of a boy, and often without any one in charge,” he informed the Eagle. “When it was opened by some boatmen a few days since, and left open by them with no person on it, the conductors had to got a row-boat and get on the bridge and close it before their cars could pass.” Eager to find out the truth, the fact-seeking Eagle reporter went down to the bridge to interview Anglim himself. But the keeper was nowhere to be found, so the reporter asked one of the various b’hoys hanging around the bridge, who directed him to a “small grocery store where drinking fluids form part of though stock in trade,” on Hamilton Avenue by Court Street, just a few blocks away.6 The store itself belonged to Anglim, it turned out, but the bridge keeper was not there either. Mrs. Anglim stood behind the counter.

“I think you’ll find him down at the bridge, underneath, ironing it, for he said it worked hard and needed fixing,” she told the reporter, who went back again to the bridge and, in frustration, yelled out “Anglim!” several times, which “only resulted in frightening the poor little fishes, who evidently took it for a threat against their lives.”

This failed effort to locate the infamous key holder attracted the attention of a property owner across the canal, also a member of the new city-administered Gowanus Canal Commission. He would not give his name, but recalled that Anglim had been the bridge keeper before the city ran the canal but had been fired for “neglect of duty.” The man was also “in the habit of using abusive language to boatmen who

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