Here's How The World Saw Brooklyn In 1949

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK – A 1949 travelogue recently resurfaced on social media showing a borough where the Dodgers ruled Ebbets Field, tourists never missed a chance to drive the Belt Parkway and Coney Island, like a fine wine, was getting better and better with time.

"Brooklyn across the river!" declares narrator Alois Havrilla as the camera pans across the skyline.

Apparently we were known as, "The city of friendly people sometimes called Dodgerville."

It was a different time.

The 10-minute Screen Art documentary, recently posted to YouTube, captures moments Brooklyn will never see again: two boys clinging to the gates of Ebbets Field, a Ronald Reagan movie headlining at a Fulton Street theater and crowds of fedora-clad men walking briskly past the Brooklyn Eagle newsroom.

The United States, finally thriving after a decade of depression and the Second World War, was a more confident nation, and that confidence is reflected in Havrilla's assurances that Brooklyn police officers are admired throughout the world and that its elevated rails will soon be replaced by modern and high-functioning subways.

Havrilla shows us a Brooklyn of mass industry: the Brooklyn Navy Yards was providing year-round employment to thousands and "Made In Brooklyn" was a label not reserved for microbrews, mason jars and bidets.

And apparently income inequality (and women workers) did not exist.

"Here the small businessman competes with his more affluent neighbor without rancor," Havrilla informs us. "From small stores and from horse-drawn wagons, here in Brooklyn, democracy lives."

But what perhaps is most jarring is the picture Havrilla paints of Brooklyn's progressive identity, especially now as Brooklyn hate crimes are on the rise and immigration officers stalk the borough's courthouses.

"In Brooklyn live peoples from the four corners of the Earth, living side by side without prejudices or hate," we are told. "In Brooklyn, the brotherhood of man is a reality instead of a myth."

Isn't it pretty to think so?