The City of 'Greater' New York City never formed.

Should the boroughs have merged?

  • Yes

    Votes: 17 60.7%
  • No

    Votes: 11 39.3%

  • Total voters
    28
I know the POD is 1898 but the effects are almost all post 1900.

The consolidation referendum to merge what are the 5 boroughs of NYC fail. IOTL it won in Brooklyn by less than 1%. How would that effect life as we know it in NYC and the US? Would NYC even be the largest city in the U.S.? The 1900 population of NYC was 3.4 million. As separate cities NYC (Manhattan) had 1.9 million and Brooklyn had 1.2 million. Rival cities like Chicago and Philadelphia had 1.7 million and 1.3 million respectively.
 
Well Manhattan and Bronx would most likely merge still also Brooklyn and Queens I feel would merge leaving SI going to one or the other City.
 
I've tried looking for websites on the consolidation to link to, but they all seem to be written by a certain type of romantic Brooklynite who is still bitter about the loss of the independent city of Brooklyn. They are not very useful.

It should be noted that the only borough-to-be at the time that had a major heartache over the formation of Greater New York was Brooklyn, or since, except for an attempt by Staten Islanders to secede during a short period when the city had an African-American Mayor.

Anyway, here are some facts that may be relevant, from the associated Wikipedia article:

* Greater New York was first seriously proposed in the state legislature in 1857, so the proposal went through four decades of debate.

* In the USA, state legislatures are sovereign over lower level bodies and can arrange local government pretty much as they see fit, though the courts have imposed some limitations to this mainly invoking the 14th Amendment and in fact eventually did override aspects of the New York State government's plans for Greater New York. So there was no requirement to consult the voters in Brooklyn or elsewhere (and I don't get the impression there were any referenda elsewhere) at all.

* The consolidation seems to have been done in conjunction with something of a power-grab by the state legislature, New York City has comparatively less home rule or power vs. the state government than is standard for other large cities in the US.

* New York (Manhattan) annexed the portion of the what was to become the Bronx west of the Bronx River in 1874. At the time, the area that became The Bronx was part of Westchester County.

* The City of Brooklyn itself had an aggressive annexation program, bringing the rest of Kings County within its borders.

* Brooklyn and Manhattan consolidated their fire departments in 1865, so absent the consolidation, a merger of Brooklyn and New York would always be a topic of discussion.

* Queens County was divided into Queens and Nassau Counties in 1899, with the portion that became Nassau County being the portion outside the borders of Greater New York. Their doesn't seem to have been any intention of including this area within the city.

* Westchester County was divided into Westchester and Bronx Counties in 1914, with the portion that became Bronx County being the portion inside the borders of Greater New York.

* Essentially, in 1898, the new consolidated city spilled over into Westchester and Queens counties, portions of which remained outside the city, so afterwards these counties were subdivided so that separate counties would be inside and outside the city.

* New York City is the only municipality that I know of in the United States where counties exist within the city borders, as opposed to the other way around which is the usual practice, though I think there are some municipalities that straddle county borders.

* The borough of Brooklyn is actually the most populous borough in New York City and has been for some time. The population of Manhattan reached a peak of something like 2.5 million but became greatly reduced by what amounted to the clearance of the Lower East Side/ Five Points slums, most of whose inhabitants and their descendants wound up in the suburbs.

Anyway, though I think alternative arrangements are certainly possible given the above, the Greater New York idea made a good deal of sense. If anything, the new city should have included all of Queens and Westchester counties, however the legislators in 1898 could not possibly have seen the extent of suburbanization that transpired. And of course nothing could be done, given the US Constitution, about the portion of the metropolitan area that was in another state!

Given that New York/ Manhattan had already expanded into Westchester in 1874, unless you have a POD before that, you should see further annexations by the City of New York, with Long Island City being the likeliest possibility. Also, I would expect that Brooklyn would annex some towns in Queens, such as Jamaica.

The two likeliest alternatives are no consolidation, but further annexations piecemeal by New York City and also Brooklyn, or a "consolidation lite" that creates IOTL Greater New York, but excluding Kings and Richmond Counties (Brooklyn and Staten Island), or a third possibility of a dual consolidation where Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Jamaica are also consolidated into a separate city. Any of these would lead to a twin cities of New York and Brooklyn scenario, with a good possibility that they merge sometime later. I actually think there is more possibility for variance with division of Queens and Westchester counties. Staten Island seems to have been an afterthought and maybe could have been left out altogether.
 
Could you have had something akin to the old Metro Toronto, where certain municipal functions are uploaded to an expanded county government? And then the five boroughs remain separate cities within this "Metro New York"?
 
I think the biggest side effect from this would be that the NYPD could get overshadowed by the Brooklyn PD. with some fun side effects in pop couture
 
As a Brooklynite, I despise the union with Manhattan, gentrification and tourism are their main exports to my borough.
 
To point out by 1898 you had the following things present in terms of what already existed in factors presents in terms of being Brooklyn and Manhattan
  • In 1857, both New York City (Manhattan) and Brooklyn had received a shotgun wedding with New York State consolidating their police, fire, and health departments into that of joint metropolitan boards
  • That of a viewpoint that Chicago would eventually surpass the City of New York in terms of the largest city in the United States, and how might it play out in terms of international perception to the United States
  • The transport crisis in that while the Brooklyn Bridge existed, there was no through transit across it; Manhattan trolleys crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and dropped their passengers off on the Brooklyn-side and then returned to Manhattan while vice-versa for that of the Brooklyn trolleys
  • That of the WATER CRISIS. It was greatly expected in that Brooklyn was about to run dry in terms of being able to provide water. In 1896, their water system was capable of delivering ninety four million gallons a day, with sober estimates being given that demand would reach that level within three years (but there were already shortages being suffered within Brooklyn). Brooklyn had considered looking eastwards towards Eastern Long Island (Suffolk County) towards accessing additional water, but in June of 1896, Suffolk County had managed to get to Albany preventing Brooklyn from buying its own water without the approval of a majority of the county supervisors
  • By comparison, Manhattan was arguably swimming in water, with roughly a capacity of up to 400 million gallons of water being available (from the Bronx River, the Croton watershed, etc) - This argument was also used in that of Queens and Staten Island with the same urgency
  • Alongside that, Brooklyn was rapidly hitting its debt ceiling with the cost of construction for the Brooklyn Bridge and annexation of towns (this was compounded by the depression as a result of the Panic of 1893) and what was happening there; this was also compounded in that while Brooklyn had only half the population of New York City in 1891, it had only one-quarter the taxable property in part because New York City was the home to the corporations while Brooklyn was primarily that of residential housing
In regards to the last point (all points are mentioned from Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898), I'll quote a single paragraph on it:

In 1894, accordingly, New York was still fifty-five million dollars below its debt limit and it could sell its bonds for a negligible 3.9 percent. Brooklyn, meanwhile, had been forced to curtail its per capita spending, which was down to $9.75 a head, compared to New York's $22.46, while raising taxes steadily: Brooklynites paid an average of $2.83 per hundred dollars of property to Manhattanites' $1.82. To irate citizens who said the wealthy could well afford still higher taxes, the BCL [Brooklyn Consolidation League] counterargued that owners would inevitably pass such increases on to renters, cutting demand, slowing building, and in the end mainly hurting construction workers, tradesmen, clerks, and shopgirls.


But even beyond that, the issue was that the referendum was for each explicit county to vote on. Those areas that had voted for it beyond that of Kings County would still have joined the 'Greater City of New York'. Brooklyn would in truth have faced a series of growing issues as a result of being separated from the rest of the 'Greater City of New York', and I'd honestly imagine that considering the growing and mounting issues that Brooklyn was suffering from under that a later referendum would've probably brought them back under the 'Greater City of New York', thus creating the Five Boroughs as they are known, but delaying it probably by a decade or so I'd expect.
 
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