On a muggy August day, as people traverse the Brooklyn Bridge, families congregate for ice cream in a former twentieth-century fireboat house, and tourists line up outside Grimaldi’s Pizzeria where Front Street meets Old Fulton Street. All the while, the cacophony of modern traffic from the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges and the much-unloved BQE (the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, to the uninitiated) pierces their senses. This is Brooklyn—“Like No Other Place in the World!” The convergence of these people, places, and sounds obscures that here is where the heart of the Village of Brooklyn once stood, home to a “casual collection [of residents] from all quarters” who mostly lived around the Fulton Ferry landing.
Brooklyn was settled along the path leading from Marechkawieck that became known as the road from the ferry in what is today’s Brooklyn Heights. In 1704, under an act passed by the General Assembly of the Colony of New York that required the creation, regulation, and maintenance of new highways, the road would become the town’s main street and be renamed Fulton Street. In the late eighteenth century, one traveler observed that the town of Brooklyn had about one hundred one-story dwellings.
Almost all of the village’s activity, its structures, and its residents were centered around the northwestern end of town, near the ferry landing where, by 1814, Robert Fulton’s steam ferry revolutionized travel across the East River by significantly reducing travel .