As my second visit to the Brooklyn Historical Society I wouldn’t say it was better than my first visit, but it was more interesting and informative. This time there I had a very different assignment compared to my previous task. My new assignment required me and my group to choose from different atlases which had different years and locations. What we were looking for was based around the famous tragedy of 1876. The reason to this famous date was the fire of the Brooklyn theater which killed somewhere around 300 people.
We were looking for an atlas that might help us identify what Brooklyn looked like before and after the fire. We choose three different atlases from 1874, 1877, and 1884. While we looked through these historic maps we came to a problem we didn’t have the exact address. Two of my classmates looked for the address in the Brooklyn directory of that time, the address they found was 315 Washington Johnson Street. When we found the building we saw that it was very narrow and seemed not have much of any breathing room. I now understand why such a tragedy happened and want to learn further details of this event.
