 The November 11, 1917, front page ofThe Brooklyn Daily Eagle | |
| Type | Daily newspaper |
|---|---|
| Format | Tabloid |
| Owner | Frank D. Schroth |
| Editor-in-chief | Thomas N. Schroth |
| Founded | October 26, 1841, asThe Brooklyn Eagle andKings County Democrat |
| Ceased publication | January 29, 1955, returning briefly 1960 to June 25, 1963. |
| Language | English |
| Headquarters | Brooklyn, New York |
| Circulation | 15,000 (as of 2017)[1] |
| Website | (Current publication) (Archived issues maintained by the Brooklyn Public Library) |
TheBrooklyn Eagle (originally joint nameThe Brooklyn Eagle andKings County Democrat,[2] laterThe Brooklyn Daily Eagle before shortening title further toBrooklyn Eagle) was an afternoon daily newspaper published in the city and later borough ofBrooklyn, in New York City, for 114 years from 1841 to 1955.
At one point, the publication was the afternoon paper with the largest daily circulation in the United States.Walt Whitman, the 19th-century poet, was its editor for two years. Other notable editors of theEagle includedDemocratic Party political figureThomas Kinsella, seminal folkloristCharles Montgomery Skinner, St. Clair McKelway (editor-in-chief from 1894 to 1915 anda great-uncle of theNew Yorker journalist), Arthur M. Howe (a prominent Canadian American who served as editor-in-chief from 1915 to 1931 and as a member of thePulitzer Prize Advisory Board from 1920 to 1946) and Cleveland Rodgers (an authority on Whitman and close friend ofRobert Moses who was editor-in-chief from 1931 to 1938 before serving as an influential member of theNew York City Planning Commission until 1951).
The paper added "Daily" to its name asThe Brooklyn Daily Eagle and Kings County Democrat on June 1, 1846.[3][4][5] The banner name was shortened on May 14, 1849, toThe Brooklyn Daily Eagle, but the lower masthead retained the political name[6][7] until June 8. On September 5, 1938, the name was further shortened, toBrooklyn Eagle,[8] withThe Brooklyn Daily Eagle continuing to appear below the masthead of the editorial page, through the end of its original run in 1955. The paper ceased publication in 1955 due to a prolonged strike. It was briefly revived from the bankrupt estate between 1960 and 1963.
A new version of theBrooklyn Eagle as a revival of the old newspaper's traditions began publishing in 1996. It has no business relation to the originalEagle (the name having lost trademark protection). The new paper publishes a daily historical/nostalgia feature called "On This Day in History", made up of much material from the original publication.
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle was first published on October 26, 1841. Its address at this time, and for many years afterwards, was at 28 Old Fulton Street, Brooklyn (today the site of a landmark building known as the "Eagle Warehouse"). A few days after it started, the paper suspended publication for a month due to a printing press fire. From 1846 to 1848, the newspaper's editor was the poet Walt Whitman.[9]
The paper started as a combination of objective news and Democratic party organ. During theAmerican Civil War, theEagle supported theDemocratic Party; as such, its mailing privileges through theUnited States Post Office Department were once revoked due to a forged letter supposedly sent by PresidentAbraham Lincoln. TheEagle played an important role in shaping Brooklyn's civic identity.[10] The once-independent city became the third-largest city in America at that time, across the water from old New York City. In 1898, it became aborough aspart of the annexation and merger campaign that formed theCity of Greater New York. TheEagle had editorially tried to forestall and stop this process, claiming that Brooklyn would go from being a great city on its own to a hinterland of the bigger city.
In August 1938,Frank D. Schroth bought the newspaper fromM. Preston Goodfellow. In addition to dropping the word "Daily" from the paper's front page, Schroth increased the paper's profile and readership with more active local coverage focused on the borough as opposed to the other competing dailies at that time in Manhattan, such asThe New York Times,New York Herald-Tribune,New York Journal-American,New York Daily News,New York Post,New York World-Telegram & Sun,New York Daily Mirror, and, later,Newsday, further out in theLong Island suburbs.[11]
The newspaper received the1951 Pulitzer Prize forPublic Service for its "crime reporting during the year".[12] Investigative journalistEd Reid in an eight-part series exposed the activities of bookmaker Harry Gross and corrupt members of theNew York City Police Department. This exposé led to an investigation by the Brooklyn District Attorney, and resulted in the eventual resignation ofMayor of New York CityWilliam O'Dwyer.[13][14]
On June 22, 1953, a newspaper boy, collecting for theBrooklyn Eagle, at an apartment building at 3403 Foster Avenue in Brooklyn, was paid with a nickel that felt funny to him. When he dropped it on the ground, it popped open and containedmicrofilm inside. The microfilm contained a series of numbers. He told the New York City Police Department, which in two days told aFederal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent about the strange nickel. The FBI was not able to link the nickel to KGB agents until aKGB (Committee on State Security of theSoviet Union) agent,Reino Häyhänen, wanted to defect to the West and the U.S. in May 1957. He identified a number of Soviet agents operating in North America, includingWilliam August Fisher (aka Rudolph Ivanovich Abel).
In the face of the continued economic pressure brought on by a 47-day strike by the local reporters' trade union,the Newspaper Guild,[15] and later attempting to sell theEagle, the paper published its last edition on January 28, 1955, and shut down for good on March 16, 1955.[16]Thomas N. Schroth, the publisher's son, served as the newspaper's managing editor in the last three years of its existence. Thereafter, he became editor ofCongressional Quarterly and foundedNational Journal in Washington, D.C.[17] This occurred around the same time as theBrooklyn Dodgers professional baseball team (who had played since 1913 atEbbets Field inCrown Heights) shocked New Yorkers by joining Manhattan'sNew York Giants (a fellowNational League team based at thePolo Grounds inWashington Heights) in moving to the West Coast, becoming theLos Angeles Dodgers and theSan Francisco Giants in the process.
The loss of both primary national icons of the borough's identity within two and a half years—compounded by such factors as longstanding institutional decline at theBrooklyn Navy Yard and theBrooklyn Army Terminal, which were both decommissioned in 1966; the precipitous contraction of the borough's manufacturing sector after state-levelright-to-work laws were permitted by the 1947Taft–Hartley Act; the advent ofcontainerization and the 1956–1962 development of thePort Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal inNew Jersey, largely supplanting the panoply ofbreakbulk cargo facilities that had scaled Brooklyn's western waterfront fromGreenpoint toBush Terminal for decades; and the deeply intertwined phenomena ofredlining, suburbanization andwhite flight—sent the borough into a psychological and socioeconomic slump. Comparatively sanguine developments—ranging from the initial wave ofprofessional-drivengentrification inBrooklyn Heights,Cobble Hill,Boerum Hill andPark Slope (leading to the former neighborhood's designation as New York City'sfirst landmark historic district in 1965) to theImmigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (which removed racially-based restrictions on immigration to the United States, enabling many neighborhoods to be revitalized by migrants from Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America and theCaribbean)—did not immediately attenuate the malaise in the popular consciousness. Notwithstanding the Heights and analogous enclaves, Brooklyn as a whole continued to elicit disproportionately vituperative scorn (first reified decades earlier in the stock "uneducated Brooklyn character" ofclassical Hollywood cinema, a trope that continued to manifest in such later films asJohn Badham'sSaturday Night Fever (1977), and in an array of deprecatory literary works emblematized byJames Agee'sBrooklyn Is) from affluent, Manhattan-based New Yorkers working in the city's influential media andFIRE industries. Ultimately, the publication of key counternarratives (such as the oeuvre ofJonathan Lethem) and the broader maturation of the borough's postwar institutions would effectively render Manhattan's cultural hegemony moot by the late 2000s.
As journalistPete Hamill (who worked as a delivery boy for theEagle) observed inNew York in 1969,
[Even] though theEagle was not a great paper, it had a great function: it helped to weld together an extremely heterogeneous community. Without it, Brooklyn became a vast network of hamlets, whose boundaries were rigidly drawn but whose connections with each other were vague at best, hostile at worst. None of the three surviving metropolitan newspapers really covers Brooklyn now until events ... have reached the stage of crisis; theNew York Times has more people in Asia than it has in Brooklyn, and you could excuse that, certainly, on grounds of priorities if you did not also know that this most powerful New York paper has three columnists writing on national affairs, one writing on European affairs, and none at all writing about this city. Without theEagle, local merchants floundered for years in their attempt to reach their old customers; two large Brooklyn department stores—Namm's and Loeser's—folded up. If you were looking for an apartment or a furnished room in Brooklyn, there was no central bulletin board.[18]
In 1960, former comic book publisherRobert W. Farrell acquired theEagle's assets inbankruptcy court, five years later after its closing,[19] publishing five Sunday editions of the paper in 1960. In 1962–1963, under the corporate name Newspaper Consolidated Corporation, Farrell and his partner Philip Enciso briefly revived theBrooklyn Eagle newspaper as a daily. During the1962–63 New York City newspaper strike, the paper had circulation grow from 50,000 to 390,000 until the strike ended.[20]
The final edition appeared on June 25, 1963.[21]
 Logo of the newBrooklyn Daily Eagle | |
| Type | Daily |
|---|---|
| Format | Tabloid |
| Owner | Everything Brooklyn Media |
| Publisher | J. Dozier Hasty |
| Founded | 1996 |
| Language | English |
| Headquarters | Brooklyn, New York City, New York |
| Website | brooklyneagle |
The Brooklyn Daily Bulletin, a much smaller newspaper also focusing on the Brooklyn borough began publishing when the originalBrooklyn Eagle folded in 1955.
In 1996,The Bulletin merged with a newly revivedBrooklyn Daily Eagle, and now publishes a morning paper five days a week under theBrooklyn Daily Eagle name. There is also a weekend edition published Saturdays asBrooklyn Eagle: Weekend Edition. This revivedBrooklyn Eagle has no business relationship with the originalEagle; but it adopted theEagle name adding it to itsBulletin title after theEagle name fell into the public domain, and following a dispute with another Brooklyn publisher over ownership of theEagle name.[22] The new publication is published by J. Dozier Hasty. TheDaily Eagle editorial staff includes 25 full-time reporters, writers, and photographers.[citation needed]
As of 2014, it is one of three English-language daily newspapers published in the borough of Brooklyn (the others are theNew York Daily Challenge[23] andHamodia).
As an homage to the originalEagle, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle publishes a daily feature called "On This Day in History", made up of much material taken from the originalBrooklyn Eagle.
Several exhibits have been held regarding the role of the paper in creating the identity of Brooklyn and its citizens at theBrooklyn Historical Society, including extensive mention and documentation in several histories published.
The new publication is published under the auspices of Everything Brooklyn Media (now stylized as ebrooklynmedia). TheDaily Eagle editorial coverage has grown to include other areas with local publications under the ebrooklynmedia banner. These include:
50 Years after the Eagle: How City Papers Cover Brooklyn
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