The seeds of all of these institutions were planted in 1824, when the Apprentices Library opened in Brooklyn. In the early 19th century, Brooklyn was undergoing rapid change. Once a sleepy farm community, this suburb of bustling Manhattan was itself becoming more bustling, attracting entrepreneurial talent from the eastern seaboard and beyond. As Brooklyn’s economy grew, so did its primarily working class residents’ desire for culture and edification. A group of business leaders from across Brooklyn recognized this need, founding what would become the Apprentices Library. Instead of apprenticing under masters of trade, more and more of the working class were hiring themselves out as employees during the early 19th century, thus forgoing the apprentices’ traditional guidance and education. The Library’s goal was to offer the sort of education that factories and mills were not providing for their employees. Led in part by distiller and investor Augustus Graham, the Library was not merely a place to read books but to engage with lecturers on trades relevant to the working class, and to witness presentations on contemporary culture and the sciences.
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Augustus Graham, by Charles Christian Heinrich Nahl, 1850 |
It’s a particularly delicious image: a venerable revolutionary hero and a child who would come to champion in his poetry the working people of Brooklyn and America, together for a brief embrace as they sanction the institution that would later serve as a parent institution to almost every major Brooklyn cultural center for nearly 200 years.
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We are with you in Rockland, Walt Whitman |
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