:''This article covers both the historical newspaper (1841–1955, 1960–1963), as well as an unrelated new Brooklyn Daily Eagle starting 1996 published currently'' The ''Brooklyn Eagle'' (originally joint name ''The Brooklyn Eagle'' and ''Kings County Democrat'', later ''The Brooklyn Daily Eagle'' before shortening title further to ''Brooklyn Eagle'') was an afternoon daily newspaper published in the city and later borough of

Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York (state), New York. Kings County is the most populous Administrative divisions of New York (state)#County, county in the State of New York, ...

, in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the U ...

, for 114 years from 1841 to 1955. At one point, it 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 the ''Eagle'' included

Democratic Party Democratic Party most often refers to: *Democratic Party (United States) Democratic Party and similar terms may also refer to: Active parties Africa *Botswana Democratic Party *Democratic Party of Equatorial Guinea *Gabonese Democratic Party *Demo ...

political figure Thomas Kinsella, seminal folklorist

Charles Montgomery Skinner Charles Montgomery Skinner (15 March 1852 – 1907) was an American writer. Newspaper career Skinner was born in Victor, New York. His career in literature and journalism included editorship of the ''Brooklyn Eagle''. His study of the pape ...

, St. Clair McKelway (editor-in-chief from 1894 to 1915 and a great-uncle of the ''New Yorker'' journalist), Arthur M. Howe (a prominent Canadian American who served as editor-in-chief from 1915 to 1931 and as a member of the

Pulitzer Prize The Pulitzer Prize () is an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine, online journalism, literature, and musical composition within the United States. It was established in 1917 by provisions in the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made h ...

Advisory Board from 1920 to 1946) and Cleveland Rodgers (an authority on Whitman and close friend of

Robert Moses Robert Moses (December 18, 1888 – July 29, 1981) was an American urban planner and public official who worked in the New York metropolitan area during the early to mid 20th century. Despite never being elected to any office, Moses is regarded ...

who was editor-in-chief from 1931 to 1938 before serving as an influential member of the New York City Planning Commission until 1951). The paper, added "Daily" to its name as ''The Brooklyn Daily Eagle and Kings County Democrat'' on June 1, 1846. The banner name was shortened on May 14, 1849, to ''The Brooklyn Daily Eagle'', but the lower masthead retained the political name until June 8. On September 5, 1938, the name was further shortened, to ''Brooklyn Eagle,'' with ''The 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 the ''Brooklyn Eagle'' as a revival of the old newspaper's traditions began publishing in 1996. It has no business relation to the original ''Eagle'' (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 pages of the old original ''Eagle''.

History

''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. The paper started as a combination of objective news and Democratic party organ. During the

American Civil War The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), the latter formed by state ...

, the ''Eagle'' supported the

; as such, its mailing privileges through the United States Post Office Department were once revoked due to a forged letter supposedly sent by the 16th President

Abraham Lincoln Abraham Lincoln ( ; February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was an American lawyer, politician, and statesman who served as the 16th president of the United States from 1861 until his assassination in 1865. Lincoln led the nation thro ...

. The ''Eagle'' played an important role in shaping Brooklyn's civic identity. The once-independent city became the third-largest city in America at that time, across the water from old New York City. In the 1898, it became a

borough A borough is an administrative division in various English-speaking countries. In principle, the term ''borough'' designates a self-governing walled town, although in practice, official use of the term varies widely. History In the Middle ...

as part of the annexation and merger campaign that formed the City of Greater New York. The ''Eagle'' 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 from M. 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 as '' The New York Times'', '' New York Herald-Tribune'',

New York Journal-American :''Includes coverage of New York Journal-American and its predecessors New York Journal, The Journal, New York American and New York Evening Journal'' The ''New York Journal-American'' was a daily newspaper published in New York City from 1937 t ...

, ''

New York Daily News The New York ''Daily News'', officially titled the ''Daily News'', is an American newspaper based in Jersey City, NJ. It was founded in 1919 by Joseph Medill Patterson as the ''Illustrated Daily News''. It was the first U.S. daily printed in ta ...

'', '' New York Post'', '' New York World-Telegram & Sun'', '' New York Daily Mirror,'' and, later, ''

Newsday ''Newsday'' is an American daily newspaper that primarily serves Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island, although it is also sold throughout the New York metropolitan area. The slogan of the newspaper is "Newsday, Your Eye on LI", and f ...

'', further out in the

Long Island Long Island is a densely populated island in the southeastern region of the U.S. state of New York (state), New York, part of the New York metropolitan area. With over 8 million people, Long Island is the most populous island in the United Sta ...

suburbs. The newspaper received the

1951 Pulitzer Prize The following are the Pulitzer Prizes for 1951. Journalism awards *Public Service: **''The Miami Herald'' and the ''Brooklyn Eagle'', for their reporting on organized crime during the year. * Local Reporting: ** Edward S. Montgomery of the ''Sa ...

for Public Service for its "crime reporting during the year." Investigative journalist

Ed Reid Ed Reid, (c1915 - 1977) was an author and investigative journalist who exposed organized crime in New York City and Las Vegas. Early life He was born in Manhattan and grew up in Brooklyn. Reid started as a reporter in 1935 and used his writing t ...

in an eight-part series exposed the activities of bookmaker Harry Gross and corrupt members of the New York City Police Department. This exposé led to an investigation by the Brooklyn District Attorney, and resulted in the eventual resignation of

Mayor of New York City The mayor of New York City, officially Mayor of the City of New York, is head of the executive branch of the government of New York City and the chief executive of New York City. The mayor's office administers all city services, public property ...

William O'Dwyer.

Hollow Nickel Case

On June 22, 1953, a newspaper boy, collecting for the ''Brooklyn 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 contained microfilm inside. The microfilm contained a series of numbers. He told the New York City Police Department, which in two days told a

Federal Bureau of Investigation The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic intelligence and security service of the United States and its principal federal law enforcement agency. Operating under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Justice, ...

(FBI) agent about the strange nickel. The FBI was not able to link the nickel to KGB agents until a KGB (Committee on State Security of the Soviet Union) agent, Reino Häyhänen, wanted to defect to the West and the United States in May 1957, including Vilyam Genrikhovich Fisher (aka Rudolph Ivanovich Abel) in the Hollow Nickel Case.

Closure

In the face of the continued economic pressure brought on by a strike by the local reporters' trade union, the Newspaper Guild, and later attempting to sell the ''Eagle'', the paper published its last edition on January 28, 1955, and shut down for good on March 16, 1955.

Thomas N. Schroth Thomas Nolan Schroth (December 21, 1920 – July 23, 2009) was an American journalist who specialized in coverage of inside the Beltway politics as editor of ''Congressional Quarterly'' starting in 1955 and then establishing ''The National Journ ...

, the publisher's son, served as the newspaper's managing editor in the last three years of its existence. Thereafter, he became editor of '' Congressional Quarterly'' and founded ''

National Journal ''National Journal'' is an advisory services company based in Washington, D.C., offering services in government affairs, advocacy communications, stakeholder mapping, and policy brands research for government and business leaders. It publishes da ...

'' in Washington, D.C. This occurred around the same time as the

Brooklyn Dodgers The Brooklyn Dodgers were a Major League Baseball team founded in 1884 as a member of the American Association (19th century), American Association before joining the National League in 1890. They remained in Brooklyn until 1957, after which the ...

professional

baseball Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each, taking turns batting and fielding. The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play generally beginning when a player on the fielding ...

team (who had played since 1913 at Ebbets Field in Crown Heights) shocked New Yorkers by joining Manhattan's

New York Giants The New York Giants are a professional American football team based in the New York metropolitan area. The Giants compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member club of the league's National Football Conference (NFC) East division. ...

(a fellow National League team based at the

Polo Grounds The Polo Grounds was the name of three stadiums in Upper Manhattan, New York City, used mainly for professional baseball and American football from 1880 through 1963. The original Polo Grounds, opened in 1876 and demolished in 1889, was built fo ...

in Washington Heights) in moving to the West Coast, becoming the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San 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 the

Brooklyn Navy Yard The Brooklyn Navy Yard (originally known as the New York Navy Yard) is a shipyard and industrial complex located in northwest Brooklyn in New York City, New York (state), New York. The Navy Yard is located on the East River in Wallabout Bay, a ...

and the Brooklyn Army Terminal, which were both decommissioned in 1966; the precipitous contraction of the borough's

manufacturing Manufacturing is the creation or production of goods with the help of equipment, labor, machines, tools, and chemical or biological processing or formulation. It is the essence of secondary sector of the economy. The term may refer to a ...

sector after state-level right-to-work laws were permitted by the 1947 Taft–Hartley Act; the advent of containerization and the 1956-1962 development of the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal in New Jersey, largely supplanting the panoply of breakbulk cargo facilities that had scaled Brooklyn's western waterfront from Greenpoint to Bush Terminal for decades; and the deeply intertwined phenomena of

redlining In the United States, redlining is a discriminatory practice in which services (financial and otherwise) are withheld from potential customers who reside in neighborhoods classified as "hazardous" to investment; these neighborhoods have signif ...

, suburbanization and white flight — sent the borough into a psychological and socioeconomic slump. Comparatively sanguine developments — ranging from the initial wave of professional-driven gentrification in Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill,

Boerum Hill Boerum Hill (pronounced ) is a small neighborhood in the northwestern portion of the New York City borough of Brooklyn, bounded by Schermerhorn Street to the north and Fourth Avenue to the east. The western border is variously given as either Sm ...

and Park Slope (leading to the former neighborhood's designation as New York City's first landmark historic district in 1965) to the

Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart–Celler Act and more recently as the 1965 Immigration Act, is a federal law passed by the 89th United States Congress and signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The l ...

(which removed racially-based restrictions on immigration to the United States, enabling many neighborhoods to be revitalized by migrants from

Eastern Europe Eastern Europe is a subregion of the European continent. As a largely ambiguous term, it has a wide range of geopolitical, geographical, ethnic, cultural, and socio-economic connotations. The vast majority of the region is covered by Russia, wh ...

Asia Asia (, ) is one of the world's most notable geographical regions, which is either considered a continent in its own right or a subcontinent of Eurasia, which shares the continental landmass of Afro-Eurasia with Africa. Asia covers an ...

, Latin America and the

Caribbean The Caribbean (, ) ( es, El Caribe; french: la Caraïbe; ht, Karayib; nl, De Caraïben) is a region of the Americas that consists of the Caribbean Sea, its islands (some surrounded by the Caribbean Sea and some bordering both the Caribbean S ...

) — 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" of

classical Hollywood cinema Classical Hollywood cinema is a term used in film criticism to describe both a narrative and visual style of filmmaking which became characteristic of American cinema between the 1910s (rapidly after World War I) and the 1960s. It eventually ...

, a trope that continued to manifest in such later films as John Badham's ''

Saturday Night Fever ''Saturday Night Fever'' is a 1977 American dance drama film directed by John Badham and produced by Robert Stigwood. It stars John Travolta as Tony Manero, a young Italian-American man from the Brooklyn borough of New York. Manero spends his ...

'' (1977), and in an array of deprecatory literary works emblematized by

James Agee James Rufus Agee ( ; November 27, 1909 – May 16, 1955) was an American novelist, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, writing for ''Time Magazine'', he was one of the most influential film critics in the United States. ...

's ''Brooklyn Is'') from affluent, Manhattan-based New Yorkers working in the city's influential media and

FIRE Fire is the rapid oxidation of a material (the fuel) in the exothermic chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and various reaction Product (chemistry), products. At a certain point in the combustion reaction, called the ignition ...

industries. Ultimately, the publication of key counternarratives (such as the oeuvre of

Jonathan Lethem Jonathan Allen Lethem (; born February 19, 1964) is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His first novel, ''Gun, with Occasional Music'', a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was publishe ...

) and the broader maturation of the borough's postwar institutions would effectively render Manhattan's cultural hegemony moot by the late 2000s. As journalist Pete Hamill (who worked as a delivery boy for the ''Eagle'') observed in ''

New York New York most commonly refers to: * New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York * New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States New York may also refer to: Film and television * '' ...

'' in 1969, " venthough the ''Eagle'' 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; the ''New 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 the ''Eagle'', 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."

1960s revival attempts

In 1960, former

comic book A comic book, also called comicbook, comic magazine or (in the United Kingdom and Ireland) simply comic, is a publication that consists of comics art in the form of sequential juxtaposed panel (comics), panels that represent individual scenes. ...

publisher Robert W. Farrell acquired the ''Eagle's'' assets in bankruptcy court, five years later after its closing, 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 the ''Brooklyn Eagle'' newspaper as a daily. During the

1962–63 New York City newspaper strike Year 196 ( CXCVI) was a leap year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Dexter and Messalla (or, less frequently, year 949 ''Ab urbe condita ...

, the paper had circulation grow from 50,000 to 390,000 until the strike ended. The final edition appeared on June 25, 1963.

1990s–present version

''The Brooklyn Daily Bulletin'', a much smaller newspaper also focusing on the Brooklyn borough began publishing when the original ''Brooklyn Eagle'' folded in 1955. In 1996, ''The Bulletin'' merged with a newly revived ''Brooklyn Daily Eagle'', and now publishes a morning paper five days a week under the ''Brooklyn Daily Eagle'' name. There is also a weekend edition published Saturdays as ''Brooklyn Eagle: Weekend Edition''. This revived ''Brooklyn Eagle'' has no business relationship with the original ''Eagle''; but it adopted the ''Eagle'' name adding it to its ''Bulletin'' title after the ''Eagle'' name fell into the public domain, and following a dispute with another Brooklyn publisher over ownership of the ''Eagle'' name. The new publication is published by J. Dozier Hasty. The ''Daily Eagle'' editorial staff includes 25 full-time reporters, writers, and photographers. As of 2014, it is one of three English-language daily newspapers published in the borough of Brooklyn (the others are the ''New York Daily Challenge'' and '' Hamodia''). As an homage to the original ''Eagle'', The Brooklyn Daily Eagle publishes a daily feature called "On This Day in History", made up of much material taken from the original ''Brooklyn Eagle''. Several exhibits have been held regarding the role of the paper in creating the identity of Brooklyn and its citizens at the Brooklyn Historical Society, including extensive mention and documentation in several histories published.

Everything Brooklyn Media

The new publication is published under the auspices of Everything Brooklyn Media (now stylized as ebrooklynmedia). The ''Daily Eagle'' editorial coverage has grown to include other areas with local publications under the ebrooklynmedia banner. These include: *''The Bay Ridge Eagle'' a weekly section in Western Brooklyn, particularly Bay Ridge area. *''Brooklyn Reporter'' in South Brooklyn *''Queens Daily Eagle'' in Queens – first issue printed June 25, 2018.Katie Robertson
'Queens Man Impeached’: A Paper Gives Trump the Local Treatment
''New York Times'' (January 14, 2021). *''Brooklyn Heights Press and Cobble Hill News'' in Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill, Brooklyn areas *''Brooklyn Barrister'', a legal practice publication

References

External links

* ** * * * *Th
James Olinkiewicz Collection of Brooklyn Daily Eagle Postcards
at th
New-York Historical Society
{{Authority control Newspapers published in Brooklyn Newspapers established in 1841 Publications disestablished in 1955 1841 establishments in New York (state) 1955 disestablishments in New York (state) Pulitzer Prize for Public Service winners Pulitzer Prize-winning newspapers Daily newspapers published in New York City