The other unignorable geographic fact that shaped Brooklyn’s character and destiny is its proximity to Manhattan, which it didn’t formally join as a borough of New York City until 1898. From the outset, Brooklyn has been a “displacement zone” for ideas, personalities and movements that weren’t quite ready to make it in the Big Apple. It has also provided a home for people actively exiled, as in the case of the former slaves who found sanctuary in the abolitionist churches and all-black settlements of Brooklyn Heights and Crown Heights.

Still, no one theory fully explains Brooklyn’s knack for encompassing America’s best and worst tendencies, often simultaneously. Again and again in this book, the reader sees how progress and development come at a cost, beginning when the Canarsee tribespeople abandoned hunting and nomadic living to trade beaver pelts with the Dutch and English. When that trade disappeared, their society went with it.

In what might be the book’s most fascinating and evocative chapter, Campanella explores the little-known history of Barren Island. Here, in the late 1800s, corpses of thousands of horses were boiled down into lamp oil, glue and bone buttons. The island also housed a plant that refined fish into oil and fertilizer; the smell was unimaginable — and, later, when waste-processing facilities replaced this plant, unspeakable odors wafted as far as Lower Manhattan. But hellish as it could be, Barren Island was also a home, with a main street and one of the first racially integrated schools in New York City. All of this disappeared by the 1930s, when the plant closed and Robert Moses ordered the residents to leave; the whole place was bulldozed, filled in and turned into an unrecognizable part of the Rockaways.

It’s hard to imagine a more iconic image of Brooklyn than the brownstone, named for the material that came into fashion during the residential development booms of the 1800s. After the Civil War, Campanella says, “the somber stone appealed to a nation in mourning” — though, I have to admit, the various shades of chocolate have never struck me as somber. To the class of Brooklyn renters who spend our days surrounded by these coveted homes, brown is more the color of envy than green could ever be. Campanella seems to take pleasure in pointing out how short-lived the brownstone fad was; tastes changed quickly based on the whims of a handful of influential architects, and by 1900 everyone was into limestone and yellow brick instead. He also seems delighted to point out that the houses are not actually made of brownstone, only decorated with it: “chocolate frosting on brick-and-timber cake.”

In fact, the iconic houses aren’t the “real” Brooklyn; that elusive land lies farther south. In the 1920s, a new housing style became popular, perhaps in part due to rising nationalism and fetishization of an Anglo past. Tudor bungalows began to spring up from Queens to East Flatbush, courtesy of an ambitious young developer named Fred C. Trump.