New York’s Nine Boroughs?
Q. Did New York City ever have more than five boroughs?
A. No, but there was talk briefly of as many as 9 or 10, including ones named Harlem and Williamsburg.
Michael Miscione, Manhattan’s borough historian, explained why. Until 1898, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island were separate from New York City. What we now know as the Bronx had been annexed by 1895, but it was not yet known as the Bronx.
“In 1896 the Legislature passed the Greater New York Bill, a law that decreed that all the municipalities around New York Harbor — the Cities of New York, Brooklyn, Long Island City, and a patchwork of towns and villages on Staten Island and in Queens County — would be consolidated into one large city on Jan. 1, 1898,” Mr. Miscione said in an e-mail. “A state commission was appointed to write a charter that would spell out the new city’s governmental structure. Among other things, the drafters had to decide if Greater New York should be divided into smaller districts and, if so, how many of them there should be.”
During that brief period, Mr. Miscione said, the number of districts was a contentious issue.
He explained: “Proponents of a strong central government wanted no such divisions — the city would run more smoothly, economically and honestly as a single unit, they said.
“Other drafters argued that local interests, especially those outside Manhattan, would be ignored by City Hall if there were no empowered smaller divisions. This decentralist faction proposed that the city be divided into 9 or 10 formal districts, or boroughs, as they chose to call them. They gave these boroughs names based on the major historical neighborhoods roughly within their boundaries. One of them, for example, was named for Harlem and another for Williamsburg, two neighborhoods that had once been separate municipalities.” (Harlem, an independent village founded by the Dutch, had been absorbed into New York when the British took over. Williamsburg, a city, had been annexed by Brooklyn in 1855.)
The decentralists’ nine-borough map would have chopped present-day Brooklyn into two boroughs, Brooklyn and Williamsburg. Manhattan Island would have had four: Harlem, Yorkville, Manhattan and Bowling Green.
“Eventually, of course, a compromise was struck between centralists and decentralists, and they settled on five boroughs,” Mr. Miscione said.
<nyt_author_id>