Kings County

“Goodwillie captures the rapturous soul of a bygone Brooklyn: the songs, the sex, the bars, the youth! And then the churn of relentless change, the broken hearts, the crushing realities. But it is the searing burn of discovery that makes Kings County a true and continual delight.” —Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End It’s the early 2000s and like generations of ambitious young people before her, Audrey Benton arrives in New York City on a bus from nowhere. Broke but resourceful, she soon finds a home for herself amid the burgeoning music scene in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. But the city’s freedom comes with risks, and Audrey makes compromises to survive. As she becomes a minor celebrity in indie rock circles, she finds an unlikely match in Theo Gorski, a shy but idealistic mill-town kid who’s struggling to establish himself in the still-patrician world of books. But then an old acquaintance of Audrey’s disappears under mysterious circumstances, sparking a series of escalating crises that force the couple to confront a dangerous secret from her past. From the raucous heights of Occupy Wall Street to the comical lows of the publishing industry, from million-dollar art auctions to Bushwick drug dens, Kings County captures New York City at a moment of cultural reckoning. Grappling with the resonant issues and themes of our time—sex and violence, art and commerce, friendship and family—it is an epic coming-of-age tale about love, consequences, bravery, and fighting for one’s place in an ever-changing world.

Written by Colin Spoelman and David Haskell—the founders of Kings County Distillery, New York City’s first distillery since Prohibition—this spirited illustrated book explores America’s age-old love affair with whiskey. A new generation of urban bootleggers is distilling whiskey at home, and cocktail enthusiasts have embraced the nuances of brown liquors. The Kings County Distillery Guide to Urban Moonshining presents whiskey’s history and culture from 1640 to today, when the DIY trend and the classic cocktail craze have conspired to make it the next big thing. For those thirsty for practical information, this book provides a detailed, easy-to-follow guide to safe home distilling, complete with a list of supplies, step-by-step instructions, and helpful pictures, anecdotes, and tips. The final section focuses on the contemporary whiskey scene, featuring a list of microdistillers, cocktail and food recipes from the country’s hottest mixologists and chefs, and an opinionated guide to building your own whiskey collection. “The moonshining world is notoriously full of orally-perpetuated misinformation and the legitimate whiskey industry is full of marketing lies and half-truths; Spoelman and Haskell have thankfully defied those traditions and released an educational book of honesty and transparency.” —Serious Eats

In particular, they question whether sprawl was a necessary condition of American industrialization; could the agricultural base that preceded and surrounded the city have survived the onrush of residential real estate speculation with a bit of foresight and public policies that the politically outnumbered farmers could not have secured on their own?

Aylesford, Cornwallis and Horton townships were the original three townships in Kings County.

"What if your parents taught you that thievery was as American as apple pie? What if your family's hero was the crooked railroad financier Tom Durant? What if your father drove to work dressed in a yellow linen suit and string tie, hired the school janitor to be his partner, and drummed up investment capital from the local Mafia?" "Then you would be Jack Acheson, the protagonist of Whitney Terrell's new novel, The King of Kings County. Jack begins his tale in the 1950s, when his father, Alton Acheson, is busy conning local farmers out of their land on the outskirts of Kansas City. From there he charts his father's attempt to build a suburban empire in rural Kings County through the giddy land rush of the '60s and '70s to the vast corporate campuses of the present day. It's a novel of youth, of football games and prep school rituals. It's a history of real estate barons and racial covenants, of color lines and highway building. And it's also the story of a father and son who are more similar than they care to admit." "Throughout, Terrell weaves an intensely private portrait of Jack's entire life, a fifty-year arc through the heart of the American dream. In it, we meet the math-whiz son of a mob accountant, John Birch-crazed ranchers, and blockbusting black real estate agents. We learn of Jack's first love, Geanie Bowen, the redheaded, improbably progressive daughter of the city's greatest developer, who protests apartheid from her father's crumbling estate. And how Jack, in his fifties, remains haunted by one particular event that he and Geanie witnessed in a quarry during their junior year of high school - a secret that eventually forces him into a clear-eyed confrontation with the true consequences of his father's legacy."--BOOK JACKET.

A History of the City of Brooklyn and Kings County (Volume I) At the time of his death, in 1885, Mr. Ostrander had completed considerable MS. for a history of the City of Brooklyn and Kings County; had prepared many chronological notes with a view to fuller writing, and had accumulated a mass of material in the form of transcripts, references, newspaper and other reports. It was his own understanding that a first volume of a proposed two-volume history might be regarded as well in hand, and that the wherewithal for the remaining chapters was advanced toward completion. At the outset of his undertaking the editor met the embarrassment of not finding any outline which might reveal the precise form in which the author intended to cast his work. Mr. Ostrander worked with a definite idea, but did not formulate this idea in writing, and only the completed expressions of this idea remained for the guidance of the editor. It became apparent that the author intended to rearrange and extend the matter for the earlier chapters. This matter was preserved in the form of a series of articles published in the Brooklyn "Eagle," during 1879-80, covering the period from the discovery by Hudson to the beginning of the Revolution. The degree of attention which these articles attracted induced Mr. Ostrander to extend the series far beyond the range he originally intended to give to them. As a result these articles were not precisely consecutive, nor was the matter so ordered as to adapt itself to book chapters without material changes. Without knowing the author's design in detail, it was exceedingly difficult to effect these changes save upon lines which the natural symmetry of such a work seemed to suggest, and the editor has had no hesitation in so rearranging the material, and in changing such features of the narrative as had been temporarily essential to serial publication.

From the time that Brooklyn was made a city in 1834 this narrative is much more than a statistical account of political changes and the rise of diiferent institutions of education, charity, punishment, and so on. It shows the growth of a city that now is part of the metropolis of New York, but still stands out as one of the most populated communities in the United States. A good read not only for the people of Brooklyn, but highly recommended to everyone interested in US history.