SOLDIERS AND SAINTS OF KINGS COUNTY- Prologue

Kings College became Columbia University in 1784. Five days after the declaration was signed, The Continental Army then tore down the sculpture of King George III at the Bowling Green. They melted cast-bronze eyesore down and molded it into over 40,000 musket balls.

The war-tested devotion of farmers, blacksmiths, tradesmen, free men who raised arms as Patirots after the massacre at Boston was clear: The King is no longer welcome here.

So why did Brooklyn remains Kings County?

There’s a theory. There’s always a theory, often more than one and here’s mine. The "S" in KINGS isn't a reference to the Monarch of Britain, heavens no. There’s no apostrophe on the “s”. That’s because it doesn’t denote possession. It denotes plurality. Brooklyn doesn’t belong to the King: It is the County of Kings.

This is where they landed, after rising from the peasant’s tenement; the faceless, nameless brick prisons on the strange-named streets from which they fled. The labyrinth of stone and black tar were tossed there as an easy solution to the swarms of locusts that infected the malignant tumor jutting east off Manhattan’s neck.

They hived there. Bred, warred, gambled, bargained, struggled, strived, worked, gained, earned, and rose. Their hope was what erected the stone towers of the Great Bridge and the steel foundations of its northward younger brothers shortly after. Most of the wretched refuse, christened by the golden lamp didn’t live to make it over. But they raised sons and daughters who did.

The Roeblings had cast a miracle on them all: Just like The Saviour, they too could walk across water; though they were made to learn early on, that it was not the lamb who granted the marvel, but the lion. The angry, vengeful God of Abraham and Moses.

The death of the father by tetanus, and the crippling of the son by Caissons disease, these were the sacrifice on the mount. The 1883 stampede was the trial by fire, and Barnum’s elephants were the appeasement of a brutal yet forgiving Lord. It was born the Great Bridge. But christened: The Brooklyn Bridge.

A Bridge to Brooklyn, with townhouse palaces just over the river; Victorian castles in Flatbush, the roughhouse hamlets of Midwood and Kensington, and regal brownstones along the crest of Stuyvesant Heights to Boerum Hill. The son of an Irish brawler on the Bow’ry would become an Officer of the Law down in Bay Ridge. Old Bubbies of Borough Park were once soft-faced, bright-eyed girls made, hunched-over, by fourteen-hour factory days. Their tired eyes would still see their kine yingele grow up to be doctors and lawyers in Park Slope and Williamsburg.

Their yearning to breath free was a distant, ancestral memory only a generation or two removed. Here, we had become Kings.