States one author, “Nothing was more characteristic of New York than the rapid degeneration into slums of areas formerly fashionable” (Morris, p. In the novel, Francie Nolan and her family make their home in Williamsburg. Like their counterparts in Manhattan, low-income areas such as Williamsburg, Brownsville, and Red Hook housed the city’s poor in tenements. Within its streets, one could travel between merchant wharves and warehouses, skyscrapers, apartment buildings, suburban homes, and slums. Its population, at 2.5 million residents, likewise surpassed the area formerly considered New York City proper. Lying between the East River and the Atlantic Ocean at Coney Island, Brooklyn stretched across an expanse of land three times larger than that of Manhattan Island. To some elderly New Yorkers, the new territories seemed so uncharted that they might as well have belonged to a foreign country. These included Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Richmond, and the Bronx. The new area, Greater New York, was divided into five sections known as boroughs. In 1898 the New York state legislature expanded the boundaries of New York City, nearly doubling its population overnight. Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place Brooklyn, New York In a show of courage and hope, however, both Smith and Francie managed to rise above their surroundings to achieve the dream that originally drew foreigners toward the shores of America. Like her main character, Francie Nolan, Smith lived in the slums of Williamsburg.

A novel set in Brooklyn, New York, about 1900 to 1919 published in 1943.Ī young girl of an Irish immigrant family comes of age in the Williamsburg slums of Brooklyn.Įvents in History at the Time the Novel Takes PlaceĮvents in History at the Time the Novel Was Writtenīetty Smith, in the first novel of her career, presents a picture of Brooklyn that she knew well.

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