Ferries, then the Brooklyn Bridge, which opened in 1883, tied Brooklyn to Manhattan. In 1898 the independent City of Brooklyn became part of the newly consolidated New York City, as one of its five boroughs.
The Brooklyn Bridge, designed by John A. Roebling and completed under his son Washington Roebling and Emily Warren Roebling, took fourteen years to build and was the longest suspension bridge in the world when it opened. It made Brooklyn’s growth into a major city possible, and the Manhattan Bridge (1909) and Williamsburg Bridge (1903) soon followed.
Brooklyn became an industrial and port city, with sugar refining, shipbuilding at the Navy Yard, breweries, factories and the busy docks of Red Hook and Sunset Park. The 1898 consolidation passed by a very narrow margin in Brooklyn, and many residents still feel that something was lost, an attitude that survives in the borough’s fierce local pride.