Brooklyn was once renowned for producing beer, sugar, ships, and much more, but not many people know that it was also once famous for the manufacture of pasta. Brooklyn was pasta's gateway into America, as documented in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1886:

It all began with Antoine Zerega, an Italian who made pasta--or macaroni as it was known--in Lyon, France.  He came to Brooklyn in 1848, setting up shop on Front Street in the area now known as Dumbo.  Little did he know that from these humble beginnings a 6.4 billion dollar per year industry would emerge.

So successfull were Zerega and other pasta makers that at the turn of the 20th century they formed the American Manufacturers of Macaroni Association.  In 1935 the Brooklyn Daily Eagle touted the emergence of Brooklyn as a power house of pasta during the Association's annual convention held here.

Zerega's business left Brooklyn in 1950, but the company continues to manufacture pasta today in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. The original building that housed the company stood on Front Street until 2006 when it was demolished, and a piece of culinary history was lost.  

One of the more prominent companies to produce macaroni in Brookyn was V. La Rosa and Sons, Inc. They were founded in 1914 by Sicilian native Vincenzo La Rosa. 
In 1949 they published this beauty of a brochure, a full-color homage to everything pasta, including recipes and descriptions of the various pasta types.                 

So the next time you fill the pasta pot, remember Zerega! Buon Appetito!

It’s nice to find some other visual specimen to rest the eyes upon in the ant nest that is late 19^th century newspaper text—an illustration of crustacean jelly molds and cake tins, a diagram of celestial bodies in spring skies, the thoraxes of some silhouetted country home pitchers; anything to give a respite from that headachy, inky and—now—digitized type.

That's why when I came across these images on page 26 of an 1896 Sunday edition of the Eagle I felt as though I had found some uninhabited moon world, as though the editor of the Eagle had decided to throw in a sort of rest stop for the eyes between columns on steam mechanics, trans-Atlantic timetables, and advertisements for wicker rockers. These shapes, of course, are nothing special in and of themselves: just one chair shape and one bunny-eared shape. But after 25 pages of the Eagle they looked like minimal dress patterns designed for some mustachioed and mutton-chopped Victorian E.T.

I wanted to thank someone for these clean planes of pure and silent space. However, these were no mere meditative polygons but rather objects more confounding than any common string of typeset English: these were puzzles. And judging by the headline, these were Loyd’s Puzzles. But now, who was Loyd?

Aside from being a remarkable mathematical genius and champion of the New York Chess Club, we learn that Master Loyd began honing his extraordinary talents at an early age in Philadelphia, where he was born on January 20, 1841. We learn that his precocity knew no bounds: from sleight of hand tricks to ventriloquism even extending into the realm of uncanny mimicry. We also learn that as of 1896 Loyd had been living in Brooklyn for 12 years in Bedford-Stuyvesant at 153 Halsey Street--a regular old Brooklynite. When he came to the Eagle in 1896 as the paper’s contributing puzzler (for the paper already retained a puzzle editor proper who specialized in children’s riddles and enigmas) he was quite well known in puzzledom, even if for a somewhat dubious achievement. Here the Eagle explains: Sam Loyd “owns up to the great sin of having invented the '15 block puzzle,'  and to which he solemnly avows there is no answer."

At the time when it was playing havoc with the brains of the country it was freely stated that he made $1,000,000 out of it. He says nobody made a cent. One large dry goods firm in New York sold 100,000 puzzles at 3 cents apiece, and it cost more than that to make them. Millions of them were sold, however. Mr. Loyd says he served on a grand jury shortly after the "15 puzzle" became the rage, and it was necessary to visit the jails, almshouses and insane asylums, and on a day when he was at one of the latter institutions the doctor gravely told him, having previously been informed that he was the inventor, that there were 1,500 persons there who had become "violently and hopelessly insane through trying to solve that awful puzzle." A column called Questions Answered, from an 1884 issue of the Eagle attests to the distress this “15 block puzzle” caused one Brooklynite identified only as “An Old Reader.”

But Loyd was not just out to drive puzzlers mad, he was also responsible for a number of eminently solvable and hugely popular puzzles and games: the Get off The Earth puzzle, the pony puzzle, and Parcheesi, to name just a few. In addition to his puzzling, which he claims was only a diversion, he was also an inventor who had been granted a number of patents, including among them some for steam engines. As the Eagle sums it all up, “Mr. Loyd is a remarkable man, and puzzle concocting is only incidental to a mind possessed of a wonderful mechanical bent.”

And now I think I’ll leave you with the task of solving those two benign-looking puzzles that first drew me into Loyd’s world. But, unlike the Eagle of Loyd’s tenure, we here at the Brooklyn Collection will not be awarding a prize bicycle to the first correct respondent—only our admiration and untiring respect.

The rules are simple: these are two seperate puzzles, each of which must be cut into four pieces of equal shape and size. We eagerly await your reply.

Some may find this hard to believe but--librarians can make mistakes.

Sometimes we know very little about the photographers whose works we find in our collections. Photographs by E.E. Rutter can be found not only in the collection of Brooklyn Public Library but also in Queens Borough Public Library and the Brooklyn Historical Society. A recent telephone call from a colleague in Queens alerted us to the fact that we may have been perpetuating a mistake as to Rutter's first name. In several documents in our control file he is named Edward E. Rutter. His images are often signed simply "Rutter" and his studio is always advertised as E.E. Rutter, so how the mistake crept in is a  mystery.

We checked Ancestry.com for census and other records, and indeed we found that the man we had been calling Edward was actually called Edgar. He had a photography studio at  number 8, 4th Avenue (among other locations) and was the official photographer for the Borough of Brooklyn.  In the 1920 census he was living on State Street with his wife, Ellen; born in Maryland, he is listed as a "Photographer" with his place of work a "Photo Studio." (In fact, his workplace was often a busy intersection, and the census erroneously gives his birthdate as 1880, but we who evidently live in a glass house will not be throwing any stones.)

A World War II Draft Registration card again has an Edgar E. Rutter, "Own Business Commercial Photographer" --but this time the birth date is given as  September 15, 1883. A Social Security Death Index record shows an Edgar Rutter of the same birth date who passed away in New Jersey in July 1964. We still don't know his middle name, but if we had continued to refer to him simply as E.E. (which he seems to have preferred) there would be no problem.

The subjects covered in our collection include Bush Terminal, Coney Island (with many images of the boardwalk and some well-muscled lifeguards)  New Utrecht, Williamsburg, Pigtown, bath houses, various new civic buildings, sewer construction, the 13th Regiment Armory and more. To the gods of cataloguing we have made reparations. In due course more of Rutter's photographs will make their way into our catalog, but for now we thank Mr. Brian Merlis for permission to use the self-portrait shown above, with pixellation that happened at our end, not his.

The Central Library at Grand Army Plaza is hosting an exhibit based on the book Over Here! New York City During World War II by Lorraine B. Diehl.  Many photographs from the Brooklyn Collection archives are on display for the very first time to the public.  The images show the first day of work for female employees of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Brooklyn war bond fundraisers, and the Sheepshead Bay Maritime Training Station.  Don't miss this chance to see treasures from the Brooklyn Collection on display, along with original posters, photos, and World War II memorabilia from the author's collection. This exhibition was organized by Brooklyn Public Library's Programs and Exhibitions Department.

While researching in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle morgue, I came across this curious image of a young Brooklyn resident digging in rubble.

Brooklyn Treasure Hunter Jay Erlichman hard at work hunting treasure.

On January 16, 1950, a small article ran in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, with this image titled "Youthful Treasure Hunter". By the time it went to print, nine-year old Jay Erlichman had been digging for treasure with his broken shovel for "about four years". Up until this date, his efforts had dug up a total of $1.27 and "an enormous collection of rusty bottle caps, tin cans, broken glass and old shoes".

While his parents supported his explorations, his thirteen year-old brother thought he was "slightly crazy". However, Jay's perseverance paid off when he dug up a cigar box containing $200 in savings bonds, and about $100 of costume jewelry on one of his digs. He was off to buy a new shovel with his treasure, and hoped to be a professional treasure hunter when he grew up.