A Quick Look at My Ancestors Who Chose the Urban Chaos of NYC and Brooklyn

Week 43 of #52Ancestors Challenge: Urban

When it comes to urban living, you don’t get much more urban than New York City and Brooklyn. If my ancestors wanted concrete, crowds, and chaos, they certainly found it! While some genealogists trace their families to wide-open prairies or peaceful mountain villages, I’m over here researching people who chose to live stacked on top of each other in buildings where you could hear your neighbor sneeze three floors up. But that urban density came with something revolutionary—infrastructure that transformed daily life in ways my rural ancestors could never have imagined.

Sanitation Revolution: From Privy Vaults to Indoor Plumbing

When Peter and Julia Plunkett established their household at 418 Van Brunt Street in Brooklyn’s industrial waterfront corridor around 1870, they entered a city in the middle of a dramatic sanitation transformation. After devastating cholera outbreaks killed thousands of New Yorkers, Brooklyn began building a sewer system in earnest, laying miles of underground pipe to replace the outhouses and privy vaults that had defined urban sanitation for generations.¹ By the 1860s, most multi-story tenements still relied on outdoor hydrants for water and privies over waterproof vaults in back yards for sanitation.²

Through the 1870s and 1880s, the city installed underground sewers in the Plunketts’ Van Brunt Street neighborhood. Indoor plumbing remained a luxury for most of their years there. Many residents initially viewed indoor toilets with suspicion, fearing that dangerous sewer gases might seep into their homes—a concern that persisted even as the technology improved.³

Let There Be Light: From Gas Lamps to Electric Streets

The streets where my ancestors walked also underwent a dramatic shift in lighting. When William and Ellen Dowling settled in Brooklyn’s Flatbush area in the 1870s, gas street lamps illuminated major thoroughfares, having replaced oil lamps earlier in the century. Gas lighting spread through Brooklyn homes by the 1880s, with pipes delivering coal gas to fixtures that produced the warm, flickering glow we associate with the era.⁵

Electric lighting arrived gradually and unevenly. In 1880, the Brush Electric Company installed Manhattan’s first electric street lights along Broadway between 14th and 26th Streets, but Brooklyn’s residential neighborhoods lagged behind.⁷ By the time Thomas and Mary Dowling purchased their Kensington home around 1905, electricity had begun to spread through Brooklyn’s residential districts, even though gas lighting remained common in homes well into the 1920s. The transition unfolded so slowly that even after electricians wired houses for power, many homeowners kept capped gas pipes in place—a reminder of overlapping technologies in this era of change.⁸

On the Move: Trolleys Transform the City

Transportation networks revolutionized how my ancestors moved around the city. The Dowling and Plunkett families witnessed Brooklyn’s evolution from horse-drawn streetcars to an interconnected web of electric trolleys and elevated railways. Brooklyn’s first horse line opened on Myrtle Avenue in 1854, but by 1895 operators had converted almost all lines to electric streetcars.⁹ Around the turn of the twentieth century, the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company ran more than 125 streetcar and elevated lines along roughly 600 miles of track, linking Brooklyn’s expanding neighborhoods to Manhattan via the Brooklyn Bridge.¹⁰

For Thomas Dowling, walking home to his Kensington residence, the rumble and clang of trolley cars on nearby Church Avenue formed the soundtrack of daily life. Those electric trolleys offered more than transportation; they made suburban living possible. Workers could live miles from their jobs and commute affordably, which fueled the development of neighborhoods like Kensington and Flatbush that had been farmland just a few decades earlier. And if you believe the popular story, this is where the Brooklyn Dodgers got their name—from fans dodging the trolleys on their way to the ballpark!

Hello, Operator: Telephones Connect the City

Telephone service arrived later and spread more slowly than sewers or electric lights. Flatbush didn’t see its first telephone until 1880, when Hendrick Van Kirk’s general store installed one. Callers spoke to an operator who manually connected each call.¹³ For years, businesses and wealthier households dominated telephone subscriptions.

By the 1930s, when Vasil and Anna Marcisak lived at 43 Washington Street, 46 Washington Street, and 12 Morris Avenue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, telephone exchanges had become common across the city. Even then, many working-class families still shared party lines or relied on corner pay phones. The Dubinskys’ home at 402 Westminster Road in Brooklyn’s Ditmas Park belonged to the local Flatbush exchange—one of several serving Brooklyn in the 1930s and 1940s.

Uneven Progress: Class and Geography in Urban Development

Infrastructure arrived unevenly across neighborhoods and income levels. The industrial waterfront where the Plunketts built their paper business received sewers and street lighting earlier than more remote residential areas. Wealthier districts installed indoor plumbing sooner, while tenement families often waited years for comparable improvements. By the time my grandparents’ generation came of age in the 1930s and 1940s, however, the basics of modern urban life—running water, electric lights, telephones, and rapid transit—had become expectations rather than luxuries. In just two generations, the streets where my ancestors raised their families shifted from a pre-industrial cityscape to a recognizably modern metropolis.

By 1892, Fifth Avenue in Manhattan became the first street to feature truly ornamental electric lamp posts—elongated, elegant cast-iron designs installed by the Edison Illuminating Company. Although the system improved on earlier models, electricity still dominated commercial corridors while gas lighting remained popular on residential streets.¹⁴ That note feels personal: I now work for General Electric Company, which traces its roots to the Edison Illuminating Company founded on April 15, 1892!

Fun Family Facts

The infrastructure story doesn’t end in the past—it connects directly to my family’s modern history. My great-aunt, Madeline (Marcisak) Cook, worked as a telephone operator, connecting calls in an era when every conversation required a human intermediary plugging wires into a switchboard. My father worked for the telephone company in New York from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, continuing the family’s connection to the communication infrastructure that transformed urban life. Technologies that seemed revolutionary to my immigrant ancestors became workplaces for their descendants a generation or two later.

Your Turn!

Did your ancestors live in urban areas? What infrastructure changes did they witness? Did they embrace indoor plumbing right away, or did they join the “suspicious of toilets inside the house” camp? Share your urban ancestor stories in the comments—I’d love to hear about the cities where your families settled!

Coming Next Week

After all this talk of crowded streets, trolley cars, and tenement living, next week we’ll pivot in the opposite direction. Get ready for Week 44 as we explore wide-open spaces, endless skies, and my Swedish ancestors who knew what it meant to truly see the horizon. We’ll also visit the Carpathian Mountains with my Slovak ancestors who left their mountain villages for America. From the urban jungle to the pastoral countryside and mountain peaks—the contrast couldn’t be more dramatic!

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1. Balkan Sewer And Water Main Service, New York City Sewers Throughout History and Myth (https://www.balkanplumbing.com/new-york-city-sewers-history-myth/ : accessed 2 November 2025). ↩︎
2. American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, Lest We Forget, a Short History of Housing in the United States (https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2004/data/papers/SS04_Panel1_Paper17.pdf : accessed 2 November 2025), 7. ↩︎
3. 6sqft, Life in New York City before indoor toilets (https://www.6sqft.com/life-in-new-york-city-before-indoor-toilets/ : accessed 2 November 2025). ↩︎
4. Balkan Sewer And Water Main Service, “New York City Sewers Throughout History and Myth.” ↩︎
5. Brownstoner, Lighting in the 19th Century Row House – Brooklyn (https://www.brownstoner.com/interiors-renovation/historic-lighting-victorian-19th-century-brownstone-early-electric-restoration-gas/ : accessed 2 November 2025). ↩︎
6. J. Stiner, copyright claimant, “Waiting for Papa,” chromolithograph, 1876; Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (Washington, D.C.), call no. PGA – Stiner (J.)—“Waiting for Papa” (A size) [P&P]; digital image, Prints & Photographs Online Catalog (https://www.loc.gov/resource/pga.12894/ : accessed 2 November 2025). ↩︎
7. Milrose Consultants, An Early History of Lighting in NYC (https://www.milrose.com/insights/an-early-history-of-lighting-in-nyc : accessed 2 November 2025). ↩︎
8. Brownstoner, Lighting in the 19th Century Row House – Brooklyn. ↩︎
9. Brooklyn College Archives & Special Collections, Brooklyn Trolleys (https://bcarchives1.omeka.net/exhibits/show/flatbush—the-junction-a-pict/brooklyn-trolleys : accessed 2 November 2025). ↩︎
10. Brooklyn College Archives & Special Collections, Brooklyn Trolleys. ↩︎
11. “Trolley cars on Flatbush and Nostrand Avenues,” photograph; Brooklyn College Archives & Special Collections, Brooklyn College Library, City University of New York; digital image, Brooklyn College Archives Omeka (https://bcarchives1.omeka.net/items/show/176 : accessed 2 November 2025). ↩︎
12. “Bell on the telephone in New York (calling Chicago) in 1892,” photograph, 1892; Gilbert H. Grosvenor Collection; Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; digital image, America’s Library (http://www.americaslibrary.gov/jb/recon/jb_recon_telephone_1_e.html: accessed 2 November 2025). ↩︎
13. Flatbush History, Calling Buckminster 4! A Telephonic History of Flatbush (https://www.flatbushhistory.com/articles/telephone-history : accessed 2 November 2025). ↩︎
14. Milrose Consultants, An Early History of Lighting in NYC. ↩︎