They were resting beneath our feet: Children's marbles. Bottles of Coca Cola or alcohol. Horseshoe fragments and the soles of men’s and women’s footwear. A pig’s tooth and a long bone from a sheep or goat.
City workers uncovered thousands of artifacts during a historic restoration of dozens of cobblestone blocks in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood.
The yearslong construction, completed this week, rebuilt narrow cobblestone streets and upgraded the stormwater and sewer systems in 26 blocks of one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city that sits between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. Municipal agencies, working with preservationists, uncovered 2,800 items, with most dating from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, though some went back as far as the 1600s.
Mark Tweedie, the archaeological monitor for the renovation, said he hopes to put some of the items on display at the Brooklyn Public Library. He worked alongside construction crews each day to keep an eye out for any historic artifacts that were uncovered.
“From the surface down into the ground, everything essentially was an archaeological feature,” he said, adding there were "a lot of different aspects of history to record during this project.”
A copper button from the 1860s-1900s with the New York State Excelsior symbol.
A copper military button dating from the post-Civil War period and smoking pipes — including one with a Liberty Eagle motif dating to the 1860s — were some of relics that stuck out to Tweedie.
“We are essentially in the oldest section of Brooklyn and most of the artifacts date to about the 1790s up until the mid-20th Century, and that’s the period where things were really active,” Tweedie said, explaining that a lot of the artifacts also reflect the same time period as the landfilling of the coastline, from the mid-1700s until the 1850s.
The workers turned up various articles of stonewear, porcelain buttons, a 1969 penny and a bicentennial quarter, according to a preliminary archaeological report shared with Gothamist. There were iron pliers and Quahog clam shells. A galvanized tin bucket with concrete may have come from the construction of the Manhattan Bridge.
Late 1700s-mid 1800s animal bones, a copper belt buckle, a slip-decorated redware plate fragment, a bone/wood handle iron knife, and two mid-20th century soda bottles.
“Each artifact tells its own individual story. That’s what I find fascinating about it,” Tweedie said.
