Brooklyn: The Once and Future City is a 3-credit hour lecture course on the physical history of Brooklyn and the evolution of its urban landscape. Casting light on a place as overexposed as it is understudied, the course will focus on the Brooklyn unknown, overlooked and unheralded—the quotidian city taken for granted or long ago blotted out by time and tide. In it we will excavate the visions, ideals dreams, schemes and forces of creative destruction that have forged the modern metropolis. By studying what Reinhart Kossellech calls the "onetime futures of past generations," we will undertake a recovery operation to reclaim lost and forgotten chapters of Brooklyn's urban past—a cabinet-of-curiosities tour of the Brooklyn obscure, before gentrification and global fame. But though its principle focus is on the urban past, the course is also about the city today. For the past is a dark moon that tugs at our orbital plane, moving it in barely perceptible ways, exerting—as the late Pete Hamill put it—an "almost tidal pull" upon the present. The urban landscape has a long memory, like an LP record with brick-and-mortar grooves. That which has vanished is often still about our feet, hidden in plain sight; for the past is all around us, and it conditions and qualifies the present. Brooklyn today is a city replete with palimpsests and traces of what went before, keepsakes that beckon us to unpack and explore and understand. This course invites you to see Brooklyn afresh, to discover an urban world layered and alive with meaning.