Brooklyn Eagle

On June 22, 1953, a newspaper boy, collecting for the Brooklyn Eagle, at an apartment building at 3403 Foster Avenue in Brooklyn, was paid with a nickel that felt funny to him. When he dropped it on the ground, it popped open and contained microfilm inside. The microfilm contained a series of numbers. He told the New York City Police Department, which in two days told a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent about the strange nickel. The FBI was not able to link the nickel to KGB agents until a KGB (Committee on State Security of the Soviet Union) agent, Reino Häyhänen, wanted to defect to the West and the United States in May 1957, including Vilyam Genrikhovich Fisher (aka Rudolph Ivanovich Abel) in the Hollow Nickel Case.

In the face of the continued economic pressure brought on by a strike by the local reporters' trade union, the Newspaper Guild, and later attempting to sell the Eagle, the paper published its last edition on January 28, 1955, and shut down for good on March 16, 1955.[15] Thomas N. Schroth, the publisher's son, served as the newspaper's managing editor in the last three years of its existence. Thereafter, he became editor of Congressional Quarterly and founded National Journal in Washington, D.C.[16] This occurred around the same time as the Brooklyn Dodgers professional baseball team (who had played since 1913 at Ebbets Field in Crown Heights) shocked New Yorkers by joining Manhattan's New York Giants (a fellow National League team based at the Polo Grounds in Washington Heights) in moving to the West Coast, becoming the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants in the process.

The loss of both primary national icons of the borough's identity within two and a half years — compounded by such factors as longstanding institutional decline at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the Brooklyn Army Terminal, which were both decommissioned in 1966; the precipitous contraction of the borough's manufacturing sector after state-level right-to-work laws were permitted by the 1947 Taft–Hartley Act; the advent of containerization and the 1956-1962 development of the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal in New Jersey, largely supplanting the panoply of breakbulk cargo facilities that had scaled Brooklyn's western waterfront from Greenpoint to Bush Terminal for decades; and the deeply intertwined phenomena of redlining, suburbanization and white flight — sent the borough into a psychological and socioeconomic slump. Comparatively sanguine developments — ranging from the initial wave of professional-driven gentrification in Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill and Park Slope (leading to the former neighborhood's designation as New York City's first landmark historic district in 1965) to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (which removed racially-based restrictions on immigration to the United States, enabling many neighborhoods to be revitalized by migrants from Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean) — did not immediately attenuate the malaise in the popular consciousness. Notwithstanding the Heights and analogous enclaves, Brooklyn as a whole continued to elicit disproportionately vituperative scorn (first reified decades earlier in the stock "uneducated Brooklyn character" of classical Hollywood cinema, a trope that continued to manifest in such later films as John Badham's Saturday Night Fever (1977), and in an array of deprecatory literary works emblematized by James Agee's Brooklyn Is) from affluent, Manhattan-based New Yorkers working in the city's influential media and FIRE industries. Ultimately, the publication of key counternarratives (such as the oeuvre of Jonathan Lethem) and the broader maturation of the borough's postwar institutions would effectively render Manhattan's cultural hegemony moot by the late 2000s.

As journalist Pete Hamill (who worked as a delivery boy for the Eagle) observed in New York in 1969, "[Even] though the Eagle was not a great paper, it had a great function: it helped to weld together an extremely heterogeneous community. Without it, Brooklyn became a vast network of hamlets, whose boundaries were rigidly drawn but whose connections with each other were vague at best, hostile at worst. None of the three surviving metropolitan newspapers really covers Brooklyn now until events [...] have reached the stage of crisis; the New York Times has more people in Asia than it has in Brooklyn, and you could excuse that, certainly, on grounds of priorities if you did not also know that this most powerful New York paper has three columnists writing on national affairs, one writing on European affairs, and none at all writing about this city. Without the Eagle, local merchants floundered for years in their attempt to reach their old customers; two large Brooklyn department stores — Namm's and Loeser's — folded up. If you were looking for an apartment or a furnished room in Brooklyn, there was no central bulletin board."[17]

In 1960, former comic book publisher Robert W. Farrell acquired the Eagle's assets in bankruptcy court, five years later after its closing,[18] publishing five Sunday editions of the paper in 1960. In 1962–1963, under the corporate name Newspaper Consolidated Corporation, Farrell and his partner Philip Enciso briefly revived the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper as a daily. During the 1962–63 New York City newspaper strike, the paper had circulation grow from 50,000 to 390,000 until the strike ended.[19]

The final edition appeared on June 25, 1963.[20]