People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 March 1894 — FOR ONE BIG CITY. [ARTICLE]

FOR ONE BIG CITY.

The Bill to Unite New York and Brook- 1 lyu Passed. Albany, N. Y., March 1. —The Great- ! er New Y r ork bill has passed the senate by a vote of 28 to 2. The proposition j to provide equal taxation on Mr. Butts’ j Greater New York bill had been de- j seated by 18 to 7 previously. The bill which now goes to the governor, sim- ! ply provides that the question of con- , solidating info one municipality the ; places about New York harbor shall be ; submitted next fall to a vote of the ; people. The friends of the project to annex all the territory for 25 miles from the New York city hall were spurred on four years ago by the fact that Chicago had as large a bona fide population as New York, and a commission was appointed by the legislature to inquire into the expediency of consolidating the city of New York and the various municipalities and towns in the state of New York composing what the New Yorkers were pleased to term its suburbs —Brooklyn, for instance, with a population of 1,100,000. After much discussion for and against the project the commission prepared a charter for the incorporations of the consolidated cities. This charter provided for the consolidation of the following towns and counties: The city of New York, the county of Kings (in which Brooklyn is situated), the town of West Chester and portions of the towns of Pelham and East Chester, Long Island City, the towns of Newtown, Flushing, Jamaica, Hemsted and Rockaway. The commission in a report last month figured out that the Greater New York would have a population of 3,000,000 and a total area of 317.77 square miles. The population of New York was put at 1,801,739, whi-h is in excess of the census of 1890. Brooklyn and the towns in Kings county that will be taken into the new town by the bill just passed, are credited with a population of 995,276. The towns in West Chester and Richmond counties, which take in Staten Island, furnish the other 300,000, which would give the new city a population of 3,000,000. There is no doubt of the bill becoming a law as the governor has expressed himself in favor of it.