Other notable editors of the Eagle included Democratic Party political figure Thomas Kinsella, seminal folklorist Charles Montgomery Skinner, St. Clair McKelway (editor-in-chief from 1894 to 1915 and a great-uncle of the New Yorker journalist), Arthur M. Howe (a prominent Canadian American who served as editor-in-chief from 1915 to 1931 and as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Advisory Board from 1920 to 1946) and Cleveland Rodgers (an authority on Whitman and close friend of Robert Moses who was editor-in-chief from 1931 to 1938 before serving as an influential member of the New York City Planning Commission until 1951).

Its address at this time, and for many years afterwards, was at 28 Old Fulton Street, Brooklyn (today the site of a landmark building known as the "Eagle Warehouse").

During the American Civil War, the Eagle supported the Democratic Party; as such, its mailing privileges through the United States Post Office Department were once revoked due to a forged letter supposedly sent by President Abraham Lincoln.

[12] Investigative journalist Ed Reid in an eight-part series exposed the activities of bookmaker Harry Gross and corrupt members of the New York City Police Department.

This exposé led to an investigation by the Brooklyn District Attorney, and resulted in the eventual resignation of Mayor of New York City William O'Dwyer.

In the face of the continued economic pressure brought on by a 47-day strike by the local reporters' trade union, the Newspaper Guild,[15] 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.

Thereafter, he became editor of Congressional Quarterly and founded National Journal in Washington, D.C.[17] 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.

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.