Subway construction on Eastern Parkway near Bedford Avenue, 1916 (Copyright: Brooklyn Public Library).
In 1906 the Kings County Penitentiary was torn down, effectively marking the end of Crow Hill and the birth of Crown Heights. By now the churches, schools and other institutions that made up Weeksville had also been torn down, re-purposed, or had become part of a new community landscape.
In the early twentieth new upmarket homes were built in Crown Heights – for example ‘Doctor’s Row’ on President Street – and attracted wealthier residents. However, white property developers and middle class residents were unhappy with the name Crow Hill and it’s connotations of African-Americans and convicts. They briefly experimented with the name Parkway District but eventually settled on Crown Heights. It’s unclear when the name Crown Heights was first used but by the time that Crown Street was developed in 1916 it had become the accepted name for the neighborhood. Two years after Crown Street was built the Malbone Street train crash left some 93 people dead. Malbone Street was subsequently renamed Empire Boulevard and eventually became the southern border of Crown Heights.
A house on Empire Boulevard and Troy Ave in Pigtown, 1923 (Copyright: Brooklyn Public Library).
An important event in the neighborhood was when the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers Charley Ebbets built Ebbets Field in 1912 on what was then considered part of Pigtown and Flatbush. Not only did the construction of Ebbets Field end Pigtown’s reputation as a squatted community, but the stadium served as an important cultural and architectural landmark of the neighborhood until the Dodgers left for Los Angeles in 1957.
From the 1920s until World War 2 Crown Heights was a distinctly white immigrant neighborhood. The largest group was secular Jews from Eastern Europe but there were also substantial Italian-American and Irish-American populations. Borders, however, remained in flux and were culturally produced. A prime example of culturally shifting borders is the transfer of St. Marks into Crown Heights in the 1930s
St. Marks to the north of Eastern Parkway was historically considered part of Bedford, itself a signifier of Anglo-American Brooklyn. In the 1930s St. Marks became home to a growing African-American community and in response the ‘native’ whites fled north and were replaced by ‘ethnic’ whites from the south. In this way St. Marks was separated from Bedford and became what is now Crown Heights North. It is here that the borders of present day Crown Heights begin to coalesce.
Henry Goldschmidt writes that by the 1940s Crown Heights had “commonly recognized borders”,
“… a vast area of north-central Brooklyn, more or less bounded by Atlantic Avenue or Fulton Street to the north, Empire Boulevard or Lefferts Avenue to the south, Washington Avenue or even Flatbush to the west, and Rochester or Ralph Avenue to the east.”[1]
But commonly recognized does not mean universally accepted. One year earlier in 1939 the WPA Guide to New York drew a border between Middle Brooklyn and East Brooklyn along Nostrand Avenue. In this definition Crown Heights, “a lower middle-class residential area”, only went as far west as Nostrand before it became Bedford.[2]
Despite competing geographically definitions of Crown Heights, to residents and outsiders alike the area remained defined by its ethnic and cultural character. Right up until the 1950s Crown Heights was a byword for a white immigrant neighborhood; Jewish, busy, and seemingly settled.
[1] Henry Goldschmidt, Race and religion among the chosen people of Crown Heights (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 91.
[2] Federal Writers’ Project, The WPA guide to New York City: the Federal Writers’ Project guide to 1930s New York (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1982), 496.