A selection from Johnson’s 1866 map of New York City shows what is now Crown Heights (Public Domain).
The first inhabitants of Brooklyn were the Lenape Indians and today’s borough formed part of Lenapehoking. The first European settlement in the vicinity of Crown Heights was established in 1664 when New Amsterdam Governor Pieter Stuyvesant granted a man named Thomas Lamberts land for the village of New Bedford, just north of Crown Heights. Yet the bulk of the area was wooded, hilly, and sparsely unpopulated. During the Battle of Long Island in 1776 The British had to recruit a scout to lead them through the forest.
In the early nineteenth century Crown Heights remained a largely uninhabited “non-man’s-land” between the villages of Bedford and St. Marks in the north, and Flatbush in the south.[1] The Lenape had been expelled or murdered, and the only residents in the “rock-ridden precipice” remained squatters who made their homes amongst the hills.[2] Despite the lack of inhabitants, the land was still parceled out on maps– often to families of stature such as the Lefferts – and was in a gradual process of de-forestation.
It was not until the 1830s that Crown Heights gained its first permanent settlement in the form of Weeksville. Weeksville was a free black community, named after a stevedore James Weeks who in 1838 purchased two lots of land on the corner of Troy Avenue and Dean Street. Weeks purchased the land from Henry C. Thompson, another black man, who had three years earlier secured thirty-two lots of what had once been Lefferts owned Bedford. But it was Weeks’ name that stood.
Clove Road and Bergen Street in Weeksville, 190-? (Copyright: Brooklyn Public Library).
Slavery had been abolished in the state of New York in 1827 but citizenship and the right to vote was still tied to land ownership. Weeksville, along with another free black community Carrsville, was both an attempt by black Americans to define their own sense of place and a means to secure political rights. Roughly speaking, Weeksville encompassed the area south of Fulton Street, north of East New York Avenue, east of Troy Avenue and west of Ralph Avenue. Hunterfly Road, an old Native American trail that has now been built over was a central point of neighborhood; in the nineteenth century the road wound southeasterly from what is now Hunterfly Place in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
While Weeksville flourished, the southern part of Crown Heights remained largely undeveloped. The exception was the Kings County Penitentiary, which was built in 1846 and occupied the two blocks between Rogers Avenue, Nostrand Avenue, President Street and Crown Street. The prison was also known as the Crow Hill Penitentiary and this became a name for the wider neighborhood. The origin of the name Crow Hill is disputed but it most likely stems from either a derogatory term used for the African-American population in Weeksville and Carrsville, or from the black and white striped uniforms worn by the incarcerated men at the penitentiary.
Kings County Penitentiary and the surrounding area, 1899 (Copyright: Brooklyn Museum).
There were also smaller neighborhoods, such as Malbonville to the west of Weeksville and Pigtown to the south. Exact definitions of any of these neighborhoods are hard to pin down. According to Wilhelma Rhodes Kelly, Crow Hill was located between Albany Avenue and Schenectady Avenue, but this does not encompass the Kings County Penitentiary which, based on its alternative name, was certainly of the neighborhood.[3] Similarly, the borders of these neighborhoods were constantly in flux. Kelly, looking at the nineteenth century, places the northwestern border of Pigtown at New York Avenue and Montgomery Street,[4] yet in 1921 the Brooklyn Eagle listed it at Albany Avenue and Malbone Street.[5] It is then easiest to agree with the Brooklyn Eagle reporter who in 1888 wrote, “It is only possible to give these divisions in a general way, as the ‘oldest inhabitants’ do not agree in laying out the boundaries, and it is a question if the lines were ever very decidedly fixed.”[6] Such an analysis proceeds well into the twentieth century.
Nevertheless, towards the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth, decisive and irreversible changes took place that wiped Weeksville, Crow Hill, and the other neighborhoods from the map. Eastern Parkway was constructed between 1870 and 1874 and the Brooklyn Bridge was built in 1883. At the same time, the expanding grid system incorporated previous neighborhood borders and landmarks. New immigrants began to move into Crown Heights and the residents of Weeksville and Crow Hill who did not have clear land ownership rights were forced out. As the demographics of the area changed so did the architectural landscape.
[1] Henry Goldschmidt, Race and religion among the chosen people of Crown Heights (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 86.
[2] Wilhelmena Rhodes Kelly, Crown Heights and Weeksville (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2009), 7.
[3] Ibid., 55.
[4] Ibid., 55.
[5] Hoy Holland, “Pigtown,” accessed December 14, 2015 http://brooklynology.brooklynpubliclibrary.org/post/2009/03/05/Pigtown.aspx
[6] Judith Wellman, Brooklyn’s Promised Land: The free black community of Weeksville (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2014), 33.