BROWNSVILLE

BROWNSVILLE

PRIMARY SOURCE PACKET

Student Name

Brownsville Primary Source Packet

INTRODUCTORY READING "American Revolution." Gale Encyclopedia of U.S.

Economic History. Ed. Thomas Carson and Mary Bonk. Detroit: Gale, 1999. Student Resources

in

Adaptation

Neighborhood in southeastern Brooklyn (2000 pop. 85,000) bounded to the north by Eastern

Parkway, to the east by Van Sinderen Avenue, to the south by Linden Boulevard, and to the

west by Rockaway Parkway. It is named for Charles S. Brown, who built 250 frame houses

there after 1865. Development remained slow until 1887, when Aaron Kaplan purchased land,

built tenements, and enticed Jewish garment markers to the area from the Lower East Side.

Further settlement was spurred by the opening of the Fulton Street elevated railway in 1889.

As the area became more accessible, two-family homes and small tenements with storefronts at

street level replaced earlier houses, and by 1910, large multifamily buildings dominated. The

area was largely Jewish, with sweatshops and pushcarts and few sewers or paved streets.

Living conditions improved after 1920, as did rapid transit connections to Manhattan in 1922

from the New Lots branch of the Interborough Rapid Transit. The neighborhood prospered

from the 1920s to the 1940s and was a center of labor radicalism: it elected socialists to the

state assembly between 1915 and 1921 and a candidate of the American Labor Party in

1936. Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States at 46 Amboy

Street on 16 October 1916 (it was closed 9 days later by the vice squad). During these years

the neighborhood inspired the most evocative accounts of the Jewish experience in New York

City, including Henry Roth¡¯s novel Call It Sleep (1934) and Alfred Kazin¡¯s memoir A Walker in

the City (1951). Some local residents who later became prominent include the composer Aaron

Copland, the actor Danny Kaye, and the impresario Sol Hurok.

Many of its residents moved to the suburbs after World War II. There followed a cycle of decay,

abandonment, vandalism, and arson, which high-rise public housing projects built doing the

1950s and 1960s did little to alleviate. Later housing renewal efforts were more successful,

notably those sponsored by the Council of East Brooklyn Churches to provide affordable onefamily houses at Marcus Garvey Village and Nehemiah Housing. At the beginning of the 21st

Century, Pitkin Avenue, the main commercial thoroughfare, was lined with small businesses,

shoe and clothing outlets, and restaurants. Loew¡¯s Pitkin Theater, a lavish movie theater built in

1930 by Thomas W. Lamb, remained at the corner of East New York Avenue and Pitkin Avenue

as a retail store. The heavy-weight boxing champions Mike Tyson and Riddick Bowe both grew

up in the neighborhood.

Brownsville attracted many immigrants from the Caribbean during the 1980s, especially from

Jamaica, Guyana and Haiti, Grenada, Barbados, and Trinidad and Tobago. In the early twentyfirst century the population of Brownsville was largely African American, with smaller groups of

Latinos and West Indians. The neighborhood remained mostly low-income with one of the

highest densities of public housing projects in the city.

Brownsville Primary Source Packet

CITATION: Rawson, Elizabeth Reich. ¡°Brownsville.¡± The Encyclopedia of New York.

2010. 2nd Ed.

Brownsville Primary Source Packet

Document 1 - Young and Currie. "Map of Brooklyn." 1820. Brooklyn Collection, Brooklyn Public Library.

Brownsville Primary Source Packet

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