Nearly 15 percent of all Americans can trace their family history back to Brooklyn, one of the most ethnically diverse areas in the country. Here are just a few of the histories of some of the borough’s neighborhoods.
• Brooklyn comes from the town Breukelen, in the Netherlands. When the Dutch settled New Amsterdam, they gave the name to a small village near what’s now Brooklyn Heights. When the Dutch lost New Amsterdam to the British in the 1660s, the new colonizers kept the name and the pronunciation, but changed the spelling.
• DUMBO is an acronym for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, and even though the name is relatively new (the area has only been called DUMBO since the late 1970s), there’s already debate about how it started. Some people say that David Walentas, a New York developer, coined the term—as he was buying up properties in the area, he wanted a cool-sounding acronym for the new neighborhood…like SoHo in Manhattan. Others say that residents actually started calling the area DUMBO to discourage gentrification (a silly sounding neighborhood was more likely to put off trendy residents). Either way, DUMBO stuck. Before that, the area was known as Rapailie, Olympia, Fulton Landing, and Gairville.
• The Dutch originally called Red Hook “Roode Hoek”: roode for the red clay soil, and hoek, “point,” because part of it “points” into the East River.
• Flatbush also comes from two Dutch words: vlacke, or flat, and bosch, woodland. East Flatbush, though, had a more colorful name—during the 1800s, it was called Pigtown, because it was full of shanties and pig farms.
“If you’re not in New York, you’re camping out.” —Thomas E. Dewey
• Around 1670, farmers in Flatbush started moving out of town in search of open land. Many of them settled in an area near Jamaica Bay, called the “east woods.” But as more people moved in, the area became a small town in its own right…New Lots, for all the new parcels of land those farmers had settled.
• Weeksville gets its name from a former slave named James Weeks, who bought some land on the outer edges of Brooklyn in 1838 and created a self-sufficient community for free, professional African Americans. (New York City’s first black police officer, Wiley Overton, lived in Weeksville, and the city published the Freedman’s Torchlight, one of the first black newspapers in the United States.) By the mid 20th century, though, the town had been absorbed into Crown Heights and mostly forgotten. That is, until a historian named James Hurley rediscovered the town, which led to an archaeological dig to unearth important artifacts. Many of the buildings were later added to the National Register of Historic Places.
• When the Dutch first visited the area that became Coney Island, there were rabbits everywhere…so many that the settlers named the penninsula Konijn Eiland (Rabbit Island). When the British took over, as usual, they anglicized the spelling.
• Before the 1920s, the water in Sheepshead Bay teemed with marine life, in particular a flatfish with stubby teeth called the sheepshead. But as developers moved in and started building houses along the water and polluting the bay, the sheepsheads and many other marine animals left or died off.
“Brooklyn was a lovely place to hit. If you got a ball in the air, you had a chance to get it out. When they tore down Ebbets Field, they tore down a little piece of me.”
—Duke Snider, centerfielder,
Brooklyn Dodgers (1947–58)
Seneca Park Zoo in Rochester is home to the only African elephants in New York State.