Timeline and facts
Bushwick township
In 1638, the Dutch West India Company secured a deed from the local Lenape people for the Bushwick area, and Peter Stuyvesant chartered the area in 1661, naming it Boswijck, meaning "neighborhood in the woods" in 17th-century Dutch.[16][17] Its area included the modern-day communities of Bushwick, Williamsburg, and Greenpoint. Bushwick was the last of the original six Dutch towns of Brooklyn to be established within New Netherland.
The community was settled, though unchartered, on February 16, 1660, on a plot of land between the Bushwick and Newtown Creeks[16] by fourteen French and Huguenot settlers, a Dutch translator named Peter Jan De Witt,[18] and one of the original eleven slaves brought to New Netherland, Franciscus the Negro, who had worked his way to freedom.[19][20] The group centered their settlement on a church located near today's Bushwick and Metropolitan Avenues. The major thoroughfare was Woodpoint Road, which allowed farmers to bring their goods to the town dock.[21] This original settlement came to be known as Het Dorp by the Dutch, and, later, Bushwick Green by the British. The English would take over the six towns three years later and unite them under Kings County in 1683.
Many of Bushwick's Dutch records were lost after its annexation by Brooklyn in 1854.[22] Contemporary reports differ on the reason: T. W. Field writes that "a nice functionary of the [Brooklyn] City Hall ... contemptuously thrust them into his waste-paper sacks",[23] while Eugene Armbruster claims that the movable bookcase containing the records "was coveted by some municipal officer, who turned its contents upon the floor".[24]
At the turn of the 19th century, Bushwick consisted of four villages: Green Point, Bushwick Shore[25] (later known as Williamsburg), Bushwick Green, and Bushwick Crossroads (at the spot where today's Bushwick Avenue turns southeast at Flushing Avenue).[26]
Bushwick's first major expansion occurred after it annexed the New Lots of Bushwick, a hilly upland originally claimed by Native Americans in the first treaties they signed with European colonists granting the settlers rights to the lowland on the water. After the second war between the natives and the settlers broke out, the natives fled, leaving the area to be divided among the six towns in Kings County. Bushwick had the prime location to absorb its new tract of land in a contiguous fashion. New Bushwick Lane (Evergreen Avenue), a former Native American trail, was a key thoroughfare for accessing this new tract, which was suitable mostly for potato and cabbage agriculture.[27] This area is bounded roughly by Flushing Avenue to the north and Evergreen Cemetery to the south. In the 1850s, the New Lots of Bushwick area began to develop. References to the town of Bowronville, a new neighborhood contained within the area south of Lafayette Avenue and Stanhope Street, began to appear in the 1850s.[28][29]
The area known as Bushwick Shore was so called for about 140 years. Bushwick residents called Bushwick Shore "the Strand", another term for "beach".[30] Bushwick Creek, in the north, and Cripplebush, a region of thick, boggy shrubland extending from Wallabout Creek to Newtown Creek, in the south and east, cut Bushwick Shore off from the other villages in Bushwick. Farmers and gardeners from the other Bushwick villages sent their goods to Bushwick Shore to be ferried to New York City for sale at a market located at the present-day Grand Street. Bushwick Shore's favorable location close to New York City led to the creation of several farming developments. Originally a 13-acre (53,000 m2) development within Bushwick Shore, Williamsburgh rapidly expanded during the first half of the 19th century and eventually seceded from Bushwick to form its own independent city in 1852.[31] Both Bushwick and Williamsburgh were annexed to the City of Brooklyn in 1854.[22]
Early industry
When Bushwick was founded, it was primarily an area for farming food and tobacco. As Brooklyn and New York City grew, factories that manufactured sugar, oil, and chemicals were built. The inventor Peter Cooper built a glue manufacturing plant, his first factory, in Bushwick. Immigrants from western Europe joined the original Dutch settlers. The Bushwick Chemical Works, at Metropolitan Avenue and Grand Street on the English Kills channel, was another early industry among the lime, plaster, and brickworks, coal yards, and other factories that developed along English Kills, which was dredged and made an important commercial waterway.[32] In October 1867, the American Institute awarded Bushwick Chemical Works the first premium for commercial acids of the greatest purity and strength.[33] The Bushwick Glass Company, later known as Brookfield Glass Company, established itself in 1869, when a local brewer sold it to James Brookfield.[34] It made a variety of bottles and jars, as well as large numbers of glass electrical insulators for telegraph, telephone and power lines.
In the 1840s and 1850s, a majority of the immigrants were German, which became the dominant population. Bushwick established a considerable brewery industry, including "Brewer's Row"—14 breweries operating in a 14-block area—by 1890.[35][36] Thus, Bushwick was dubbed the "beer capital of the Northeast". The last Bushwick breweries, the Schaefer's and Rheingold Breweries, closed its doors in 1976.[37][36] As late as the 1980s, there were unsuccessful efforts to revive the Rheingold Brewery.[38] The William Ulmer Brewery at Beaver and Belvidere Streets was given landmark status by the city in 2010, becoming the first brewery with such a status.[39]
As late as 1883, Bushwick maintained open farming land east of Flushing Avenue.[40] A synergy developed between the brewers and the farmers during this period, as the dairy farmers collected spent grain and hops for cow feed. The dairy farmers sold milk and other dairy products to consumers in Brooklyn. Both industries supported blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and feed stores along Flushing Avenue.[41]
Railway hub
In 1868, the Long Island Rail Road built the Bushwick Branch from its hub in Jamaica via Maspeth to Bushwick Terminal, at the intersection of Montrose and Bushwick avenues,[42][43] allowing easy movement of passengers, raw materials, and finished goods. Routes also radiated to Flushing, Queens.
The first elevated railway ("el") in Brooklyn, known as the Lexington Avenue Elevated, opened in 1885. Its eastern terminus was at the edge of Bushwick, at Gates Avenue and Broadway.[44] This line was extended southeastward into East New York shortly thereafter. By the end of 1889, the Broadway Elevated and the Myrtle Avenue Elevated were completed, enabling easier access to Downtown Brooklyn and Manhattan and the rapid residential development of Bushwick from farmland.
With the success of the brewing industry and the presence of the els, another wave of European immigrants settled in the neighborhood. Also, parts of Bushwick became affluent. Brewery owners and doctors commissioned mansions along Bushwick and Irving Avenues at the turn of the 20th century. New York mayor John Francis Hylan kept a townhouse on Bushwick Avenue during this period.[45] Bushwick homes were designed in the Italianate, Neo Greco, Romanesque Revival, and Queen Anne styles by well-known architects. Bushwick was a center of culture, with several Vaudeville-era playhouses, including the Amphion Theatre, the nation's first theatre with electric lighting.[46] The wealth of the neighborhood peaked between World War I and World War II, even when events such as Prohibition and the Great Depression were taking place. After World War I, the German enclave was steadily replaced by a significant proportion of Italian Americans. By 1950, Bushwick was one of New York City's largest Italian American neighborhoods, although some German Americans remained.[35]
The Italian community was composed almost entirely of Sicilians, mostly from the Palermo, Trapani, and Agrigento provinces in Sicily. In particular, the Sicilian townsfolk of Menfi, Santa Margherita di Belice, Trapani, Castelvetrano, and many other paesi had their own clubs (clubbu) in the area. Il Circolo di Santa Margherita di Belice, founded in Bushwick, remains the oldest operating Sicilian organization in the United States. These clubs often started as mutual benevolence associations or funeral societies but transformed along with the needs of their communities from the late 1800s until the 1960s, when many began to fade away. St. Joseph Patron of the Universal Church Roman Catholic Parish was the hub of the Sicilian community, and held five feasts during the year, complete with processions of saints or Our Lady of Trapani. St. Joseph opened in 1923 because the Italian community had been rapidly growing in Bushwick since 1900. This Sicilian community first was centered in Our Lady of Pompeii parish on Siegel Street in Williamsburgh. But as industry expanded along Flushing Avenue, the Sicilian population expanded with the growing need for labor by factory operators. St. Leonard's parish was the large German Catholic parish in the area, but the Italian community was not welcome there and was thus compelled to open its own parish. St. Leonard's closed in 1973. St. Joseph's is now a large and vibrant Latino parish run by the Scalabrini Order of priests, an Italian missionary order that caters to migrants.
Postwar transition and decline[edit]
The demographic transition of Bushwick after World War II was similar to that of many Brooklyn neighborhoods. The U.S. Census records show that the neighborhood's population was almost 90% white in 1960, but dropped to less than 40% white by 1970.[47] During this transition, white-collar workers were being replaced by those migrating from the south. Puerto Ricans and African Americans, among other Caribbean American families, moved into homes in the southeastern edge of the neighborhood, closest to Eastern Parkway. By the mid-1950s, migrants began settling into central Bushwick. The availability of block association housing helped many neighborhoods survive the economic and social distress of the 1970s.[47]
This change in demographics coincided with changes in the local economy. Rising energy costs, advances in transportation and the change to the use of aluminum cans encouraged beer companies to move out of New York City. As breweries in Bushwick closed, the neighborhood's economic base eroded. Discussions of urban renewal took place in the 1960s, but never materialized, resulting in the demolition of many residential buildings with the intent of replacing these structures with public housing, but nothing new was built in its place as these proposals were scrapped. Another contribution to the change in the socioeconomic profile of the neighborhood was the John Lindsay administration's policy of raising available rent for welfare recipients. Since these tenants could now bring higher rents than tenants would on the open market, landlords began filling vacant units with such tenants. By the mid-1970s, half of Bushwick's residents were on public assistance.[48]
According to The New York Times, Bushwick was "a neatly maintained community of wood houses" by the mid-1960s. Within five years, it had become "what often approached a no man's land of abandoned buildings, empty lots, drugs and arson."[49]
On the night of July 13, 1977, a major blackout cut power to nearly all of New York City, and arson, looting, and vandalism occurred in low-income neighborhoods across the city. Bushwick suffered some of the most devastating damage and losses. While store owners along Knickerbocker and Graham avenues were able to defend their stores, the Broadway shopping district was heavily looted and burned. Twenty-seven stores along Broadway were burned, and looters and some residents saw the blackout as an opportunity to get what they otherwise could not afford.[50]: 104 Newspapers around the country published UPI and the Associated Press's photos of Bushwick residents with stolen items and a police officer beating a suspected looter, and Bushwick became known for riots and looting.[51] Fires spread to many residential buildings as well. After the riots were over and the fires were put out, residents saw unsafe dwellings and empty lots among surviving buildings, leading one author to describe the scene as "some streets that looked like Brooklyn Heights, and others that looked like Dresden in 1945":[50]: 181 The business vacancy rate on Broadway reached 43% in the wake of the riots.[46]
The 1977 blackout and resulting riots left Bushwick without a commercial retail hub. Middle-class residents who could afford to leave did so, in some cases abandoning their homes. New immigrants continued to move to the area, many from Hispanic America, but renovation and new construction was outpaced by the demolition of unsafe buildings, forcing overcrowded conditions at first. As buildings came down, the vacant lots made parts of the neighborhood look and feel desolate, resulting in a greater outflow of residents and a growth of the illegal drug trade due to a lack of job opportunities. Author Jonathan Mahler described the social and economic hardships of Bushwick after the blackout in his book Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning, explaining that the majority of neighborhood residents were living on less than $4,000 a year, and had to rely on some form of public assistance. By the 1980s, the Knickerbocker Avenue shopping district was nicknamed "The Well" for its seemingly unending supply of drugs.[52] Even through the 1990s, it remained a poor and relatively dangerous area, with 77 murders, 80 rapes, and 2,242 robberies in 1990.[53]