North Brooklyn

Williamsburg-Greenpoint—Bushwick
and Ridge Wood—Stuyvesant Heights

Area: East River and Clinton Ave. on the west to Evergreen Cemetery and the
borough line on the east; Fulton St. north to Newtown Creek.
Principal highways: Broadway, Bushwick Ave., and Fulton St.

Transportation: BMT Jamaica subway, Marcy Ave. to Eastern Parkway stations;
8th Ave. (Independent) Queens-Brooklyn crosstown subway, Fulton St. to Green-
point Ave. stations; Fulton St. el, Nostrand to Ralph Ave. stations.

North Brooklyn is an old, neglected, working-class residential area,
built largely around the industrial centers along the East River and Newtown
Creek—where Havemeyer, Bliss, Pratt, Arbuckle, Bossert, and Cooper
made fortunes in sugar, coffee, lumber, ships, oil, and glue. Williams-
burg and Greenpoint are virtually unrelieved slums; Bushwick, Ridge-
wood, and parts of Stuyvesant Heights achieve a slightly genteel air, a
reminder of their more prosperous days in the late nineteenth century.

WILLIAMSBURG, the area extending fanwise from the Williamsburg
Bridge to Flushing and Bushwick Avenues, has a large polyglot popula-
tion. The neighborhood, formerly the most congested residential area in
Brooklyn, has lost some sixty thousand inhabitants since the 1920's. Here,
with the erection in 1936-7 of Williamsburg Houses, a PWA construction
project, began Brooklyn's first experiment in large-scale low-rent housing.

Originally part of the town of Bushwick, Williamsburg was founded
about 1810 and named for a Colonel Williams, the engineer who sur-
veyed it. About 1819 Noah Waterbury established a distillery at
the foot of South Second Street, the first industrial plant in the locality.
W'illiamsburg in the middle-nineteenth century was a popular resort; its
hotels near the Brooklyn Ferry attracted a wealthy, cosmopolitan crowd,
including such gourmets and sportsmen as Commodore Vanderbilt, Jim
Fisk, and William C. Whitney. With the opening of the Williamsburg
Bridge in 1903 and the resultant influx of immigrant families from over-
crowded Manhattan, the district's affluence vanished.