Community Board 16 Brooklyn

Community Board 16 Brooklyn

Neighborhoods in Community Board 16

Brownsville and Ocean Hill
Always one of the great neighborhood names in Brooklyn, Brownsville is on the rebound. For the first time in five decades, the population is steadily increasing. Traditional shopping areas like Pitkin, Belmont and Rockaway Avenues are now
expanding, as half the entire neighborhood has been filled with low-density, affordable housing that has maintained Brownsville as a stable, thriving community.
New housing was created by the East Brooklyn Churches coalition with the help of the late Bishop Francis Mugavero. They brought in developer I.D. Robbins and the Industrial Area Foundation to create the Nehemiah Plan that cleared land and built
low-cost private homes. Marcus Garvey Village also provides affordable and attractive one-family housing units.
Named for Charles S. Brown, who built 250 frame houses here, Brownsville was a small village until 1885 until developer Aaron Kaplan purchased land, built tenements and enticed to the area several Jewish garment makers from the Lower East
Side. Further development was spurred by the opening of the Fulton Street elevated railway in 1889.
As the neighborhood became more accessible, two-family homes and small tenements with storefronts at street level replaced earlier houses, and by 1910, large multi-family dwellings made for crowded conditions. This area was a largely
Jewish ghetto, with sweatshops and pushcarts and no sewers or paved streets. The neighborhood prospered from the 1920s to the 1940s but remained 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 October 16, 1916 (it was closed nine days later by the vice squad.) The Brownsville Children's
Library, of the Brooklyn Public Library, was the first children's library in the nation. Now known as the Stone Avenue Branch, it remains a strong community center.
In the 1980s, immigrants from the Caribbean began pouring into the neighborhood, aiding its revitalization.
Ocean Hill, one of Brownsville's neighbors, is home to Broadway, an important thoroughfare that is enjoying new life thanks to the East Broadway Merchants' Association and the Ocean Hill Bushwick Bedford-Stuyvesant Development Corporation.

About our association

Community Board 9 Neighborhoods

Brownsville and Broadway Junction