Early development Brighton Beach is included in an area from Sheepshead Bay to Sea Gate that was purchased from the Native Americans in 1645 for a gun, a blanket and a kettle. Brighton Beach was located on sandy terrain, and before development in the 1860s, had mostly farms. The area was part of the "Middle Division" of the town of
Gravesend, which was the sole English settlement out of the original six towns in
Kings County. By the mid-18th century, thirty-nine lots in the division had been distributed to the descendants of English colonists. With the help of Gravesend's surveyor
William Stillwell, Engeman acquired all 39 lots for the relatively low cost of $20,000. Mostly patronized by the upper middle class, this hotel close to the then-rundown western Coney Island had rooms for up to 5,000 guests nightly and served meals for up to 20,000 people daily. The , double-decker Brighton Beach Bathing Pavilion was also built nearby and opened in 1878, with the capacity for 1,200 bathers. "Hotel Brighton", also known as the "Brighton Beach Hotel", was situated on the beach at what is now the foot of
Coney Island Avenue. The
Brooklyn, Flatbush, and Coney Island Railway, the predecessor to the
New York City Subway's present-day
Brighton Line, opened on July 2, 1878, and provided access to the hotel. Adjacent to the hotel, Engeman built the
Brighton Beach Race Course for
thoroughbred horse racing. After that extremely high tide, and a decade of
beach erosion, the Brighton Beach Hotel, by then owned by the Railway, faced the possibility of being "undermined and carried away." A "highly ingenious and novel" plan to elevate and move the entire building was begun by railway Superintendent J.L. Morrow and Secretary E.L. Langford. It was accomplished by lifting the entire estimated 5000-ton hotel on 13 hydraulic jacks, raising the building above its plot, and then laying 24 lines of railroad track – a mile and a half long altogether – under it; then the building temporarily on 112 railroad "platform cars" (flat cars) was pulled by six steam
locomotives and relocated another 495 feet inland.
Anton Seidl and the
Metropolitan Opera brought their popular interpretations of
Wagner to the Brighton Beach Music Hall, where
John Philip Sousa was in residence, and the New Brighton Theater was a hotspot for vaudeville. Visitors for tea at
Reisenweber's Brighton Beach Casino would be served by Japanese waitresses in full costume. At an enormous private club, the Brighton Beach Baths, members could swim, access a private beach, and play
handball,
mah-jongg, and cards.
Early 20th century In 1905, Brighton Beach Park opened its own area of amusements, called Brighton Pike. Brighton Pike offered a boardwalk, games, live entertainment (including the
Miller Brothers' wild-west show:
101 Ranch), and a huge steel roller coaster. In May 1919, most of the park was burned down, including the roller coaster. Of the estimated 55,000 Holocaust survivors living in New York City as of 2011, most live in Brighton Beach. To meet the bursting cultural demands, the New Brighton Theater converted itself to the States' first Yiddish theater in 1919. Today, Brighton Beach has many synagogues and Jewish institutions, including a
Chabad center, a
Mikvah and a Jewish day school called Mazel.
Late 20th century and Soviet immigration After
World War II, the quality of life in Brighton Beach decreased significantly as the poverty rate and the ratio of older residents to younger residents increased; this was primarily effectuated by the postwar codification of
rent regulation in New York, which incentivized middle-aged residents and retirees (particularly the aforementioned first- and second-generation Jewish-American residents, many of whom had eschewed homeownership in favor of investing their savings in family businesses or postsecondary educations for their children) to retain their units in the prewar six-story semi-fireproof elevator apartment houses that lined Brightwater Court and other nearby thoroughfares for decades. This included an influx of immigrants from the
Caucasus, mostly from countries such as
Georgia and
Azerbaijan. A large number of Russian immigrant firms, shops, restaurants, clubs, offices, banks, schools, and children's play centers opened in the area. This address has become the destination of wealthy businessmen, entertainers, and senior officials from the former Soviet Union, and with their purchase of units at the Oceana, area housing prices have risen. Since the early 2010s, a significant number of
Central Asian immigrants have also chosen Brighton Beach as a place to settle. == Culture ==