Early development The area that would become Brownsville was first used by the Dutch for farming, as well as manufacturing stone slabs and other things used to construct buildings. In 1823–1824, the Dutch founded the
New Lots Reformed Church in nearby New Lots because the
corresponding church in
Flatbush was too far away. The church, which has its own cemetery that was built in 1841, was listed on the
National Register of Historic Places in 1983. In 1858, William Suydam parceled the land into 262 lots, providing simple two- to four-room accommodations for workers who were living there. However, Suydam vastly underestimated how undesirable the area was, and ran out of funding in 1861. Believing the area to be useful for development, Within three years of the first lot being distributed, there were 10,000 Jews living in Brownsville. This overcrowding was despite the availability of empty space in the fringes of Brownsville. There were also no playgrounds in the area, and the only park in the vicinity was
Betsy Head Park. Brownsville was also considered to have the highest density of Jews of any place in the United States through the 1950s. Brownsville was also a place for radical political causes during this time. In 1916,
Margaret Sanger set up the first birth control clinic in America on Amboy Street. At one point in the 1943 published book,
New York City Market Analysis, it had described Brownsville as having a variety of small industry unlike Lower East Side. The book also mentioned the Jewish populations were a mix of Russian, Austrian, and Polish immigrants and were 80% of the foreign born population in the neighborhood. In the 1930s, Brownsville achieved notoriety as the birthplace of
Murder, Inc., The organizations' criminal businesses also extended to nearby neighborhoods of
Ocean Hill and
East New York. The members mainly consisted of Jewish and Italian Americans as these neighborhoods during that time were mainly populated by Jewish and Italian enclaves.
A film about the organization was produced and released in 1960.
Late 20th century African Americans had begun moving into Brooklyn in large numbers in the early 20th century. The adjacent
Bedford-Stuyvesant was the first large African American community of Brooklyn. In the 1930s, Brownsville began to receive growing numbers of African Americans. Most of the new residents were poor and socially disadvantaged, especially the new African-American residents, who were mostly migrants from the Jim Crow-era
South where they were racially discriminated against. By 1950, there were double the number of blacks, most of whom occupied the neighborhood's most undesirable housing. At the same time, new immigration quotas had reduced the number of Russian Jews who were able to immigrate to the United States. For instance, in the Van Dyke Houses, the black population in 1956 was 57% and the white population that year was 43%, with a little over one percent of residents receiving
welfare benefits. Seven years later, 72% of the residents were black, 15% Puerto Rican, and the development had the highest rate of per-capita arrests of any housing development citywide. The newly majority-black Brownsville neighborhood had few community institutions or economic opportunities. It lacked a middle class, and its residents did not own the businesses they relied upon. At that time, Brownsville and East New York's single-mother rate was almost twice the national rate, at 45%. Backlash against the report, mainly on accusations of
victim blaming, caused leaders to overlook Moynihan's proposals to improve poor black communities' quality of life, and the single-mother rate in Brownsville grew. Officer Rattley was not indicted by the grand jury. Then, in 1968, Brownsville was the setting of a protracted and highly contentious
teachers' strike. The
Board of Education had experimented with giving the people of the neighborhood control over the school. The new
school administration fired several teachers in violation of union contract rules. The teachers were all white and mostly Jewish, and the resulting strike badly divided the whole city. The resulting strike dragged on for half a year, becoming known as one of
John Lindsay's "Ten Plagues". It also served to segregate the remaining Jewish community from the larger black and Latino community. By 1970, the 130,000-resident population of Brownsville was 77% black and 19% Puerto Rican. Meanwhile, rioting and disorder continued. In June 1970, two men set fire to garbage bags to protest the
New York City Department of Sanitation's reduction of trash collection pickups in Brownsville from six times to twice per week. In the riots that followed this arson, one man was killed and multiple others were injured. In May 1971, the mostly black residents of Brownsville objected to reductions in
Medicaid, welfare funds, and
drug prevention programs in a peaceful protest that soon turned violent. In the ensuing riot, protesters conflicted with police, with windows being broken and the
New York City Fire Department fighting over 100 fires in a single night. The city began to rehabilitate many formerly abandoned tenement-style apartment buildings and designate them low-income housing beginning in the late 1970s.
Marcus Garvey Village, whose townhouse-style three-story apartment buildings had front doors and gardens, was an example of such low-income development that did not lower crime and poverty, as was intended; instead, the houses became the home base of a local gang, and poverty went up to 40%. The neighborhood's crime rate decreased somewhat by the 1980s. Many subsidized multi-unit townhouses and newly constructed apartment buildings were built on vacant lots across the expanse of the neighborhood, and from 2000 to 2003, applications for construction of residential buildings in Brownsville increased sevenfold. However, these improvements are limited to certain sections of Brownsville. In 2013, 39% of residents fell below the poverty line, compared to 43% in 2000, being twice the city's overall rate as well as 13% higher than that of nearby
Newark, New Jersey. There is a high rate of poverty in the neighborhood's northeastern section, which is inhabited disproportionately by African-Americans and Latinos. The overall average income in Brownsville is lower than that of the rest of Brooklyn and the rest of New York City. A columnist for
The New York Times, writing for the paper's "Big City" section on 2012, stated that the many improvements to the city's overall quality of life, enacted by then-mayor
Michael Bloomberg since 2002, "might have happened in Lithuania for all the effect they have had (or could have) on the lives of people in Brownsville." On the other hand, the area's lack of gentrification might have kept most of residents' money within the local Brownsville economy. The area's largest employer is supposedly the
United States Postal Service, and the lack of mobility for many residents encourages them to buy from local stores instead. == Geography and land use ==