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. 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 and one of the original eleven
slaves brought to New Netherland, Franciscus the Negro, who had worked his way to freedom. 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. 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. while Eugene Armbruster claims that the movable bookcase containing the records "was coveted by some municipal officer, who turned its contents upon the floor". At the turn of the 19th century, Bushwick consisted of four villages: Green Point, Bushwick Shore (later known as Williamsburg), Bushwick Green, and Bushwick Crossroads (at the spot where today's Bushwick Avenue turns southeast at
Flushing Avenue). 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. 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. The area known as Bushwick Shore was so called for about 140 years. Bushwick residents called Bushwick Shore "the Strand", the Dutch term for "beach". 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 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. Both Bushwick and Williamsburgh were annexed to the City of Brooklyn in 1854.
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. In October 1867, the
American Institute awarded Bushwick Chemical Works the first premium for commercial acids of the greatest purity and strength. The Bushwick Glass Company, later known as
Brookfield Glass Company, established itself in 1869, when a local brewer sold it to James Brookfield. 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. 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. 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. As late as 1883, Bushwick maintained open farming land east of Flushing Avenue. 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.
Railway hub Bushwick Branch 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, 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. They 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. 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 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. During this transition, white-collar workers were being replaced by those migrating from the south.
Puerto Ricans,
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. 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." 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. 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. 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": 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. In the wake of reduced crime rates citywide and a shortage of affordable housing in nearby neighborhoods such as
Park Slope and
Williamsburg, numerous young professionals and artists have moved into converted warehouse lofts, brownstones, limestone-brick townhouses, and other renovated buildings in Bushwick. A flourishing artist community has existed in Bushwick for decades and has become more visible in the neighborhood. Dozens of art studios and galleries are scattered throughout the neighborhood. Several open studios programs are conducted that enable the public to visit artist studios and galleries, and several websites are devoted to promoting neighborhood art and events. Bushwick artists display their works in galleries and private spaces throughout the neighborhood. The borough's first and only trailer park, a 20-person art collective established by founder, Hayden Cummings and ZenoRadio's Baruch Herzfeld, was established within a former nut roasting factory for live/work spaces. A Bushwick-centered news site, entitled
Bushwick Daily, was founded in 2010 by Katarina Hybenova, and features community issues, events, food, art and culture. Starting in the mid-2000s, the city and state governments began the Bushwick Initiative, a two-year pilot program spearheaded by the
New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) and various community projects. The group's goal was to improve quality of life in the twenty-three square blocks surrounding
Maria Hernandez Park through various programs such as addressing deteriorated housing conditions, increasing economic development opportunities, and reducing drug dealing activities. The group's crime-reduction activities included collaboration with the HPD's Narcotics Control Unit and the New York City Police Department's 83rd Precinct and Narcotics Division to reduce drug-dealing. ==Demographics==