Early history The island and its environs were first inhabited by bands of
Lenape, an Algonquian-speaking tribe that occupied territory along both sides of Long Island Sound, and through coastal areas through present-day New Jersey and down to Delaware. The first known European believed to set foot in the area that would become Gravesend was
Henry Hudson, whose ship,
the Half Moon, landed at
Coney Island in the fall of 1609. The Dutch claimed this land as part of their
New Netherland Colony. Gravesend is notable as one of the few colonial towns to be founded by a woman,
Lady Deborah Moody (
Jeanne Mance being another notable female founder). In 1643, governor general
Willem Kieft granted her and a group of English settlers a land patent on December 19, 1645. Moody, along with John Tilton and wife Mary Pearsall Tilton, came to Gravesend after choosing excommunication, following religious persecution in
Lynn, Massachusetts. Moody and Mary Tilton had been tried because of their
Anabaptist beliefs, accused of spreading religious dissent in the Puritan colony. Kieft was recruiting settlers to secure this land that his forces had taken from the Lenape. Some clashes continued, and the town organization was not completed until 1645. The signed town charter and grant was one of the first to ever be awarded to a woman in the New World. John Tilton became the first town clerk of Gravesend and owned part of what later would become Coney Island. Moody, the Tiltons, and other early English settlers were known to have paid the Lenape for their land. Another prominent early settler was
Anthony Janszoon van Salee. The Town of Gravesend encompassed in southern Kings County, including the entire
island of
Coney Island. This was originally used as the town's common lands on the
Atlantic Ocean. It was divided, as was the town itself, into 41 parcels for the original patentees. When the town was first laid out, almost half of the area was made up of
salt marsh wetlands and
sandhill dunes along the shore of Gravesend Bay. It was one of the earliest planned communities in America. It consisted of a square surrounded by a 20-foot-high wooden palisade. The town was bisected by two main roads, Gravesend Road (now
McDonald Avenue) running from north to south, and Gravesend Neck Road, The religious freedom of early Gravesend made it a destination for ostracized or controversial groups,
Nonconformists or
Dissenters such as the
Quakers, who briefly made their home in the town before being chased out by the succeeding
New Netherland director general
Peter Stuyvesant, who arrived in 1647. He was wary of Gravesend's open acceptance of "heretical" sects. Early in the following year, McKane was tried, convicted, and sentenced to six years in
Sing Sing for such corruption. He was released near the end of the century and died of a stroke in his Sheepshead Bay home in 1899. After McKane's fall from power, Gravesend and
Coney Island were annexed in 1894 by the city of
Brooklyn, which in turn became part of New York City in 1898.
George C. Tilyou created one of Coney Island's first amusement parks,
Steeplechase Park, the opening of which ushered in Coney Island's golden age. Around the same time, Gravesend was the site of testing for the
Boynton Bicycle Railroad, the earliest forerunner of the
monorail. The BBR consisted of a single-wheeled engine that hauled two double-decker passenger cars along a single track; a second rail above the train, supported by wooden arches, kept it from tipping over. The engine and cars were four feet wide and were capable of speeds far greater than the much bulkier standard trains. In 1889, the BBR began running a short route between the
Gravesend stop of the Sea Beach Railroad (near the intersection of 86th and West Seventh Streets) and Brighton Beach in Coney Island, a distance of just over a mile. Despite the smooth and speedy ride, the BBR ultimately failed and the test route fell into disuse, as did the Boynton train and its shed.
Later years 's aftermath Although Coney Island continued to be a major tourist attraction throughout the 20th century, the closing of Gravesend's great racetracks in the century's first decade resulted in the rest of the old town fading into obscurity. Most of it was developed as a working and middle-class residential Brooklyn neighborhood. During the 1920s, many one-family homes were built in Gravesend, which were then converted to two-family housing during the
Great Depression. On the other hand, the area in the northeast part of Gravesend, bound by
McDonald Avenue,
Kings Highway,
Ocean Parkway, and
Avenue U, saw an influx of affluent
Sephardi Jews (mostly
Syrian Jews) during the 1970s. These residents built large
Spanish Colonial-style houses, The relationship between the predominantly African-American and more poor population of the Marlboro Houses and the predominantly white surrounding neighborhoods continued to be tense through much of the 1980s. By 1986, crime was generally low in Gravesend, except for Marlboro Houses, where illegal drugs contributed to higher crime rates than in the rest of the neighborhood. In January 1988, to protest the specific attack and the general climate of racial violence, Reverend
Al Sharpton led 450 marchers between Marlboro Houses and a police station, and were met with chants of "go back to Africa" and various racial epithets from a predominantly white crowd. Beginning in the 1990s, the northeast section of the neighborhood was redeveloped with larger, upscale single-family homes, whose prices reached $1 million. This dramatically changed the composition of part of the neighborhood. In addition, some two-family homes were being converted back to single-family houses. Despite high rates of car thefts, Gravesend's crime rate remained relatively low. ==Education==