DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

A Brief History

 

Like much of the land that now makes up Brooklyn, the area now known as Prospect Heights was originally settled by the Lenape Indians, and was purchased by Dutch settlers (Betts 8).

 

The Prospect Heights area remained, for the most part, pastoral farmland from the time of the Lenape first contact with Europeans and the mid 19th century.  The reasons for its subsequent use and growth as an urban residential district included the expansion of the city of Brooklyn, but consisted of two important factors: transportation improvements and the development of Prospect Park.

 

"These transportation improvements included new  links between Prospect Heights and the ferries along Brooklyn’s waterfront. Construction began on Prospect Park in 1866 and the park opened to the public in 1871, although it was not yet complete" (Betts 6).

 

Prospect Heights development was slow through the 1860s, but development started in earnest after the civil war, particularly along St. Marks Avenue, where several groupings of row houses were built in then popular architectural designs, such as Italianate, Anglo-Italianate and Queen Anne designs.

 


Fig 2. 
1860 Census Data. Source: Social Explorer

Through most of the nineteenth century, most residential development in the neighborhood focused on single family homes and small apartment buildings (including the building in which I now live, which was built around 1870).  After the turn of the twentieth century, the extension of the IRT subway line to Eastern Parkway (near Prospect Park) encouraged a new sort of development: six-story elevator apartment houses (Betts 21).

 

For most of its history, through the middle part of the twentieth century, Prospect Heights remained overwhelmingly white.  In the 1860 Census, 98% of Brooklyn's nearly 280,000 residents were white, while only 5.9%, roughly three thousand residents, were "colored" (US Census, Fig. 2).

 

From the turn of the century, Prospect Heights residents were mainly middle-class whites of Irish and Italian decent, with wealthier families living along Eastern Parkway at its southern edge (Walzer).

 

Throughout its history, Prospect Heights had been a stable, middle-class enclave, but that would change during the latter half of the twentieth century, as economic pressures and white flight to suburbia changed its racial make-up and the fortunes of its residents.

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.