Bedford Stuyvesant
Early history
The neighborhood name is an extension of the name of the Village of Bedford, expanded to include the area of Stuyvesant Heights. The name Stuyvesant comes from Peter Stuyvesant, the last governor of the colony of New Netherlands.
In pre-revolutionary Kings County, Bedford, which now forms the heart of the community, was the first major settlement east of the then Village of Brooklyn on the ferry road to Jamaica and eastern Long Island.
With the building of the Brooklyn and Jamaica Railroad in 1832, taken over by the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) in 1836, Bedford was established as a railroad station near the intersection of current Atlantic and Franklin Avenues. In 1878, the Brooklyn, Flatbush and Coney Island Railway established its northern terminal with a connection to the LIRR at the same location.
The community of Bedford contained one of the older free African American communities in the U.S., Weeksville, much of which is still extant and preserved as an historical site. Ocean Hill, a subsection is primarily a residential area.
Bedford-Stuyvesant brownstones
Establishment as an urban neighborhood
Bedford-Stuyvesant brownstonesIn the last decades of the 19th century, with the advent of electric trolleys and the Fulton Street Elevated, Bedford Stuyvesant became a working class and middle class bedroom community for those working in downtown Brooklyn and Manhattan in New York City. At that time, most of the pre-existing wooden homes were destroyed and replaced with brownstone row houses, which are highly sought after in the neighborhood's contemporary renaissance. Many consider the area to be the African-American mecca of Brooklyn, similar to what Harlem is to Manhattan.
Weeksville
Weeksville was a village founded by African American freedmen on Long Island, New York in the area of what is now the neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. It was named after James Weeks, an African American freedman who purchased land there in 1838. The land was purchased from another African American freedman, Henry C. Thompson.
The village was established by a group of African American land investors and political activists. By the 1850s, it had more than 500 residents from all over the East Coast (as well as two people born in Africa). Almost 40 percent of them were southern-born. Almost one-third of the men over 21 owned land. It had a school, two churches, and in the 1860s became the national headquarters of the African Civilization Society and the Howard Orphan Asylum.