Gravesend
Neighborhood of Brooklyn
Looking atGravesend Bay from Gravesend (2012)
Etymology: seebelow
Interactive map of Gravesend
Coordinates:40°35′53″N73°58′16″W / 40.598°N 73.971°W /40.598; -73.971
Country	United States
State	New York
City	New York City
Borough	Brooklyn
Area
• Total	1.144 sq mi (2.962 km2)
Population  (2010)[1]
• Total	29,436
• Density	25,740/sq mi (9,938/km2)
Ethnicity [2]
• White	52.8%
• Asian	21.2
• Hispanic	16.0
• Black	8.4
• Other	1.5
ZIP Code	11223[3]
Area codes	718, 347, 929, and917

Gravesend is a neighborhood in the south-central section of theNew York Cityborough ofBrooklyn, on the southwestern edge ofLong Island in theU.S. state ofNew York. It is bounded by theBelt Parkway to the south,Bay Parkway to the west,Avenue P to the north, andOcean Parkway to the east.

Gravesend was one of the originaltowns in the Dutch colony ofNew Netherland. After the English took over, it was one of the six original towns ofKings County in colonialNew York. Gravesend was the only English chartered town in what became Kings County and is notable as being one of the first towns founded by a woman,Deborah, Lady Moody. The town of Gravesend encompassed 7,000 acres (2,800 ha) in southern Kings County, including the entirepeninsula ofConey Island, and was annexed by theCity of Brooklyn in 1894.

The modern-day neighborhood is part ofBrooklyn Community Board 11,Brooklyn Community Board 13 andBrooklyn Community Board 15. As of 2020, Gravesend had a population of 30,587.^[4]

The name "Gravesend" was given to the area by New Amsterdam's Dutch authorities. Local sources think that the name probably comes from Dutch words, which when combined can mean "groves end" or "Count's beach".^[5]

Historic sources, written in Dutch, suggest that it was named by the Dutch governor generalWillem Kieft for the Dutch settlement of's'Gravesande (now's-Gravenzande) in the Netherlands, which means "Count's Beach" or "Count's Sand".^[6][7] A 1656 map of Nova Belgica confirms this, by mentioning the names of Dutch towns like Vlissingen (Flushing), Breukelen (Brooklyn), Amersfoort (Flatlands), Heemstee (Hempstead, Heemstede which means homestead) and Gravesant ('s-Gravenzande).

Because of the association with Lady Moody, some speculate that it was named after the English seaport ofGravesend, Kent.^[8]

The modern neighborhood of Gravesend lies between East 12th Street orConey Island Avenue to the east, Stillwell Avenue to the west, Avenue P to the north, andConey Island Creek andShore Parkway to the south. To the east of Gravesend isHomecrest andSheepshead Bay, to the northeast Midwood, to the northwestBensonhurst, and to the westBath Beach. To the south, across Coney Island Creek, lies the neighborhood ofConey Island, and acrossShore Parkway liesBrighton Beach.

Calvert Vaux Park, formerly Dreier Offerman Park, is located southwest of the neighborhood.^[9]

South of Shore Parkway and north of Coney Island Creek, is sometimes calledWhite Sands. Originally, White Sands consisted of several short, dead-end streets with no through-routes within the neighborhood. Currently, it consists of two blocks of residences and aHome Depot location.^[10]

White Sands' name is derived from the white sand which formerly covered the shore and the mouth of Coney Island Creek. The first houses to be built in the neighborhood were bungalows that were raised on stilts above the sand, but as development slowly progressed, much of the sand was removed and replaced with landfill. In 1993,Home Depot became interested in White Sands as the location for a new store due to its location near the highly usedCropsey Avenue and Shore Parkway. By 2000, Home Depot had acquired about two-thirds of the properties in White Sands, and by 2002, the acquired properties had been razed and replaced by a new Home Depot location.^[10][9]

The island and its environs were first inhabited by bands ofLenape, 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.^[11] The first known European believed to set foot in the area that would become Gravesend wasHenry Hudson, whose ship,theHalf Moon, landed atConey Island in the fall of 1609. The Dutch claimed this land as part of theirNew Netherland Colony.^[12]

Gravesend is notable as one of the few colonial towns to be founded by a woman,Lady Deborah Moody^[13] (Jeanne Mance being another notable female founder). In 1643, governor generalWillem 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 inLynn, Massachusetts. Moody and Mary Tilton had been tried because of theirAnabaptist beliefs, accused of spreading religious dissent in the Puritan colony.^[14] 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.^[15] 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.^[16] Another prominent early settler wasAnthony Janszoon van Salee.

The Town of Gravesend encompassed 7,000 acres (2,800 ha) in southern Kings County, including the entireisland ofConey Island. This was originally used as the town's common lands on theAtlantic 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 ofsalt marshwetlands andsandhilldunes along the shore of Gravesend Bay. It was one of the earliest planned communities in America. It consisted of a 16-acre (6.5 ha) square surrounded by a 20-foot-high wooden palisade. The town was bisected by two main roads, Gravesend Road (nowMcDonald Avenue) running from north to south, and Gravesend Neck Road,^[13][15] running from east to west. These roads divided the town into four quadrants, which were subdivided into ten plots of land each. This grid of the original town can still be seen on maps and aerial photographs of the area. At the center of town, where the two main roads met, a town hall was constructed where town meetings were held once a month.^[7][11]

The neighborhood center is still the four blocks bounded by Village Road South, Village Road East, Village Road North, and Van Sicklen Street, where the Moody House and Van Sicklen family cemetery are located. Next to, and parallel with the van Sicklen Family Cemetery is theOld Gravesend Cemetery, where Lady Moody is said to be interred.Egyptian émigréMohammad Ben Misoud, who was part of a late 19th-century attraction at the Coney Island amusement park, was given a properMuslim funeral upon his death in August 1896 and also buried in Old Gravesend Cemetery.^[17]

The religious freedom of early Gravesend made it a destination for ostracized or controversial groups,Nonconformists orDissenters such as theQuakers, who briefly made their home in the town before being chased out by the succeedingNew Netherland director generalPeter Stuyvesant, who arrived in 1647. He was wary of Gravesend's open acceptance of "heretical" sects.^[11]

In 1654 the people of Gravesend purchasedConey Island from the local Lenape band for about $15 worth of seashells, guns, and gunpowder.^[11]

In August 1776 during the American Revolutionary War, Gravesend Bay was the landing site of thousands of British soldiers and German mercenaries from their staging area on Staten Island, leading to theBattle of Long Island (alsoBattle of Brooklyn). The troops met little resistance from the Continental Army advance troops under GeneralGeorge Washington then headquartered in New York City (at the time limited to the tip of Manhattan Island). The battle, in addition to being the first, would prove to be the largest fought in the entire war.^[11]

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, Gravesend remained a sleepy suburb. With the opening of three prominent racetracks (Sheepshead Bay Race Track,Gravesend Race Track, andBrighton Beach Race Course) in the late 19th century, and the blossoming ofConey Island into a popular vacation spot, the town was developed as a successfulresort community.John Y. McKane was credited with this. ASheepshead Bay carpenter and contractor, he gained a variety of elected and appointed positions: as Gravesend town supervisor, chief of police, chief of detectives, fire commissioner, schools commissioner, public lands commissioner, superintendent of the Sheepshead Bay Methodist Church, head tenor of the church choir, and Santa Claus at the annual Sabbath school Christmas celebration. From the 1870s to the 1890s, McKane cultivatedConey Island, which was then part of the township of Gravesend, as a pleasure ground. He participated in both political and physical development.

As townconstable, McKane expanded the Gravesend police force considerably and personally patrolled the beach. McKane became corrupt, using the pretense of town permits to extort tribute from every business, large or small, on Coney Island. Presenting himself as a champion of law and order, he skimmed much money from the many brothels and gambling parlors that thrived in his bailiwick. During McKane's reign Coney Island came to be known by many as "Sodom by the Sea".^{[citation needed]}

McKane became a Democratic Party ward boss and had loose standards on who was allowed to vote: immigrants, dead people, seasonal migrant workers, and criminals. Voting records show many specious entries. On the eve of the 1893 election, William Gaynor, a lawyer running for Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice, decided to test McKane's methods by dispatching more than 20 Republican observers to examine the Gravesend voter registries and oversee the voting in all six districts of the town, as he was entitled to do by law. However, when the observers reached Gravesend town hall at dawn on election day, McKane, along with a large group of policemen and cronies, confronted them. When the observers balked and produced injunctions from the Brooklyn Supreme Court, McKane supposedly declared "injunctions don't go here" and ordered the men away. A scuffle ensued and five of the observers were beaten and arrested. This event raised great outrage.^[18] Early in the following year, McKane was tried, convicted, and sentenced to six years inSing 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.^[19]

After McKane's fall from power, Gravesend andConey Island were annexed in 1894 by the city ofBrooklyn, which in turn became part of New York City in 1898.^[20]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 theBoynton Bicycle Railroad, the earliest forerunner of themonorail.^[21] 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 theGravesend 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.^[22]

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 theGreat Depression.^[13]

In the 1950s, the city constructed the 28-buildingMarlboro Houses, public housing units run by theNew York City Housing Authority, located between Avenues V and X from Stillwell Avenue to the Gravesend subway yards. Gradually this housing became occupied predominantly by African Americans.^[23] On the other hand, the area in the northeast part of Gravesend, bound byMcDonald Avenue,Kings Highway,Ocean Parkway, andAvenue U, saw an influx of affluentSephardi Jews (mostlySyrian Jews) during the 1970s.^[24] These residents built largeSpanish Colonial-style houses,^[13] and had their own police force.^[24]

In 1982, an African-American transit worker namedWillie Turks was beaten to death in Gravesend by a group of white teenagers.^[25] 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.^[26] 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.^[24] On December 25, 1987, white youths beat two black men in the neighborhood in an apparent "unprovoked attack."^[27] In January 1988, to protest the specific attack and the general climate of racial violence, ReverendAl 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.^[28]

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.^[29] 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.^[13]

• Big Apple Academy
• John Dewey High School
• Lafayette High School (now Lafayette Educational Complex)
• Touro College
• PS 95 The Gravesend
• PS 216 Arturo Toscanini
• PS 212 Lady Deborah Moody
• PS 721K Brooklyn Occupational Center
• IS 281 Joseph B. Cavallaro
• IS 228 David A. Boody
• Shostakovich School of Music
• PS 215 Morris H. Weiss
• PS 238 Anne Sullivan (Pre-K - 8)
• Our Lady of Grace Catholic Academy
• St Simon and St Jude Catholic School ( k-8) Jim McGinty
• PS 97 The Highlawn

TheBrooklyn Public Library's Gravesend branch is located at 303 Avenue X near West 2nd Street. It opened in 1962 and was renovated in 2001.^[30]

Based on data from the2010 United States census, the population of Gravesend was 29,436, an increase of 179 (0.6%) from the 29,257 counted in2000. Covering an area of 731.83 acres (296.16 ha), the neighborhood had a population density of 40.2 inhabitants per acre (25,700/sq mi; 9,900/km²).^[1]

The racial makeup of the neighborhood was 52.8% (15,535)White, 21.2% (6,250)Asian, 8.4% (2,469)African American, 0.1% (41)Native American, 0.0% (1)Pacific Islander, 0.1% (41) fromother races, and 1.3% (383) from two or more races.Hispanic orLatino residents of any race were 16.0% (4,716) of the population.^[2]

In the 2020 census data fromNYC Dept. Of City Planning, West Gravesend showed there were between 20,000 and 29,999 white residents and 26,700 Asian residents showing both their populations to be almost equivalent and there were between 5,000 and 9,999 Hispanic residents. South Gravesend has between 10,000 and 19,999 white residents and has between 5,000 and 9,999 Asian residents, but showed each the Hispanic and Black populations to be under 5000 residents. East Gravesend overlapping toHomecrest showed a higher proportion of white residents of between 30,000 and 39,999 with Hispanic residents of between 5,000 and 9,999 and as well as Asian residents of between 5,000 and 9,999.^[31] The affordable housingNYCHA development Marlboro Houses located right on the borderline of Gravesend andConey Island holds a significant concentrated community of Black residents even though some Asian and Hispanic residents also live within the housing development as well.^[32][33][34]

Gravesend's earliest European settlers were predominantly English and Dutch. Slavery was legal in the colony, and many settlers had enslaved African Americans as workers until after the American Revolution, when New York gradually abolished the institution. African Americans continued to work and live in Gravesend after the abolition of slavery, clustering near theBMT Brighton Line at East 16th Street.^{[citation needed]}

The now-defunct Gravesend Race Track opened on August 26, 1886, and hired mainly black workers, who tended to live nearby. Later, there was a surge inIrish,Italian, andJewish residents, immigrants and their descendants who moved out from Manhattan.Chinese,Mexican,Puerto Rican,Russian,Ukrainian andWest Indies immigrants are the most recent residents to share this neighborhood.^{[citation needed]} The largest group is thought to beItalian American and named for Gravesend's Italian community is a professionalsoccer team, theBrooklyn Italians who play in Gravesend'sJohn Dewey High School football stadium.^[35] Of the Italian-American community, Sicilians (especially fromCastellammare del Golfo), make up the largest specific region of people.

In 2008,The New York Times reported that the neighborhood had become particularly popular amongSephardic Jews. It was among severalSyrian Jewish communities of the United States.^[29]The New York Times also reported that in the2012 presidential election, a precinct in Gravesend was one of the few parts ofNew York City carried byMitt Romney, with 133 votes to just 3 forBarack Obama.^[36]

Gravesend is served by threeNew York City Subway corridors.^[7] The services and lines, respectively, are:

• D, ​R, and ​W trains on theBMT West End Line at25th Avenue andBay 50th Street;
• F and <F>​ trains on theIND Culver Line atKings Highway,Avenue U, andAvenue X; and
• N and ​W trains on theBMT Sea Beach Line atKings Highway,Avenue U, and86th Street.

TheConey Island Subway Yard is in the neighborhood.^[7]

TheB1,B3,B4,B64,B68,B82 andB82 SBS lines operate through Gravesend.^[37]

• William DeMeo (born 1971), actor
• John Franco (born 1960), formerNew York Mets baseball player^[38]
• Domenic Recchia (born 1959), attorney and politician

Gravesend is patrolled by theNew York City Police Department's 60th, 61st, and 62nd Precincts.^[39]

Notes

Bibliography

• French, J. H.Gazetteer Of the State of New York (1860)
• Ierardi, Eric J.Gravesend: Home of Coney Island
• (August 10, 1896)Tombstone For "The Nubian"The Brooklyn Daily Eagle
• (August 1896)"Turk is Buried with Odd Ceremonies"The New York Times

• Media related toGravesend, Brooklyn at Wikimedia Commons

• Gravesend, Brooklyn
• 1645 establishments in North America
• 1645 establishments in the Dutch Empire
• Establishments in New Netherland
• Former towns in New York City
• Italian-American culture in New York City
• Neighborhoods in Brooklyn
• Populated coastal places in New York (state)
• Sicilian-American culture
• Syrian-American culture in New York City
• Syrian-Jewish culture in New York (state)

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