Bedford-Stuyvesant (pronounced /ˈstaɪvəsənt/; also known as Bed-Stuy) is a neighborhood in the central portion of the New York City, USA, borough of Brooklyn. Formed in 1930, the neighborhood is part of Brooklyn Community Board 3, Brooklyn Community Board 8 and Brooklyn Community Board 16. The neighborhood is patrolled by the NYPD’s 79th and 81st precincts. In the City Council the district is represented by Albert Vann, of the 36th Council District.
Bed-Stuy is bordered by Bushwick to the north (bordering Williamsburg); Classon Avenue to the west (bordering Clinton Hill); Broadway and Van Sinderen Avenue to the east (bordering Bushwick and East New York); Atlantic Avenue and Ralph Avenue to the south and west (bordering Crown Heights) and as far as East New York Avenue (bordering Brownsville).
For decades, it has been a cultural center for Brooklyn’s black population. Following the construction of the subway line between Harlem and Bedford in 1936, blacks left an overcrowded Harlem for more housing availability in Bedford-Stuyvesant. From Bed-Stuy, blacks have since moved into the surrounding areas of Brooklyn, such as East New York, Crown Heights, Brownsville and Fort Greene.
The main north-south thoroughfare is Nostrand Avenue, but the main shopping street is Fulton Street, which lies above the main subway line for the area (A C trains). Fulton Street runs east-west the length of the neighborhood and intersects high-traffic streets including Bedford Avenue, Nostrand Avenue and Stuyvesant Avenue. Bedford-Stuyvesant is actually made up of four neighborhoods: Bedford, Stuyvesant Heights, Ocean Hill and Weeksville.
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 Netherland.
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 1833, along Atlantic Avenue, taken over by the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) in 1836, Bedford was established as a railroad station near the intersection of current Atlantic Avenue 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 oldest free black communities in the U.S., Weeksville, much of which is still extant and preserved as a historical site. Ocean Hill, a subsection founded in 1890 is primarily a residential area.
In 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. These are highly sought after in the neighborhood’s contemporary renaissance. Many consider the area to be the black cultural mecca of Brooklyn, similar to what Harlem is to Manhattan.
During and after World War II, large numbers of African Americans, migrating from the Southern United States upon the decline of agricultural work and seeking economic opportunities in the North, moved into the neighborhood. They often preferred it to the available housing in Harlem.
A series of problems led to a long decline in the neighborhood. Some of the new residents who had been rural workers had difficulty finding reasonably paid work in the urban New York economy. The city itself was in a period of steady decline, exacerbated by abandonment of parts of the transportation network, disappearance of industrial jobs, decline of public facilities and services, inability to deal with increasing crime, and difficulties in municipal government. The movement of significant parts of its population to suburban areas ghettoized a racially diverse neighborhood.
The 1960s and 1970s were a difficult time for New York City and affected Bedford-Stuyvesant seriously.[citation needed] Gang wars erupted in 1961 in Bedford-Stuyvesant. During the same year, Alfred E. Clark of The New York Times referred to it as “Brooklyn’s Little Harlem.”[6] One of the first urban riots of the era took place there. Social and racial divisions in the city contributed to the tensions, which climaxed when attempts at community control in the nearby Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district pitted some black community residents and activists (from both inside and outside the area) against teachers, the majority of whom were white, many of them Jewish. Charges of racism were a common part of social tensions at the time.
In 1964, race riots broke out in the Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem after an Irish American NYPD lieutenant, Thomas Gilligan, shot and killed an African American teenager, James Powell, 15.[7] The riot spread to Bedford-Stuyvesant and resulted in the destruction and looting of many neighborhood businesses, many of which were Jewish-owned[citation needed]. Race relations between the NYPD and the city’s black community were strained as crime was high in black neighborhoods and few black policemen were present on the force.[8] In black New York neighborhoods, crimes related to drugs and homicides were higher than anywhere else in the city contributing to the problems between the white dominated police force and black community. Coincidentally enough, the 1964 riot took place across the NYPD’s 28th and 32nd precinct located in Harlem, and the 79th precinct located in Bedford-Stuyvesant which at one time were the only three police precincts in the NYPD that black police officers were allowed to patrol in.[9] Race riots followed in 1967 and 1968, as part of the political and racial tensions in the United States of the era, aggravated by continued high unemployment among blacks, continued de facto segregation in housing, the failure to enforce civil rights laws, and the murder of Caucasians by blacks.
In 1965, Andrew W. Cooper, a journalist from Bedford-Stuyvesant, brought suit under the Voting Rights Act against racial gerrymandering.[10] The lawsuit claimed that Bedford-Stuyvesant was divided among five congressional districts, each represented by a white Congress member.[11] It resulted in the creation of New York’s 12th Congressional District and the election in 1968 of Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman ever elected to the U.S. Congress.[12]
In 1977, a power outage occurred throughout all of New York City due to a power failure at the Con Edison Plant. As a result, looting was widespread throughout the city, especially in poor black and Puerto Rican areas of Harlem, the Bronx and Brooklyn. Bedford-Stuyvesant and neighboring Bushwick were two of the worst hit areas. Thirty-five blocks of Broadway, the street dividing the two communities, were affected, with 134 stores looted, 45 of which were set ablaze.
LATE 2000’s – PRESENT
Many properties were renovated after the turn of the century, and crime declined. A number of whites and middle-class blacks, as well as a large number of students, moved into the area. New clothing stores, mid-century collector furniture stores, florists, bakeries, cafes and restaurants opened and Fresh Direct began delivering to the area. However, violent crime still remains a problem in the area.
