Brooklyn By Name: How the Neighborhoods, Streets, Parks, Bridges, and More Got Their Names

Introduction

Introduction With each homey crash-crash crash-crash of the wheels against the rails, there would steal up at me along the bounding slopes of the awnings the nearness of all those streets in middle Brooklyn named after generals of the Revolutionary War. —Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City (1951) Brooklyn’s identity has developed out of the shared associations of its landmark names. Coney Island, Prospect Park, Fulton Street, and Ebbets Field are widely recognized and need little formal introduction. As totems of the borough’s culture and history, they continue to stir the popular imagination. The streets and places of Brooklyn are the real arteries of the thriving metropolis, and the sources of their names reveal the borough’s and the nation ’s rich and textured past. Yet outside of the easily discernible, the origin of many of Kings County’s street and place-names remains obscure and their derivations known only by the few. As Brooklyn historian Ralph Foster Weld dryly observed over a half century ago, “These names are repeated glibly in many accents—unconscious tribute which the heedless present pays to Brooklyn’s past.” Understanding the history of names—the field of toponomy—opens a unique window onto the past and offers an avenue to celebrate those left to posterity. It is also a means of painting, in Terrence Ranger’s evocative phrasing, a more usable historical canvas. Brooklyn’s street and placenames run the gamut, representing signers of the Declaration of Independence , baseball greats, philosophers, poets, diplomats, saints—not to mention the Revolutionary War generals whom Alfred Kazin makes reference to in his classic Brooklyn childhood memoir. A tour d’horizon of Brooklyn names is, at once, an amble through the borough’s history. Mapping the Names Brooklyn, whose earliest inhabitants comprised different groups of Native Americans, is geographically situated in Western Long Island. But unlike other parts of Long Island, which display a veritable bounty of Indian names from Massapequa to Ronkonkoma, Brooklyn has only a handful. Canarsie and Gowanus exist, to be sure, but Kings County’s European settlers ultimately adopted far fewer Native American names than other parts of the metropolitan area.| 1 Street names designating Dutch landowners are among the earliest acknowledged in Brooklyn. Remembered here are Brooklyn’s noteworthy first families—the Lotts, Remsens, and Bergens—some with multiple namings scattered across the borough (being six towns originally, Brooklyn is rife with repetition). All told, landowners and developers are represented in the greatest number. The British takeover inevitably led to linguistic corruption as, for example , Boswijck turned into “Bushwick” and V’Lacke Bos became “Flatbush.” Anglicization also introduced names of English and royalist heritage—for example, Stirling,York, and not least, Kings County. In addition, Dutch families were forced to take on surnames, rather than continue the custom of using one’s place of origin or patronymic. (Pieter Claeson [son of Claes], to take one example, adopted the name Wyckoff to satisfy the new sovereigns.) Similar to the aftermath of other successful revolutions, following the Revolutionary War some streets were stripped of names associated with the ancien régime (though others, say for Tory sympathizer Joris Rapelye, sneaked through). In their stead were streets dedicated to the heroes of the conflict, from generals to infantrymen. International partisans who helped the revolution succeed were also honored with streets, including Lafayette (French), De Kalb (German), and Kosciuszko (Polish). Street and place-names of this period additionally reflect the slaveholding culture once manifest throughout Kings County. The “peculiar institution ” had ignominious roots in Brooklyn and continued until its final abolition in 1827. At least seventy street names can be conclusively attributed to the area’s slaveholders. The nineteenth century brought a new bevy of names associated with the War of 1812 and the Union Army in the Civil War, not to mention the first of several historical appeals to the founding fathers. Many signers of the Declaration of Independence were recognized with streets in Williamsburg , and accomplished military leaders—naval commanders being a particular favorite—criss-crossed the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant. At the nineteenth century’s end, place-names sought not only to honor a virtuous national past but also to reflect a sensibility that resonated with an increasing number of Brooklyn’s elite. With the British no longer a mortal enemy and Victorian aesthetics of significant bourgeois appeal, English names were reintroduced as Brooklyn experienced a distinct wave of Anglophilia . Neighborhoods like Prospect Park South, Ditmas Park...