Gravesend, Brooklyn Over the Years

Gravesend, Brooklyn Over the Years

This article relates to Saint of the Narrows Street

Gravesend is only an hour from New York City's Grand Central Station by subway, but Manhattan "might as well be Mars" to the characters of Saint of the Narrows Street. It is a small neighborhood in south Brooklyn, just north of the better-known Coney Island and Brighton Beach.

The name "Gravesend" sounds macabre, but its roots are benign, if somewhat debated. There are two competing origins—English or Dutch—of the neighborhood's name. The Dutch colonized what is now Brooklyn (then called "Breuckelen") in the 1640s, parceling the area into six different villages, including Gravesend and other, better-known names, like Bushwick and Flatbush. (The present-day neighborhoods bearing these names are about at the center of their original, larger towns.) Gravesend was the only one of those six that was founded by an English person, and also the only one founded by a woman—Lady Deborah Moody, who was fleeing religious persecution in England and the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony, and who had enough money and followers to create a new community of religious freedom in the Dutch territory.

Some speculate that Gravesend was named by Moody after a town in Kent, England, of the same name. Other historical sources indicate that William Kieft—the Dutch director of New Netherland—named it after the town of 's'Gravenzande (now 's-Gravenzande) in the Netherlands, which roughly translates to "Count's Beach" or "Count's Sand." According to a historical archeologist, the name was originally Dutch but "gladly accepted by the settlers, in whose minds it referred or came to refer to the English town. Both Dutch and English were satisfied."

In the 18th and 19th centuries, Gravesend was an industrial hub, known for shipbuilding, brick-making, and oyster farming. In the early 20th century, demographics began to change as a new wave of immigrants, including Italians and Jews, arrived in Brooklyn. Over the 20th century and into the 21st, Gravesend has remained a mix of working-class and middle-class families, escaping for now the gentrification that has shaped other Brooklyn neighborhoods, although the demographics have continued to shift. Italians, once the majority of denizens, still have a strong presence (a local amateur soccer team that plays in Gravesend is called the Brooklyn Italians); the Sephardic Jewish population has grown; and there are growing numbers of Chinese, Mexican, and Russian immigrants. A real estate agent in 2008 described the neighborhood as a "minestrone soup"—"a jumbled-up mix of ingredients that somehow fit together."

Map of Gravesend Brooklyn from 1946, courtesy of Brooklyn Historical Society

Filed under Places, Cultures & Identities

This article relates to Saint of the Narrows Street. It first ran in the February 26, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.