Community Board 18 Brooklyn

Community Board 18 Brooklyn

Neighborhoods in Community Board 18

Mill Basin, Mill Island, Bergen Beach and Georgetown
Tired of city life and need to get away from it all? Head over to Mill Island and Bergen Beach, where the homes are huge, the lawns are lush, the waterfront is often right in your backyard, and, better yet, you don't have to deal with alternate side of
the street parking. Ever. Georgetown and Mill Basin (also known as Old Mill Basin if you're looking to buy) are a step closer to such urban luxuries as corner grocery stores and buses (forget about subways) -- but by rest-of-Brooklyn standards, they're farmland.
Once an enclave for families seeking a suburban lifestyle in the early 1960s (Bergen Beach has its own stable), Mill Island and Bergen Beach are now a healthy mix of original residents and new homeowners whose idea of redecorating frequently
entails bulldozing the existing house and erecting a palace in its place. More than 200 homes in Mill Island have docks and a few have elevators. One, on National Drive, has a six-car garage. Another, an all-white, two-story brick house, has an indoor
swimming pool. Homes in the $750,000 range are not uncommon and waterfront property soars into the millions.

Canarsie and Flatlands

Canarsie spent the colonial period as part of the township of Flatlands, a quiet fishing and farming village. In the 1870s, large numbers of German immigrants discovered Canarsie, and by the turn of the century its population consisted of about 3,000 German, Dutch, Scottish, Irish and Italians -- mostly fishermen who mined the rich oyster beds of Jamaica Bay. A church founded by the German community, the Canarsie Reformed Church (82 Conklin Avenue), built in 1877, is a reminder of this immigrant era.
Canarsie also became a popular seaside resort; its speakeasies, beer gardens, vaudeville houses and the Golden City Amusement Park (opened in 1907 near the current site of Canarsie Pier) made it a honky-tonk town. By the 1930s, the
pollution of Jamaica Bay destroyed the fishing industry, and the Depression took a terrible toll on this community of laborers. In 1939, the amusement park burned down. Immediately after, the whole area was leveled to build the Belt Parkway.
After World War II the building boom of the '50s and '60s gave this swampland on the edge of the city a brand-new look. It began with Seaview Village, 200 acres covered with 40 blocks of modest Cape Cod, ranch-style and split-level houses and attached rowhouses. Other developments followed, and multi-family brick rowhouses soon covered the former farmland.
Residents who were children in the '40s and early '50s remember Canarsie as a rural community. They bought coal, ice and even clothing from street vendors and walked on paths first made by the Canarsee Indians. The newcomers of the '50s and '60s, however, mostly Jews and Italians from Crown Heights, Brownsville, East New York and Williamsburg, recall a suburban Canarsie -- residential tree-lined streets, driveways and garages, superior schools, fervent community activism, and great shopping along Flatlands Avenue, Avenue L (known as "the L") and Rockaway Parkway.
In the last few years these neighborhood qualities have attracted African-Americans, Caribbean immigrants and Asians, who have enriched Canarsie with an influx of new cultures.
The construction of the Belt Parkway in the '30s brought with it the largest publicly financed neighborhood waterfront project, the Canarsie Pier, which later became part of the Gateway National Recreation Area, itself the largest park in an urban
location. The six-acre pier is used year-round for fishing, people-watching, picnicking and summer concerts. The pier is also home to Abbracciamento on the Pier, where you can dine just a few yards away from the lapping of the waves.
Nearby, stretching along Seaview Avenue is one of the city's largest parks, the 136-acre Canarsie Beach Park. Four cricket fields accommodate the athletic interests of the growing Caribbean community.
South Shore High School, one of the neighborhood's two high schools, offers a popular adult education program at night and on weekends.

Flatlands, a low-lying community southwest of Canarsie, began life in 1636 as Nieuw Amersfoort, making it the oldest of the Dutch settlements. Many of the original Dutch farmhouses still stand, including the Stoothoff-Baxter-Kouwenhoven House,
an historic landmark at 1640 East 48th Street. Nearby is the Hendrick I. Lott House (1940 East 36th Street), first built in 1676 with small windows to guard against Indian attack. Borough President Howard Golden has supported the work of the Lott
House Preservation Association by allocating funding to aid in the purchase of this important historical site. This will help ensure that this landmark is preserved for future generations.
Flatlands is also home to the landmarked Flatlands Dutch Reformed Church (3931 Kings Highway), originally erected in 1663 as one of three churches established by order of then-Governor Peter Stuuvesant. In the adjacent cemetery, many
early Dutch landowners are buried, including the Wyckoffs, Lotts, Kouwenhovens and Voorhees, in addition to native Americans and some of the earliest free blacks in Brooklyn.

Marine Park

Residents of Marine Park share the greatest backyard in the world: the namesake park, which opened in the 1920s with a 140-acre gift from philanthropists Alfred T. White and Frederic B. Pratt. Now 1,024 acres, Marine Park includes ballfields, biking and jogging paths, tennis courts, cricket courts, two new bocce courts, a children's playground, a nature trail, a beach (no swimming allowed) and plenty of undeveloped marshland. Birding in Marine Park has a passionate following. More than 100 species of birds
have been sighted there among the wetlands and other park areas.
The public Marine Park Golf Course, taking up about 250 acres of Marine
Park alongside the waters of Gerritsen Bay, includes white sands, scrub oak
and marsh grass. A marina lies at the end of Flatbush Avenue.
In 1931 Floyd Bennett Field, just east of Marine Park, was opened on 387 acres of reclaimed marshland; it was named for the pilot who flew Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd across the North Pole in 1926. Many record-breaking flights, including Wiley
Post's pioneer flight around the world in 1933, originated here. In 1972 it became part of the Gateway National Recreation Area and today includes the New York City Police Department's Aviation Unit and a Naval Reserve station.
Shared recreational space in Marine Park has spawned a strong feeling of community. The neighborhood boasts an active and longstanding civic association, the Marine Park Civic Association. Small children play on the sidewalks of this tree-lined,
predominantly single-family-home neighborhood. Residents, mostly of Irish and Italian descent, have a close relationship with the local 63rd Precinct. During the summer the rallying cry is "block party!" Several streets each weekend are closed to traffic
for these music-and-barbecue filled extravaganzas.
Despite Marine Park's decidedly residential flavor, shopping and entertainment are close at hand. Flatbush Avenue (and to a much smaller extent, Quentin Road) offers an array of stores and restaurants. Michael's and Bon Appetit are local favorites.
Kings Plaza, opened in 1970 as the first suburban -- and largest -- indoor mall in the borough, includes a multiplex movie theater, Macy's, and Sears and Roebuck. Express and Structure, two popular clothing chains, recently opened stores here.

Local Links

Gateway National Recreation Area