Gravesend, Brooklyn
By Joseph Ditta
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About this ebook
Experience the old farming days of what was once the agricultural community of Gravesend, Brooklyn and how the town has transformed into the urban neighborhood it is today.
Permanently settled in 1645, the farming town of Gravesend, Long Island, was annexed to the city (now borough) of Brooklyn, New York, in 1894. Few reminders from Gravesend's rural days survive around the urban landscape it has become. Even its more recent past is quickly disappearing.
Joseph Ditta
In Gravesend, Brooklyn lifelong resident Joseph Ditta, reference librarian at the New-York Historical Society, traces the evolution of this historic neighborhood through a fascinating selection of rare and never-before-published views.
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Gravesend, Brooklyn - Joseph Ditta
pages.
INTRODUCTION
Ultima Thule was a region the ancients believed lay at the end of the Earth. In Roz Chast’s New Yorker cartoon with that title (published on October 14, 2002), a mother warns her daughter of the dangers lurking in the neighborhoods of Brooklyn, New York, outside their own. Heedless, the girl sets out to explore and steps off the planet. I just wanted to see what was on the other side of McDonald Avenue!
she wails.
What Chast’s character probably did not know is that McDonald Avenue was once called Gravesend Avenue (see page 72). If she had followed it south to a point just below Avenue U, she would have come to the heart of Gravesend, one of the first planned communities in America. She would not have recognized it as such. There are no historic signs to read, just the names on auto body shops under the elevated train tracks. It might seem like the gritty edge of the world today, but to its founder, Lady Moody, Gravesend was Utopia.
Deborah Moody (born about 1586 and died about 1659) was the wealthy, freethinking widow of a baronet who left England when the Court of the Star Chamber ordered that she limit her time in London and stay on her Wiltshire estate. By 1639, she was in Puritan Massachusetts, where her dissenting belief that scripture did not sanction infant baptism branded her a dangerous woman.
Avoiding censure she moved in 1643 to New Netherland, where she petitioned the tolerant Dutch to grant her and some followers a spot on which to worship as they pleased.
A war raging against the Native Americans foiled the group’s immediate plans. After the hostilities, on December 19, 1645, Director-General Willem Kieft issued a patent for land on southwestern Long Island, an area that by mid-century included five Dutch towns: Flatbush, Flatlands, New Utrecht, Bushwick, and Brooklyn. Kieft’s patent called this sixth, English town Gravesand,
a combination of two similar sounding European places: ’s-Gravenzande, South Holland (which means count’s beach
in Dutch), and Gravesend, England (which takes its name from words meaning at the end of the grove
). Eventually spelled the English way, Gravesend’s seemingly morbid name had no connection to burials (despite the presence of New York City’s earliest cemetery within its borders; see page 12).
Lady Moody’s fellow patentee, the surveyor James Hubbard, designed the town’s central plan: a 16-acre square bounded by present-day Village Road North, Village Road East, Village Road South, and Van Sicklen Street and cut into quadrants by the intersection of Gravesend Neck Road and McDonald Avenue (see the map on page 11). In each quadrant, 10 house lots bordered a common yard for holding livestock. A palisade enclosed the larger square and beyond it circled 40 long, wedge-shaped plantations. The pattern resembled a radiant cross and perhaps signified Lady Moody’s intent—that Gravesend shine
like a beacon for seekers of religious freedom. Kieft’s patent ensured they could enjoy "liberty of Conscience . . . without molestation or disturbance from any magistrate or . . . ecclesiastical minister that may pretend jurisdiction over