MUST HAVE! Flatbush joins the neighborhoods of Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Red Hook/Gowanus, DUMBO/Vinegar Hill, Bay Ridge/Fort Hamilton:

The Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS) has just released a history of Brooklyn’s fabled Flatbush neighborhood. As one of the original six townships of Kings County, Flatbush has 400 years of recorded history, in which time it transformed from a rural Dutch hamlet of farmers into the “layered, complex, endlessly fascinating place” that the book’s co-author Francis Morrone described at the booklaunch last Thursday evening.
– Brooklyn Historical Society Releases New History of Flatbush, Phoebe Neidl, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 23, 2008

The book provides yet another response to the question, “Where is Flatbush, anyway?!“

The neighborhood is geographically defined in the book as being bound on the north by Parkside Avenue, on the south by Avenue H, on the east by Rogers Avenue and on the west by Coney Island Avenue. Flatbush encompasses several smaller communities, such as Ditmas Park, Prospect Park South, Beverly Square, Fisk Terrace, Midwood, Caton Park, and Albemarle-Kenmore Terraces.

Credit for this new history is largely due to the late Adina Back, a public historian who specialized in the civil rights movement, community activism and education here in Brooklyn. She passed away last month from cancer as the book was going to print.

With both anecdotal and statistical accounts, Back traces Flatbush’s evolution into the diverse urban area it now is with the help of documents and photos preserved by the Flatbush Historical Society, which closed its doors in 2002 and donated its collection to BHS.

Related Posts

Where is Flatbush, anyway?!, December 1, 2007

Links

Brooklyn Historical Society Releases New History of Flatbush, Phoebe Neidl, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 23, 2008
BHS Celebrates Publication of New Flatbush Neighborhood History Guide [PDF], Press Release, September 9, 2008