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View from Sunset park overlooking Harbor and World Trade Center

(for more pix http://streetlights.tripod.com/bklyn/sunset/sunset.html )

History

Named for a park on the ridge line, the Sunset Park neighborhood has gone through many ethnic changes and is a microcosm of many of the immigration waves that transformed the city.

In its heyday in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Brooklyn waterfront was more prosperous than Manhattan's waterfront. It encompassed hundreds of acres of enormous basins, dry docks, storage warehouses and storehouses for bulk goods (such as coffee and grain), shipbuilding and repair facilities, sugar refineries, and thousands of feet of piers. My grandfather worked on these piers.

Following the Irish in the mid 1800s, a Scandinavian community was among the first ethnic groups to establish itself in Sunset Park starting in the late 1800s leaving an imprint which still persists today both in residents and institutions like the Lutheran Medical Center.

Brooklyn waterfront in Sunset Park, 1926

Also around 1880, a Polish community took root near Third Avenue and 20th street. The Ansonia Clock factory employed many Polish men and many found work in the nearby Greenwood cemetery at fourth and 25th street. By 1890, a largely Catholic Polish community was established along Third Avenue in Sunset Park. Our Lady of Czestochowa was a center of worship in the community.

Streetcars ran on 2nd and 3rd avenue

Around the turn of the century, Italians moved into the neighborhood followed by Puerto Ricans after World War II and today Chinese and other Asians. Today, it is largely Latino, with a heavy Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican and Central American presence.

The Brooklyn Historical Society recently sponsored an exhibit covering the Chinese who live in the 8th avenue area of Sunset Park.

Sunset Park is divided by freeways including the Gowanus. Urban planners and other groups are trying to propose alternative development for the area.

Businesses

1. Bush Terminal

One of the largest employment areas in Sunset Park were the shipyards just down the hill where my grandfather worked. During World War II this area boomed and the docks known as Bush Terminals expanded rapidly.

In 1903, Irving T. Bush, incorporated the Bush Terminal Railroad to serve his 200 acre industrial park that he had started to construct in 1900 on the waterfront in Brooklyn. He constructed 15 industrial lofts - six to eight stories in height. His railroad was a great success - it needed eight steam locomotives and another six electric ones to serve all of the customers.

Within two decades after the Second World War, however, the Port Authority's lack of investment-for the New York side of the harbor-in the newly emerging containerized shipping technology, and its interest in expansive, undeveloped New Jersey as the location of choice for a new container port, signaled the quick demise of Sunset Park's shipping industry and, along with it, a slow but steady disintegration of its manufacturing base.

By the late 1960s, many of the firms operating out of the Bush Terminal had either closed or moved. In the 1980s, privately owned Industry City Associates purchased a series of Bush Terminal buildings situated along Third Avenue and began an aggressive program of renovation and promotion of available space.

Former Brooklyn Army Terminal

2. Brooklyn Army Terminal (BAT)

During the Second World War, Brooklyn Army Terminal processed nearly 80 percent of U.S. supplies and troops for the war effort and employed 10,000 civilians. In the 1980s, Brooklyn Army Terminal was converted by the City of New York to a rental facility for industrial and commercial businesses.

In the 1970s, the City of New York closed the Brooklyn Army Terminal. The Brooklyn Army Terminal reopened in 1987 after a major renovation by The City of New York.

3. Lutheran Medical Center

The Lutheran Medical Center was founded in 1883 by a Norwegian Lutheran Deaconess-Nurse, Sister Elisabeth Fedde, to support the local Scandinavian population. For 80 years Lutheran Medical Center grew and declined with other neighborhood institutions as a function of an economy based on the Brooklyn waterfront. In the last ten years, the Lutheran Medical Center made a major commitment to the neighborhood by negotiating the purchase of the vacant American Machine and Foundry building, The AMF building was, along with Brooklyn Army Terminal, a dominant fixture of the southern end of the industrial district.

Churches and Schools

The church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help at 5^th and 59^th is the largest church in Brooklyn.

Sources

Snyder-Grenier, Ellen M. Brooklyn! An Illustrated History Philadelphia:Temple University Press, 1996.