If you’ve walked down Clifton Place lately, you’ve probably noticed how much history is packed into these blocks. The cornices, the stoops, the tree canopy, and just up the way, Herbert Von King Park. Here’s the short version of how our neighborhood, and that park, came to be.
From two villages to one neighborhood
Bedford-Stuyvesant is really two older communities that grew into each other over time. Bedford started as a small Dutch settlement, one of the first outside the old Village of Brooklyn, dating back to a petition Governor Peter Stuyvesant approved in 1663. Stuyvesant Heights, just to the east, took its name from that same governor. The two didn’t get combined into the single name “Bedford-Stuyvesant” until the 1930s, once the Fulton Street elevated line (today’s A and C trains) made the area easy to reach.
Most of the rowhouses that give this neighborhood its look, including the ones on our own block, went up between 1885 and 1900. German immigrant builders put them up for a solidly middle-class market, and by the 1880s and ’90s, Stuyvesant Heights north of Decatur Street already looked a lot like it does today: tall ceilings, big windows, and blocks of brownstone and brick that are still standing well over a century later.
A neighborhood shaped by the Great Migration
The neighborhood changed again in the 1930s and ’40s, as Black families left an increasingly overcrowded Harlem for the more spacious housing Bedford-Stuyvesant had to offer. By 1950 the Black population had grown to roughly 155,000, about 55% of residents, and by 1960 it was 85%. It became one of the largest and most culturally significant Black communities in New York City, and it still is.
That growth came with real struggle. Discriminatory lending, blockbusting, and years of disinvestment took a toll, and tensions boiled over more than once in the 1960s. But the same years also produced some of the most important community organizing in the city’s history. Senator Robert F. Kennedy visited in 1966, and that visit helped launch the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, generally considered the first community development corporation in the country. It went on to renovate housing and help fund homeownership across the neighborhood.
Around the same time, local organizing helped redraw Brooklyn’s congressional lines, which led to Shirley Chisholm’s election in 1968 as the first Black woman in the U.S. Congress. She represented this neighborhood in Washington for the next 14 years.
Herbert Von King Park is older than the neighborhood’s name
The park most of us just call “Von King” has its own long story, and it actually predates the name “Bedford-Stuyvesant” by decades. Brooklyn’s Common Council set the land aside in 1857 as Tompkins Park, named for Daniel D. Tompkins, an abolitionist who served as New York’s governor and later as U.S. Vice President. It was one of the very first parks the city of Brooklyn ever created.
In 1871, Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, the same pair who designed Central Park and Prospect Park, drew up the plan for Tompkins Park. In keeping with the thinking of the time, they kept it deliberately open and sparse, worried that dense trees and winding paths would invite what they called “clandestine purposes.” Over the following century the park slowly filled in: a shelter for women and children in 1878, a library in 1899 that later became part of the Brooklyn Public Library, a playground in 1927, and eventually a full recreation center in 1973 that’s still there today, home to the Eubie Blake Theater.
In 1985, the park was renamed for Herbert Von King (1912 to 1985), a Virginia-born contractor and community leader some people called the “Mayor of Bedford-Stuyvesant.” Von King founded Boy Scout Troop 219 back in 1933 and spent more than fifty years serving on local school boards, police community councils, and environmental groups. The City Council renamed the park in his honor in the same year he died.
The Von King Cultural Arts Center, the building most of us walk past on Lafayette Avenue, got a $7 million renovation in 2022 that included upgrades to that same Eubie Blake Theater.
Still writing the story
Like a lot of Brooklyn, Bed-Stuy has changed quite a bit since the 2000s. Renewed interest in blocks like these has brought new investment, and with it, new pressure on longtime residents. Our block association is a small, local version of the same thing that built the Restoration Corporation decades ago: neighbors looking out for the place they live, together.
Sources: NYC Parks, Herbert Von King Park History, Wikipedia, Herbert Von King Park, Wikipedia, Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Brownstoner, Bed-Stuy Brooklyn: How the Neighborhood Got Its Name, The Cultural Landscape Foundation, Herbert Von King Park, Wikipedia, Shirley Chisholm, Wikipedia, Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation
