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Drawing of the Lefferts family's Flatbush homestead
Flatbush is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. The neighborhood consists of several subsections in central Brooklyn and is generally bounded by Prospect Park to the north, East Flatbush to the east, Midwood to the south, and Kensington and Parkville (which were characterized throughout much of the 20th century as subsections of Flatbush) to the west. The neighborhood had a population of 105,804 as of the 2010 United States Census. The modern neighborhood includes or borders several institutions of note, including Brooklyn College.
Flatbush was originally chartered as the Dutch Nieuw Nederland colony town of Midwout (or Midwoud or Medwoud). The town's former border runs through what is now Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Before it was incorporated into the City of Brooklyn in 1894, Flatbush described both the Town of Flatbush, incorporating a large swath of central Kings County extending east to the Queens County border, and the Village of Flatbush, formerly the heart of the current community. The neighborhood was consolidated into the City of Greater New York in 1898 and was connected to the rest of the city with the development of the New York City Subway in the early 20th century. During the 1970s and early 1980s, Flatbush experienced a shift in demographics due to white flight.
~• as pictured on google maps
History
From “An American Family Grows in Brooklyn”
Brooklyn’s Dutch Frontier
“We … rode on to the Vlacke Bos, a village situated about an hour and a half’s distance … This village seems to have better farms than the bay, and yields full as much revenue. Riding through it, we came to the woods and the hills, which are very stony and uncomfortable to ride over.”
– Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, a Labadist minister visiting New York and its environs, 1679
When Pieter Janse Hagewout and his family settled in Flatbush in 1661, it was known as Midwout or Vlack Bos. The heavily forested area lay several miles from New Amsterdam, the small port city on the tip of Manhattan that was the center of the Dutch colony of New Netherland. Europeans, primarily the Dutch, had inhabited the region since the 1630s. By 1652, Peter Stuyvesant, Director-General of New Netherland, granted Midwout a town charter.
Peter Stuyvesant deed conveying land to Adriaen Hegeman, April 12, 1661; Lefferts family papers, ARC.145, box OS1; Brooklyn Historical Society.
This 1661 deed, signed by Peter Stuyvesant, Director-General of New Netherlands, conveyed a plot of land in the village of Vlack Bos (Flatbush) to Adriaen Hegeman, an early Dutch settler. In 1784, Peter Lefferts (1753-1791) married Femmetie Hegeman (1760-1847), an ancestor of Adriaen. After their marriage, Peter arranged to purchase 100 acres of the original Hegeman plot, thus enlarging the Lefferts family’s Flatbush homestead. After this transaction, the original deed passed into the hands of the Lefferts family.
In the seventeenth century, Midwout was little more than a frontier outpost, home to a few industrious Dutch farmers and their families. These settlers took advantage of the available and fertile land on Long Island, or Sewanhacka as it was called by the Lenape Indians. Some early residents, including Pieter Janse Hagewout, obtained their land via land deeds from Peter Stuyvesant himself. Yet only a small number of families chose to make their homes on New Amsterdam’s frontier. In 1696, less than 500 people lived in Flatbush.
During the seventeenth century, Dutch families like the Leffertses, the Hegemans, the Cortelyous, and the Vanderveers lived uneasily with the Canarsee Indians who had occupied Sewanhacka long before European settlement. Between the 1630s and the 1680s, European settlers purchased land from Native American tribes throughout present-day Brooklyn. By the 1680s, the Dutch had bought all of Kings County. Violent skirmishes over contested lands pitted Dutch settlers against native tribes – and competing tribes against each other – throughout the seventeenth century. Some Native Americans were taken as slaves and sold off to Dutch outposts in the Caribbean. Regular smallpox outbreaks further decimated the Canarsee population. By the eighteenth century, most remaining Native Americans migrated further east on Long Island, or moved westward into the Delaware River valley and beyond.
Early Settlers
- In 1661, Dutch immigrant Pieter Janse Hagewout purchased a farm in the town of Midwout, later called Flatbush, on Long Island. Pieter’s son, Leffert Pieterse, would give this pioneering family their now-iconic surname. These men were the first of many generations of Leffertses to call Kings County, the present-day borough of Brooklyn, home.
Notable residents
Notable residents listed at Wikipedia include:
- 22Gz (born 1997), Brooklyn drill rapper
- Michael Badalucco (born 1954), actor
- Joseph Barbera (1911–2006), animator
- John Boardman (born 1932), professor emeritus of physics, Brooklyn College; science fiction fan, author and fanzine publisher; and gaming authority
- Dane Clark (1912–1998), actor
- Roz Chast (born 1954), cartoonist for The New Yorker
- Al Davis (1929–2011), owner and general manager of the Oakland Raiders
- Neil Diamond (born 1941), singer
- David Draiman (born 1973), vocalist for Disturbed
- Da Bush Babees
- Cella Dwellas
- East Flatbush Project
- Richard Fariña (1937-1966), folksinger, novelist and poet
- Patrick Fitzgerald (born 1960), attorney
- Fu-Schnickens
- Full Force
- Sol Forman (1903–2001), restaurateur, owner of Peter Luger Steak House
- Flatbush Zombies
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933–2020), United States Supreme Court Justice
- Sidney "Sid" Gordon (1917–1975), Major League Baseball All-Star player
- Sonia Greene (1883–1972), pulp fiction writer and amateur publisher
- Susan Hayward (1917–1975), actress
- Leona Helmsley (1920–2007), businesswoman who was known for her flamboyant personality and her reputation for tyrannical behavior
- Hurricane G, rapper
- John Jea (1773–unknown) writer best known for his autobiography describing his time in slavery in Flatbush
- Jidenna (born 1985), rapper
- Joey Badass (born 1995), rapper, singer, songwriter, record producer and actor
- JPEGMafia (born 1989), rapper and record producer
- Eric Kaplan (born 1971), television writer and producer
- Alvin Klein (c. 1938–2009), theater critic for The New York Times
- Talib Kweli (born 1975), rapper, entrepreneur and activist
- Jackie Loughery (born 1930), actress and beauty pageant titleholder who was crowned Miss USA 1952
- Norman Mailer (1923-2007), novelist
- David Mathews, lawyer and politician
- Jimmy McMillan (born 1946), political activist and perennial candidate
- Joe Paterno (1926-2012), football coach
- JTG
- Rampage
- Red Cafe
- Busta Rhymes
- Chubb Rock
- Rowdy Rebel
- Dmitry Salita, professional boxer
- Bernie Sanders, politician and activist; United States senator from Vermont
- Shaggy
- Mimi Sheraton (born Miriam Solomon; 1926), food critic and writer
- Bobby Shmurda (born 1994), rapper
- Special Ed (born 1972), rapper
- Richard Sheirer
- Michael Showalter (born 1970), comedian, actor, director, writer, and producer
- Shyne
- Peter Steele
- Capital Steez
- Barbra Streisand (born 1942), singer and actress
- Bruce Sudano
- Paul Sylbert (1928-2016), production designer, art director and set designer
- The Underachievers
- Don Vultaggio, billionaire co-founder of Arizona Beverage Company
- Devin Wenig (born 1966), business executive, president and CEO of eBay, CEO of Thomson Reuters Markets
- Michael K. Williams, actor
- Angela Yee, radio personality
- Sheff G, Brooklyn drill rapper (born 1998)
References
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatbush,_Brooklyn
- https://lefferts.brooklynhistory.org/introduction/
- Gertrude Lefferts Vanderbilt dedicated her 1881 book, The Social History of Flatbush, to Kings County's Dutch settlers. < GoogleBooks >