[nygirl1]

Now we head north into the section of Bushwick


Bushwick is a large neighborhood in the northern section of Brooklyn, today it is the boroughs center for Latin American life. The neighborhood sits under the elevated line served by the L, J, M lines and used to be a streetcar suburb when Brooklyn was an independent city. The neighborhood had long been settled by planters growing everything from tobacco to cabbage. It grew as an industrial neighborhood taking on many German and Scandanavian immigrants throughout the 19th century. The neighborhood became the city of Brooklyn’s largest German dominated region and was dubbed
“Brewers Row” as it developed into a major brewing district. The neighborhood became very affluent, it continued to take on immigrants but the area quickly adapted and conformed. Mansions were built by those who made their wealth off of the Brewing industry and in the 19th century the neighborhood also developed a sizeable theater district. Around the 1920’s Italians replaced Germans as the dominant culture. Middle class African Americans began moving into the industrial neighborhood by the 1950’s. This decade also saw some of the largest arrivals of Puerto Rican migration and many came to settle in Bushwick. The brewery companies by this time were already starting to move out of the neighborhood for factories elsewhere. Bushwick suffered the same fate East New York suffered-white flight-loss of industry-rapid shift in demographics-unemployment-poverty-crime. The neighborhood deteriorated rapidly and experienced rioting, looting and arsons during the black out of 1977. Townhouses and apartment buildings were burned down, businesses were looted and destroyed. The riots left Bushwick with a huge loss in business and dwellings. This once thriving Industrial Brooklyn power house deteriorated into a bombed out breeding ground for crime. The area remained that way for quite some time. In the earliest years of the 21st Century the Bushwick Initiative was introduced and redevelopment and restoration helped bring the community back from the dead. Crime steadily reduced and business came back. The neighborhood, today home to large Dominican and Puerto Rican communities is a success story.