Brighton Beach
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Brighton Beach is a community on Coney Island in the borough of Brooklyn in New York City.
It is bounded by Coney Island at Ocean Parkway to the west, affluent, but non-gated Manhattan Beach at Corbin Place to the east, Gravesend at Neptune Avenue to the north (at the Belt Parkway), and the Atlantic Ocean to the south (at the Riegelmann Boardwalk/beachfront)[1].
Brighton Beach was developed by William A. Engeman as a beach resort in 1868, and was named in 1878 by Henry C. Murphy and a group of businessmen in a 1878 contest[1] ; the winning name evoked the resort of Brighton, England. The centerpiece of the resort was the large Hotel Brighton or Brighton Beach Hotel, placed on the beach at what is now the foot of Coney Island Avenue and accessed by the Brooklyn, Flatbush, and Coney Island Railway, later known as the BMT Brighton Line, which opened on July 2, 1878.
Brighton Beach was redeveloped as a fairly dense residential community with the final rebuilding of the Brighton Beach railway into a modern rapid transit line of the New York City Subway system c. 1920. The area has a large community of Jewish (and non-Jewish) immigrants who left what was the Soviet Union in the 1980s and 1990s. However, living in the Soviet Union has made them in many ways culturally distinct from the Jewish immigrants that moved to the neighborhood decades earlier from Tsarist Russia. The recent influx of Soviet culture has resulted in recent émigrés being more culturally similar to Russians and Ukrainians than to the earlier Jewish immigrants. Some of the newer Jewish emigres are married to Russian or Ukrainian Christians, and non-Jewish surnames abound. Brighton Beach was dubbed "Little Odessa" by the local populace long ago due to many of its residents having come from Odessa. It is or was reportedly the home of the Russian Mafia in the United States. In 2006, Alec Brook-Krasny was elected to the New York State Assembly, the first elected Soviet-born Jewish politician from Brighton Beach.
Brighton Beach is also home to many other ethnic groups such as immigrants from Pakistan. On Brighton 7th Street and Neptune Avenue, there is a mosque where Muslims (mostly from Pakistan and Bangladesh) pray. There is another mosque located between Brighton 8th Street and Banner Avenue. Brighton Beach is also home to people of Mexican and other Latino descent. There are numerous Polish and Georgian residents, but relatively few Italian-Americans or African-Americans remaining. There are some Korean markets also, but for the most part their owners do not reside in the neighborhood. Notable past residents include CNN anchor Larry King and current General Bancorp President Adnan Mohammad.
Brighton Beach is replete with restaurants, food stores, cafes, boutiques, banks, etc. The community, with an estimated population of 350,000 (mostly from Russia & Ukraine), has a distinctively ethnic feel – akin to Manhattan's Chinatown. The proximity of Brighton Beach to the city's beaches (the street runs parallel to the Coney Island beach area and the Boardwalk) and the fact that the street is located right under the Brighton Beach Avenue subway station, makes it a popular summer weekend destination for thousands of NYC residents.
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[edit] The Beach
The beach at Brighton Beach provides a much cleaner and quieter alternative to nearby Coney Island. Unlike other beaches in New York City, in recent years, ever increasing number of women at the beach are starting to sunbathe topless.
[edit] Education
Brighton Beach, like all of New York City, is served by the New York City Department of Education. Affluent Manhattan Beach, New York is zoned to PS 225 The Eileen E. Zaglin School for grades K-8, as well as PS 100 located on Brighton Beach and West 3rd for grades K-5 and P.S. 253 The Magnet School of Multicultural Humanities.
Nearby high schools include:
- Rachel Carson's School of Coastal Studies
- John Dewey High School
- The Leon M. Goldstein High School for the Sciences
- William E. Grady Vocational High School
- Abraham Lincoln High School
[edit] The Fifties
The early 1950s and onward into the 1960s were years sandwiched between the end of second world war and what was about to become the generation that would grow into Viet Nam veterans and their families. The 1950s brought with it, a town comprised mostly of second generation children, born of concentration camp survivors who had lost their husbands, wives and first born to Hitler's concentration camps. Everywhere were the signs of the "refugees" who had fled, with numbers on their forearms, making their home in a small and welcoming town near Coney Island. The generation brought forth a well educated and industrious group of baby boomers, born into freedom and only by their parents memories, would recognize oppression and antisemitism in their own time. These were the years filled with the odd and quirky stores that so embellished the little neighborhood seaside resort. There was the "Forty Thieves" store, so dubbed because their owners were not quite honest nor reliable. "Mrs Stahl's," a knish establishment acclaimed as having the best kasha and cherry cheese knishes,as well as "Diamond's", a store owned by Neil Diamond's parents. In addition, was "Irving's Deli" and "New Deal" Chinese cuisine, which were both neighborhood establishments. The summer would bring with it a host of travelling subway riders, determined to find their best bites and delectables that Brighton Beach could provide on their way to the ocean billowing out towards Coney Island.
[edit] References
- ^ a b Kenneth T. Jackson: The Encyclopedia of New York City: The New York Historical Society; Yale University Press; 1995. P.139-140.
