What’s In A Name: Crow Hill by Mike Combs and Suzanne Spellen

The Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights extends roughly from Atlantic Avenue in the north to Empire Boulevard in the South, and from Washington Avenue in the west to Ralph Avenue in the east. But what many don’t know is that the neighborhood hasn’t always been called Crown Heights; in fact, up until the early part of the 20th century, the northern blocks were a part of Bedford, and much of the rest was called Crow Hill. But how did the area first become Crow Hill, and how—and why—did that name change?

Although the area was originally settled by the Lenape Native American tribe, no record of what they called it has been recorded. After the Dutch arrived, the farmers who settled on the land in the 1660s also had no formal name for what they described as “unoccupied woodland.” Parts of the neighborhood were first called Crow Hill in the 1840s, but there are three different theories about where the name came from.

The first suggests that the hills along the southern line of the neighborhood were the woody refuge to crows that pestered the farmers on the cleared parts of the land. Another links the name to the Kings County Penitentiary, whose inmates were called crows; according to this view, the name spread first to the hill on which the penitentiary was situated and from there to the entire area. According to the last theory, the “crow” in Crow Hill comes from the old racist term for African Americans—in this case those who lived in the woods along the hills.

To unravel this mystery, the internet of its day, the Brooklyn newspapers and maps of the 19th and early 20th century, provide some hints. During this time, Brooklyn was covered by at least 20 newspapers, the largest of which was the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. But it is in the Brooklyn Evening Star that we see the first reference to Crow Hill, in February of 1842. The name appears in an advertisement of a wood auction near the Remsen Farm located east of Bedford and south of Eastern Parkway. In 1843, we see an advertisement in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle for 8 acres of land for sale in Crow Hill. Other mentions of Crow Hill in the 1840s are for the most part reports of crimes in the area or whose victims or perpetrators lived here.

Crow Hill appears for the first time on a map dated 1849, entitled “Sidney’s Map of 12 Miles around New York.” The map clearly shows an area called “Crow Hill” just outside of the African American towns of Weeksville and Carrsville. The topographical markings on the map also show that this was a large geographic marker; a long, elevated bluff, rising over this part of eastern Brooklyn.

By 1848 newspapers begin to refer to the newly completed Kings County Penitentiary as Crow Hill. This marks a shift in the locus of the neighborhood to the west. Throughout the 1850s, the name Crow Hill continues to appear in crime reports and articles about the destination where the county’s wrongdoers were sent. This begins to change dramatically, however, after Manhattan’s Draft Riots of 1863, in which white men (mostly Irish), angry at being conscripted into the Union army during the Civil War, rioted and attacked African Americans. During the three days of terror, the mob killed every Black person they could catch and ran as many people as they could into the sea and into hiding.

As a result, many Black folks came to Brooklyn to escape, settling in Weeksville, Carrsville, and other small Black communities in the area. The Crow Hill name once again includes this part of Brooklyn. Their white neighbors, some of whom are living in shacks amid scrubland and goats, don’t take to the new residents, as reporting makes clear, and racist language appears more and more frequently, until finally the neighborhood is smeared as a dangerous and impoverished battleground.

By the late 1880s and 1890s, this racist hyperbole has reached fever pitch, with wealthier white residents demanding that the crime-infested area be cleared. These demands coincide with the development of the area and the expansion of Brooklyn: there is money to be made in the development of the eastern and southern territory, but not until it is cleansed of its prior inhabitants. The smaller Black communities are completely erased, and even Weeksville is nearly wiped off the map, the only surviving parts being a small segment of the Hunterfly Road and a few remaining homes and institutions.

In 1906, the Kings County Penitentiary was torn down, making room for the development, over the next decade, of Crown Street. The new residents, who range from the middle class to the extremely wealthy, want to distance themselves from the neighborhood’s reputation and rechristened it Crown Heights. The name migrated across Eastern Parkway, and originally extended north to about Sterling Place, where Crown Heights met the vast upscale neighborhood of Bedford, at the time, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Brooklyn.

The name “Crown Heights” did not cover the entire neighborhood between Empire Boulevard and Atlantic Avenue until the middle of the 20th century. This is why many Crown Heights old-timers still refer to their neighborhood as a part of Bedford Stuyvesant. The Crow Hill name, which also migrated from eastern to western Crown Heights, settled in the area west of Bedford Avenue to Washington Avenue, Eastern Parkway north to Atlantic Avenue, where it remains today. The name’s original origins and original location remain fluid to this day, but it is certain that in this migration, much of its woodsy, institutional, multiracial past has been erased.

So, which version of the Crow Hill origin story is true? The answer is, all of them, at different times and in different places. A name that sprang from the geography of the undeveloped areas of the county was later associated with the penitentiary and, still later, with refugees from the racial terrorism in Manhattan. Today’s Crow Hill neighborhood can embrace the name with pride, because no matter what its origins or locations, it is now a neighborhood of homes, businesses, houses of worship and schools. To protect the neighborhood’s history and fine architecture that many have come to love, Crow Hill deserves to be landmarked.