Kings Highway (Brooklyn)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kings Highway is a Business Improvement District that runs through the New York City borough of Brooklyn. The street has over 100 stores and shops.
The road begins at Bay Parkway. After intersecting with Ocean Avenue the street becomes mostly residential, snaking through Brooklyn and ending at East 98th Street.
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[edit] History
Kings Highway was a pre-Columbian trail that may have led to a Native American holy site.
Originally, Kings Highway was much longer than it is now. It originally began at Fulton Ferry, where Old Fulton and Furman Streets are now, and ran southeast all the way to the small Dutch town of New Amersfort, now known as Flatlands. It took a sharp westward turn at that point and swept into another of Brooklyn's original six towns, New Utrecht, and on into Yellow Hook (Bay Ridge), ending at Denyse's Ferry, operated by a colonial-era landowner, about where Shore Road and 79th Street are now.
The British General Lord Cornwallis traveled along it with his troops on August 26, 1776, to the Battle of Brooklyn, a major defeat for the Continental Army in the American Revolutionary War. When President George Washington came to survey the agricultural abilities of Kings, Queens, and Suffolk Counties in 1792, he traveled down this rural road. Gradually, attractive homesteads started to line the road as farmers moved into the area.
Though the road was the major highway running through the towns of Brooklyn, Flatbush, Flatlands, Brooklyn, Gravesend and New Utrecht, it did not have a commonly used name until the nineteenth century. It was often referred to simply as “lane” or “road,” followed by a short description. Thus it would be described as “the lane between Gravesend and New Utrecht.” It also took on local names in each town, such as “Gravesend Lane” and “Ferry Road.” The name “Kings Highway” was a common reference to public highways during colonial times, and has been employed for other roads around New York in no way connected with the present Kings Highway.
Despite its long history and importance as a connection through the borough of Brooklyn, there was a plan in the early 1920s to have the street demapped as part of an effort to regularize the street grid. Instead, they widened it in 1922, created the malls, and altered its route one more time, straightening as many sections as possible.
Following the example of the parkways designed by Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), who created Eastern and Ocean Parkways, the malls used trees to separate local and through traffic along the street. Unlike Olmsted’s parkways, however, the Kings Highway Malls are much narrower and do not provide the leisurely promenades that characterize Olmsted’s work.
[edit] Kings Highway Today
Kings Highway west of Bedford Avenue is mainly populated by immigrants from former Soviet Union.
The major problems with Kings Highway are as follows:
- Zig-zags all over Brooklyn, with multiple service lanes, making driving in an unfamiliar area close to Kings Highway frustrating and unproductive.
- Unnaturally large and wide street is a haven for noisy and pollutant city bus routes.
The major advantages of Kings Highway are as follows:
- Bus lines (B82 and B7) run almost entirely through the long street of Kings Highway.
- Various stores ranging from "chic" boutiques to discounted stores are located along the street between East 10th street and East 19th street.
- Restaurants and small cafés offering various styles like Fast Food, Russian, Mexican, Chinese, Mediterranean, Israeli, Turkish, etc.
The street is served by three New York City Subway Lines:
- BMT Sea Beach Line (N), at West 8th Street
- BMT Culver Line (F), at McDonald Ave.
- BMT Brighton Line (B, Q), at East 16th Street
