The 12,000 Year Old History of Sunset Park

 

     Sunset Park began 12,000 years ago. We stopped the 1,000 foot high Wisconsin glacier that had been moving across North America for 100,000 years. The glacier had pushed a mountain of rocks and debris ahead of it, leaving the ridge we call 6th Ave - the highest points in Brooklyn.

 

     Our ridge gave other neighborhoods their names - Bay Ridge and Ridgewood. As the glacier began melting, millions of gallons of water rushed off and wiped out Brooklyn - laying it flat and giving us neighborhoods like Flatbush and Flatlands.

 

    The Lenni-Lenape Native Americans were here when Giovanni Verrazzano sailed into New York bay in 1524. The Dutch (1646) and the English sparsely settled Sunset Park. The first fighting in the American Revolution took place around 37th Street in 1776. As Brooklyn grew into a city, we were south of it and thus known as South (of) Brooklyn. As the Irish came in the mid-1800's, we were known as Ward 8, and had become the southern border of Brooklyn. In the last half of the 1800's, Germans & then Scandinavians came in huge numbers, followed by Italians & Poles.

 

     In 1964, Puerto Ricans joined the already small number of their countrymen and began to become the dominant population. When President Johnson declared his War on Poverty, our area needed a name to get federal funds and the name Sunset Park was applied to us for the first time.

 

     In the mid-1980's, many Asians joined us as did Mexican, Central & South Americans. Today, we stand - 140,000 individuals, of numerous cultures, but all as one family.