In February 1960 a wrecking ball painted like a baseball tore down Ebbets Field, just east of Flatbush Avenue. In October 1965 President Lyndon Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Immigration Act at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. Between those two dates is one of the strangest and most successful neighborhood rebuilds in the history of New York City: Flatbush, Brooklyn, which was 89% white in 1970 and became by 1980 the largest concentration of Caribbean families anywhere outside the West Indies. This documentary is the full story of how that happened, from the 1651 Dutch farming village to the world’s first officially designated Little Caribbean, and the ironic pressure that Caribbean Flatbush’s own success is creating today.
We trace the founding of the Flatbush Dutch Reformed Church congregation in 1654, the chartering of Erasmus Hall Academy in 1786 by investors that included Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field, Loew’s Kings Theatre on Flatbush Avenue, and Eleanor Roosevelt opening the first Sears Roebuck department store in New York City on Beverley Road in November 1932. Then the pivot: the Dodgers’ 1957 departure for Los Angeles, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, and the arrival of families from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Haiti, Guyana, Barbados, Grenada, Panama, St. Vincent, and beyond.
The documentary covers the founding of the West Indian American Day Carnival Association by Carlos Lezama in 1967, the political ascent of Shirley Chisholm, Una Clarke, and Yvette Clarke, the reggae and dancehall era that made Brooklyn “Jamaica’s 15th Parish,” Buju Banton’s 1992 show at the Biltmore Ballroom on Church Avenue, the designation of Little Caribbean in 2017 and Little Haiti in 2018, the co-namings of Bob Marley Boulevard, Toussaint L’Ouverture Boulevard, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines Boulevard, and the MTA’s 2021 renaming of the Newkirk Avenue subway station to Newkirk Avenue-Little Haiti. Long-running Caribbean businesses named include Allan’s Bakery (1961), the African Record Centre (1969), Conrad’s Famous Bakery (1981), Scoops (1984), and Labay Market.
The final chapters examine the pressures on Caribbean Flatbush today: Brooklyn’s loss of nearly 70,000 Black residents between 2010 and 2020, Flatbush two-bedroom rents rising from about $2,200 to $3,500, the 2021 closure of the landmarked Sears on Beverley Road, the $95 million restoration and 2015 reopening of Kings Theatre, Time Out’s ranking of Flatbush as the world’s 17th-coolest neighborhood in 2024, the work of Equality for Flatbush and the Flatbush African Burial Ground Coalition, and the stepping-stone migration paths from Flatbush to Cambria Heights, Elmont, Rockland County, Broward County, and Miami-Dade.
Sources and further reaidng:
Vital City NYC, “The Evolution of Flatbush” by John Mollenkopf
Wikipedia: Little Caribbean, Brooklyn
Wikipedia: Flatbush, Brooklyn
Wikipedia: Kings Theatre (Brooklyn)
Wikipedia: Ebbets Field
Wikipedia: Sears Roebuck Department Store, Brooklyn
Wikipedia: Shirley Chisholm
Wikipedia: Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965
WIADCA official history
BK Magazine, “Walshy Fire’s Art of Dancehall”
HUD USER, Flatbush and Midwood housing data
Mapping Inequality, University of Richmond
Time Out, Coolest Neighborhoods in the World 2024
