THREE blocks of New Utrecht Avenue are uncovered by an elevated train. When riding the buses all over southern Brooklyn as a kid, I was on the B35 one day rolling up 39th Street and passed an elevated train over 10th Avenue instead of where it “should” have been, on New Utrecht Avenue. This called for some research. I later devoted an entire FNY page to this curious uncovered section.
New Utrecht Avenue runs southeast from about the intersection of 9th Avenue and 39th Street a few miles to 86th Street just past its intersection with 18th Avenue. For most of its length the West End elevated line shadows it. For many years, B and M trains plied the line, but several years ago when repairs to the Manhattan Bridge were completed and trains began running on both sides of it again, the alphabet soup of Brooklyn subway lines was re-stirred and the B was assigned to the Brighton line, buddying up with the Q, while the D wound up on the West End. By 2010, the M was running between two termini in Queens, Continental Avenue in Forest Hills and Metropolitan Avenue in Middle Village.
New Utrecht (pronounced, in Brooklyn, at least, “YOU-trekt”) Avenue was so named because it went to the Town of New Utrecht, founded in the 1600s and one of the six towns that existed in Kings County before all were consolidated into the City of Brooklyn in 1896 and then into New York City in 1898. The town of New Utrecht was named for Utrecht, Netherlands, the 4th largest city in that country. In Dutch, “Utrecht” is derived from two words that mean “old fort,” so that “New Utrecht” literally means “New Old Fort.”
I was surprised to learn during my research that New Utrecht Avenue existed long before the railroad that ran along it and the elevated train that replaced it ever existed. The road was laid out in the 1830s after some protracted negotiations with Dutch landowners, descendants of original settlers, and attained its full length in the 1850s. It was known in its early years as the Brooklyn, Greenwood and Bath Plank Road, as it originally had a wood roadbed and stretched from the southern edge of the City of Brooklyn at Green-Wood Cemetery and ran to Bath Beach, named for the British spa town on the Avon, famous in high-school British lit classes for the Wife of Bath, the randy, frequently-married heroine featured in Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th-Century Canterbury Tales. This was a recreational area in Brooklyn too, as villas and yacht clubs clustered near the shore, until the Depression ended its run as a resort.
The railroad becomes part of the New Utrecht Avenue story in 1863, when a steam railroad built by Charles Godfrey Gunther, a former NYC mayor, was built from the entrance to Green-Wood Cemetery to Bath Beach. The line necessitated a transfer at 36th Street (just as today’s subways do from the D to the N and R) because steam railroads were forbidden in Brooklyn in that era. A horsecar line completed the run from 5th and 36th to 5th and 25th. The steam line was completed out to Coney Island in 1864, where it met the West End Hotel. After an 1885 reorganization the line became the Brooklyn, Bath and West End Railroad, was electrified by overhead catenary wire in 1893, was acquired by Brooklyn Rapid Transit in 1898, and finally, was replaced by the West End Elevated in November 1916. Unfortunately, Godfrey’s name never attached itself to subsequent iterations of his railroad the way Andrew Culver’s did to what is now the F train in Brooklyn.
While three blocks of New Utrecht Avenue are open to daylight, there is a lengthy Brooklyn Avenue completely shadowed by an el… Livonia Avenue.
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10/29/24
3 comments
When I saw the heading “NEW UTRECHT IN DAYLIGHT” and viewed the building in the photo, I momentarily believed Kevin had finally featured Brooklyn’s pinnacle of secondary education – New Utrecht High School! Alas, on closer inspection and reading, that’s not NUHS, and not Bensonhurst. Oh the humanity! What a disappointment! But, as we used to say – “Wait till next year!”
City planners may have once envisioned extending New Utrecht Avenue to Downtown. Hammond Avenue was conceived as part of the street grid in the late 1830s to run diagonally from the intersection of Atlantic Avenue and Smith Street, crossing Prospect Avenue at Fifth and ending at Green-Wood Cemetery around 7th Avenue in the 20s. This almost anticipated that permission would be granted at some point to construct a road across the cemetery. That permission never came, nor was it apparently ever discussed, and in 1846 Hammond Avenue was demapped without ever having been built. Brooklyn property owners at the time did not care for diagonal streets as it made for odd-shaped lots when subdivided, so that may have had something to do with it.
Hammond Avenue had been named for Alonzo G. Hammond, along with Isaiah Tiffany and Samuel Cheever one of the three Commissioners appointed by the New York State Legislature to “lay out Streets, Avenues and Squares in the City of Brooklyn.”
The Dutch pronunciation would be something like “oo-tre[ch]t,” the “ch” being like “Lo[ch] Lomond” or “[Ch]anukah”