Sunset Park, Brooklyn
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- Sunset Park is also a 1996 American film.
Sunset Park is a diverse, working-class neighborhood in the South Brooklyn section of Brooklyn, New York. The neighborhood is located south of Park Slope and Windsor Terrace, separated by Green-Wood Cemetery, while 65th Street and the Gowanus Expressway mark the end of the community before Bay Ridge to the south. The community extends westward from Borough Park, all the way to the piers of Brooklyn's waterfront and the Brooklyn Army Terminal.
There is a namesake city park within the neighborhood, located at 43rd Street and 5th Avenue, which is one the highest points in Brooklyn. The hillish terrain of the park affords visitors magnificent views of Downtown Brooklyn and the Brooklyn Bridge, Lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty, Staten Island, and New Jersey beyond. The "main drag" of the neighborhood lies along 5th Avenue, while the New York City Subway serves the region on the BMT Fourth Avenue Line and is home to the Jackie Gleason Bus Depot.
Brief history and overview
In the heyday of the New York Harbor's dominance of North American shipping during the 19th Century, Sunset Park grew rapidly, largely as a result of Irish, Polish, and Norwegian immigrant families moving to the area. The neighborhood grew up around the Bush Terminal, a model industrial park completed in 1895, and continued to grow through World War II, when the Brooklyn Army Terminal employed more than 10,000 civilians to ship 80% of all American supplies and troops.
After the war, with the rise of truck-based freight shipping, the growth of suburban sprawl and ports in New Jersey, the closing of the Army Terminal, and the decreasing importance of heavy industry in the American northeast, Sunset Park's fortunes began to decline. Families which had lived in the community for decades began moving out, and the homes in the neighborhood — largely modest but attractive rowhouses — lost value. The construction of the Gowanus Expressway in 1941 effectively cut the neighborhood off from the harbor, which further wounded the area, in a fashion often associated with the expressway's builder: power-broker Robert Moses.
Sunset Park's second age began with a wave of immigration from Puerto Rico, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic, as well as other Latin American countries. By 1990, Hispanics comprised 50% of Sunset Park's population, rehabilitating property values and developing a thriving community. More recently, the neighborhood has attracted many East Asian immigrants, centered on an area now known as "Brooklyn Chinatown", along 8th Avenue from 42nd to 62nd Street, where the city's third-largest Chinese community can be found.
The 2000 Census for Sunset Park shows that there were 120,441 people living in the neighborhood, 27% of residents were children (0-17 years), 65% were adults (18-64 years), and 9% were senior citizens (65 or older). This shows that people in Sunset Park are slightly younger than the New York City average. Roughly 53% of residents were Hispanic, 23% were "white" or Caucasian, 17% were Asian, 4% were "black" or African-American.
See also
External links
- Sunset Park A New Perspective (http://web.honorscollege.cuny.edu/student-projects/2005/neighborhoods/14/) from CUNY Baruch College