History of Bedford-Stuyvesant

Bridge Street Development Corporation serves Central Brooklyn, primarily the Bedford-Stuyvesant community. The community is densely populated, predominantly by African-American and Latino families.

Bedford-Stuyvesant was settled by the Dutch in the 1600s. The Dutch West India Company purchased the land from the Canarsee Indians in the 1630s and named the area Bedford, the first major settlement east of the Village of Brooklyn. In 1677, the town of Stuyvesant was formed and named for Peter Stuyvesant, the last governor of the Dutch colony of New Netherland. To learn more about the history of Bedford-Stuyvesant, click here.

Since the early 1800s, Bedford-Stuyvesant has been an African-American cultural center. In 1838—just 11 years after slavery was abolished in New York State—James Weeks, a former slave, purchased land in Bedford to establish the community of Weeksville, one of the oldest free black communities in the U.S. (In fact, Weeks purchased the land from Henry C. Thompson, a trustee of the same AWME church that would be named the Bridge Street AWME Church in 1854.) Much of Weeksville has been preserved as a historical site by the Weeksville Heritage Center.