[2] The affluent[2] neighborhood's mixture of apartment buildings, mansions, brownstone and brick rowhouses, and the Pratt Institute and St. Joseph's College, built at various times in a number of different styles, is a great part of its charm.

The area’s European history began in the 1640s, when Dutch colonists laid tobacco plantations near Wallabout Bay.

Bedford Corners, situated just southeast of Clinton Hill, was incorporated in 1663, and the settlers (both Dutch and French Huguenot) purchased surrounding lands from the native Lenape in 1670.

After the war, the Dutch continued to build on the land, which sloped toward the East River and offered great views of the water and of Manhattan.

The area was originally devised as a rural get-away for those "determined to escape from the closeness of city life", as Walt Whitman, editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, put it in 1846.

George Washington Pine had bought up the land in the area and broke it into lots, selling them to those who wanted to lead a quiet life not too far from the conveniences of the Navy Yard.

[2] The area's development continued after Charles Pratt, an oil executive, built a mansion at 232 Clinton Avenue, which is now part of the Brooklyn campus of St. Joseph's College's.

[2] After the late 1870s, Clinton Hill was one of the stops on the Brooklyn, Flatbush and Coney Island Railway (BF&CI, now part of the Brighton subway line), an excursion line which would bring families from the neighborhood to Brighton Beach for a day of recreation, and allow them to be home "at a reasonable hour".

In addition some of the remaining mansions were converted into rooming houses in the following decades, and urban renewal, part of Robert Moses' relentless rebuilding of the city, cleared five blocks south of the Pratt Institute, destroying the brownstones there.

[15] James William Elwell built the wood-framed Italianate villa at 70 Lefferts Place that is in the Clinton Hill district.

[17] The brick building at 275 Park Avenue was built in the 1890s as a chocolate factory which produced and distributed Tootsie Rolls throughout the United States.

The last train on the Lexington Avenue line ran on October 13, 1950; dismantling of the elevated tracks began on November 1.

[4] Clinton Hill is served by NYC Ferry's Astoria route, which stops at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.