Kensington, Brooklyn
[4] These efforts also encompassed Brooklyn Real Estate Exchange President Jeremiah Johnson, Jr.'s circa 1891 Kensington Heights[5] and circa 1894 Kensington-in-Flatbush developments, the former in the vicinity of Ditmas Avenue and the latter possibly in the vicinity of Church Avenue; detached suburban villas on and adjoining Ocean Parkway that attracted wealthier residents from more urbanized areas, including Brooklyn Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick; hybrid commercial/walk-up apartment structures on commercial thoroughfares; and a variety of limestone- and brick-fronted townhouse rows.
As the area was gradually rezoned amid the construction of the IND Brooklyn Line, six-story elevator apartment houses[6] became increasingly prevalent on upper Ocean Parkway and in its periphery between the late 1920s and 1941, replacing many of the suburban villas.
[21] A 1945 fifteen-year retrospective study of Brooklyn Protestantism by the Committee for Cooperative Field Research included the Kensington tracts between the historical villages of Windsor Terrace and Parkville (alternatively characterized as the "Ocean Parkway corridor") within the boundaries of Flatbush, also noting that a contemporaneous survey of 3,072 families indicated that 41% of residents identified as Roman Catholic (exemplified by a recent influx of second and third-generation Italian Americans from South Brooklyn and other northern neighborhoods), 33% as Jewish (primarily concentrated in apartment houses on "main traffic ways") and 26% as Protestant, with the latter population remaining concentrated in "private dwellings on the side streets" amid an ongoing decline.
[22] In his 2015 memoir, musician Marky Ramone (who resided at 640 Ditmas Avenue throughout much of his childhood in the 1960s) noted the area's distance from major thoroughfares in eastern Flatbush, necessitating a two-fare public transit zone via bus to Erasmus Hall High School.
[23] Beginning in the 1950s, demographic shifts in eastern Flatbush — exemplified by white flight among the Jewish American community and the concomitant emergence of an Afro-Caribbean immigrant community in the vicinity of Flatbush Avenue — would contrast with comparative stability in the Kensington tracts, notwithstanding the effects of a decade-long population decline[24] likely stemming from a variety of factors, including the beginning of post-Levittown mass suburbanization and the broader amelioration of New York City's postwar housing shortage.
In 1956, the closure and ensuing "bustitution" of the Church Avenue streetcar line irrevocably altered a longstanding facet of the neighborhood's public transit landscape.
[28] Similarly, Gilbert Tauber and Samuel Kaplan asserted that southern Windsor Terrace, the traditional Kensington tracts and western Midwood constituted the sprawling neighborhood of "Kensington-Ocean Parkway" in The New York City Handbook, first published by Doubleday in 1966.
[31] In April 1973, Brooklyn Borough President Sebastian Leone said that planned renovations of upper Ocean Parkway (along with a smaller portion in contemporary Midwood) "[would] be an asset to the Flatbush community.
"[32] Brooklyn-born sports journalist Stan Fischler also identified the IND Church Avenue station as being located in Flatbush in Uptown, Downtown, his 1976 history of the New York City subway system.
[33] Reflecting this transitional milieu, the area surrounding a March 1977 gas station shootout at 417 Dahill Road was alternatively characterized as being part of Borough Park (by reporters Thomas Raftery and Paul Meskil) and as a "worn section of Flatbush" (by columnist Pete Hamill) on the same page of the New York Daily News.
Most of the area's long-endangered mainline Protestant churches (including the historically prominent Prospect Park Baptist Church[35]) were forced to close due to a lack of parishioners, while the area's deeply-rooted Irish American community continued to be supplanted by new waves of upwardly mobile Italian Americans moving out from less desirable sections of central and northern Brooklyn, paralleling developments in nearby Sunset Park.
Another resident who recently moved to Ocean Parkway cited the area's perceived isolation from eastern Flatbush, by now a predominantly Caribbean American community, as his impetus for relocation: "I'm a bigot.
"[37] By the early 1980s, the Kensington designation was rapidly adopted by real estate interests as these tenants (who often identified as Flatbush residents) began to die or retire elsewhere, leading to a greater awareness of the name through a surfeit of advertising.
[40] Nevertheless, City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center sociologist William B. Helmreich included Kensington within the boundaries of Flatbush (while acknowledging its unique demographic mix and comparatively downscale architectural profile) in The Brooklyn Nobody Knows (2016).
[43] Kensington is a very ethnically diverse neighborhood, consisting of South Asian (Bangladeshi and Pakistani), Orthodox Jewish (Hasidic), Uzbek, Latin American, Polish, and Ukrainian communities.
[52][53] The New York City Subway's IND Culver Line (F,
