By the 21st century, the neighborhood's population is primarily composed of Scandinavian, Irish, Italian, Hispanics and Chinese immigrants along with swaths of predominantly white young urban professionals.

[11] When New Netherland was conveyed to the English in 1664, the latter improved the waterfront pathway in the town of Brooklyn as part of a Gowanus (Coast) Road, which ran southwest to an east–west trail called Martense's Lane, then southward to the boundary with New Utrecht.

[19][20] Sunset Park did not have its own name until the 20th century; rather, the neighborhoods in southern Brooklyn, including Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, Bensonhurst, and Bath Beach, were collectively referred to as a single area.

[b][13][21] The first major development in the region was Green-Wood Cemetery, which opened in 1840 near the boundary of South Brooklyn and Bay Ridge,[22][23][24] and quickly became popular as a tourist attraction.

[5][26] The 39th Street Ferry started traveling to the Battery Maritime Building in Manhattan in 1887, followed two years later by the opening of the Fifth Avenue elevated train line in the neighborhood.

[37] The Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote in 1893 that one could "find lands that are now vacant covered with dwellings and factories, broken and uneven and uninviting paths transformed into broad avenues lined with stores and people in them.

"[47] Two-story on basement row houses were the most common building class to be erected in modern-day Sunset Park in the 1900s and 1910s due to their wide appeal, with the majority of these being two-family homes.

[36] The Eagle said in 1901 that two-family houses were "particularly attractive to people who desire comparatively small apartments, but who object to living in flats, and they appeal to this class on account of their being more quiet, and possibly, more exclusive.

[76] A Real Estate Record and Guide article from the time said: "All along the line of the railroads there are plainly visible the result of the advertising of the contracts for the construction of the 4th av [sic] subway.

[89][92][93] The Norwegian community in Bay Ridge, the largest in the city, stretched between Fourth and Eighth Avenues south of 45th Street at its peak in World War II.

[75] Alongside tenements and apartment houses stemming from the nationally prosperous 1914–1929 era, the area was characterized by "limestones and brownstones, as well and brick and wood rowhouses".

[102] The HOLC contended that the brownstones and the newly built Sunset Park Play Center were positive attributes of the neighborhood, but that the overall rating of the area was revised downward due to its industrial uses and the high numbers of Italian immigrants east of Seventh Avenue.

While denoting the redlining-induced socioeconomic decline of the waterfront, it revealed that the uphill section was more affluent than other residential, white ethnic-dominated areas adjacent to the city's industrial and maritime economies.

However, the rapid development of Sunset Park had forestalled the emergence of upper middle class apartment houses that took root in comparable neighborhoods throughout the early 20th century; coupled with the impact of the waterfront, Sunset Park's aggregate average and median household expenditures were more analogous to the redlined working class neighborhoods that had arisen in once-affluent areas following Brooklyn's consolidation into the City of Greater New York.

The area also remained considerably poorer than adjacent districts with detached housing stock and the semi-suburban belt of south-central and southeastern Brooklyn neighborhoods primarily developed after consolidation.

[107][26] According to longtime resident and community activist Tony Giordano, the Scandinavian population coexisted with upwardly mobile Irish and Italians who had moved from less desirable parts of South Brooklyn, such as Gowanus and western Park Slope.

Most of the housing inventory in the waterfront district failed to comply with a 1961 zoning resolution that subjected 2,000 residences to "rigid prohibitions against reconstruction [...], improvements [or] certain kinds of repairs"; this rapidly hastened predatory blockbusting practices.

Major factors included the purchase of Bush Terminal by new investors in 1963[118] and its conversion into an industrial park;[119] the gradual loosening of the 1961 zoning regulations;[117] and the expansion of Lutheran Medical Center to the waterfront American Machine and Foundry factory in the 1970s.

[26] According to writer David Ment, beginning in the late 1960s, "real estate speculators often used [blockbusting] tactics to purchase homes, then obtained inflated appraisals and mortgage insurance from the [...] FHA.

"[122] The Sunset Park Redevelopment Committee, founded in 1969 to help the expansion of Lutheran Medical Center,[112] started reclaiming some of the blighted homes, though to little success at first.

[107] Author Tarry Hum stated that these residents' interest in Sunset Park row houses was "an important neighborhood amenity that … helped stem the area's decline".

In the 2000s, an influx of Fuzhou immigrants supplanted the Cantonese at a significantly faster rate than in Manhattan's Chinatown; this trend had slowed down by the end of the decade, with fewer Fuzhouese coming to Sunset Park each year.

[82] Although many row houses have shed internal architectural elements of the era, they continue to encompass a substantial swath of the residential stock between Fourth and Sixth Avenues south of 40th Street.

[167] While these houses retained their polychrome facades and other Victorian-era design flourishes (akin to the "painted ladies" of San Francisco) as late as 1940,[169] most have been clad in vinyl siding and Formstone for decades.

[5] The Brooklyn Army Terminal, a massive former warehousing complex converted into an industrial park,[184] is located west of Second Avenue between 59th and 65th Streets and is individually listed on the NRHP.

[142]: 14 The concentration of fine particulate matter, the deadliest type of air pollutant, in Sunset Park is 0.0085 milligrams per cubic metre (8.5×10−9 oz/cu ft), higher than the citywide and boroughwide averages.

[5][221] The park's elevated location offers views of New York Harbor; Manhattan; the Statue of Liberty; and, more distantly, the hills of Staten Island and the U.S. state of New Jersey.

[224] One component of the greenway is Bush Terminal Piers Park, a green space between 43rd and 50th Streets that contains a pedestrian and bike path as well as baseball and soccer fields.

[244] The Church of Our Lady of Czestochowa-St. Casimir, located nearby on 25th Street, is another Roman Catholic parish; its red-brick building was designed in 1904 by John Ryan in the Gothic style.

[292] In the aftermath of subway disruptions arising from Hurricane Sandy on October 29, 2012, SeaStreak began running a route from Rockaway Park, Queens, to Pier 11 and the East 34th Street ferry terminal.