Bedford-Stuyvesant

Northern section of the borough of Brooklyn, New York City. After Chicago's South Side, it is regarded as the second largest Black community in the USA. Bedford is in the north and west of the district (bordering Clinton Hill, Williamsburg, and Bushwick), while Stuyvesant Heights is in the south and east (bordering Bushwick and Crown Heights). Bedford-Stuyvesant was once notorious as a slum ghetto, but urban regeneration has helped restore it as a middle-class and working-class community.

During the Dutch administration of New York (New Amsterdam), Bedford was a farming community. Later, as Brooklyn grew after the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, it expanded northeast. Stuyvesant Heights developed as an upper-middle-class community in the 1890s. The district's combined name was first used in the early 1930s. At the time, Bedford was the focus of extensive Black immigration, while Stuyvesant Heights remained a White enclave. By the 1950s the joint neighbourhood was badly run-down, but in the 1960s restoration efforts began, bringing manufacturing and commercial enterprises back into the area. However, some pockets of serious poverty still remain here, in the slum areas of the northeast. Churches, such as Concord Baptist Church, which boasts the largest Black congregation in the country (12,000), play a vital role in the cohesion of Bedford-Stuyvesant's community.