Crown Heights

Residential and commercial district in the north of Brooklyn, New York City. Crown Heights is situated south of Bedford-Stuyvesant, north of East Flatbush, and west of Brownsville. It centres on Eastern Parkway, and until about 1916 was known as Crow Hill. The Brooklyn Museum, Prospect Park, and Brooklyn Botanic Garden lie immediately to the west of the district.

When it was laid out in 1866 by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux (the creators of Central Park), Eastern Parkway was the world's first such urban thoroughfare. Crown Heights was a suburb up to the 1880s, when fashionable brownstone houses were built throughout the area. Affluent residents began to leave the district after World War II, and people of Jewish and Italian descent moved in from older neighbourhoods. They were followed in the 1950s by Black residents, especially West Indians. One Jewish group, members of the Orthodox Lubavitcher Hassidic sect, remained after other Whites left; their world headquarters is on Eastern Parkway. In the 1990s, Crown Heights made the news as tension between the Black and Hassidic communities flared sporadically into violent conflict.