Flatbush

District in south-central Brooklyn, New York City. Part of the city (later borough) of Brooklyn since 1894, Flatbush is now a socially and ethnically mixed area. Flatbush Avenue, which runs through its centre, is one of Brooklyn's main thoroughfares, extending from the Manhattan Bridge on the East River southeast to the Marine Parkway Bridge at Rockaway Inlet, a distance of over 16 km/10 mi.

The district's name refers to the almost perfectly flat glacial plain that was formed in the last Ice Age in front of the terminal moraine where the higher districts of northern Brooklyn (e.g. Bay Ridge, Crown Heights) now stand. Settled by the Dutch in the 1630s, the area was part of Midwood before its establishment in its own right as ‘'t Vlacke Bos’ (the Wooded Plain) in 1652. New Lots separated from Flatbush in 1852, railway construction brought considerable growth to the area in the 1880s, and by 1900 it had become an affluent suburb. The extension of the city subway in the 1920s attracted residents from older neighbourhoods, and a largely Jewish lower-middle-class community developed here. Nowadays, East Flatbush, which lies to the south of Crown Heights, is home to a large Caribbean community, with newer Asian immigrants moving in since the 1980s. Some social tensions have been evident. In central Flatbush, Erasmus Hall Academy (founded 1786; a public high school since 1896), has a diverse list of famous alumni, including the US politician Alexander Hamilton and the US singer and actor Barbra Streisand.