Landmarks Crow Hill

In 1877, the Brooklyn, Flatbush and Coney Island Railway was incorporated, opening the next year in 1878. It originally ran from the Prospect Park entrance at Flatbush and Ocean Avenues south to the Brighton Beach Hotel, built near the water's edge. The BF&CI wanted to find a way to get its trains closer to downtown Brooklyn. Since a route through Prospect Park was impossible in this pre-subway era, it was decided to build a tremch through the hill at Crown Heights (then known as Crow Hill) and run the line below grade, connecting with the Long Island Rail Road tracks at Atlantic Avenue.

Crow Hill was formerly a district in northeast Brooklyn that extended from the hills east of Prospect Park to East New York. According to tradition, it was named after the largest hill in the area, which was infested with crows. An article published in the Brooklyn Eagle in 1873, however, speculated that the area was named for a settlement established during the 1830s by blacks who were then colloquially known as “crows.”1 These impoverished people lived in shanties on Crow Hill, and worked in Manhattan’s meat and fish markets. In 1846 the Kings County Penitentiary was built on top of the hill, and it may be the large structure visible at the far right of Crow Hill. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts owns six of Fussell’s views of Crow Hill, four of which represent dilapidated but picturesque shanties similar to the one in Crow Hill, Shantytown. The neighborhood was gentrified during the early twentieth century and renamed Crown Heights.

CROWN HEIGHTS: Formerly called Crow Hill, and was the site of a prison. It was a quiet, sparsely populated settlement in the original Dutch town of Breukelen. Once home to Ebbet's Field, Brooklyn Dodgers from 1912 through 1957. Crow Hill was its pre-prohibition name. When it was Dutch farmland, it was believed to have been called Crow Hill after its tallest hill, whose trees were always filled with crows. Then again that name could have come from the mid-1800’s when there were African and African American settlements there, and the whites called them ‘crows’. A third story has it that the ‘crows’ were inmates in the Kings County Penitentiary that was there from 1846 to 1907.

From the (1939) WPA Guide to New York City:
Crown Heights, for the most part a lower middle-class residential area, lies on both sides of the ridge of Eastern Parkway. The section was known as Crow Hill until 1916, when Crown Street was cut through.