Brooklyn Wonders, Part 1: Hunterfly Road Houses

New York City is full of world class sights, landmarks, and vistas. That's water under one of the many bridges (George Washington, Williamsburg, Manhattan, Brooklyn, RFK). But, once in a while, you'll be able to find something or somewhere that has much history outside of Manhattan, and I'm trying to highlight some of those here, starting with this post.

When the Dutch arrived in 1634, there were already roads cut into the ground all over the wooded hilly landscape that made up what they called Breukelen, or occasionally called Canarsee (which is still a name of a neighborhood) after the native Lenape people. The Lenape were the road builders, and eventually, the Dutch set stone pavers down on the roads to make it easier to get supplies to the disparate communities. The two surviving roads that are still in the same orientation to themselves, and generally at odds with the surrounding street grids that popped up after British and American development, are Clove Road and Hunterfly Road.

Here's a picture of Clove Road, the only (I doubt this, as I've studied aerial shots and think I've found another spot where Clove Road may still exist as a walkway through a parking area) remaining section of the street still in use by automobiles. You can see the pavers that Dutch laid more than 300 years ago (they had been blacktopped in the '30s, but the asphalt has since eroded).

The next remaining Lenape road is known as Hunterfly Road. Clove Road essentially was a way through the woods (Brooklyn was a mountain wilderness before the British showed up) from the East River, today what would be looking directly at the Statue of Liberty, basically headed east, out into the communities that lived on Long Island. Hunterfly Road was a north-south road, connecting what today is Queens and Long Island Sound to the beach resort of Far Rockaway, on the Jamaica Bay, near what today is JFK airport. On a quick random side note: taking the subway from our apartment in BK away from Manhattan, in thirty minutes you'll end up in Far Rockaway, a teeny beach community that looks like Pismo Beach mixed with the town from the movie Jaws, and you'll technically still be in New York City. Incidentally, where we live, in Bed-Stuy, originally was a community called Bedford Corners, established in 1659, that grew up around the intersection of Clove and Hunterfly.

In any case, when New York State abolished slavery in 1827, a free-black community sprung up in the late 1830s, built around the only place the white community didn't care too much about, some backwater area along the old Indian Hunterfly Road. Eventually Weeksville, taking its name from James Weeks, a freed slave who bought the parcel of land from another freed slave, became a fully functioning, fully insular free black community. They had schools, hospitals, elder care, law and order organizations, markets, and around fifteen thousand people. This community existed about a mile south of where we live today. The Hunterfly Road Houses are still standing, a few different homes from different time periods, built up one after a another, each under a new generation. 

Tours are free if you're a student or if you live within a mile. I've gone around and asked some of the kids we know if they've heard of Weeksville, and the history of the area...I'd like to take it upon myself to do some guerilla educating around these parts.