Crown Heights has a rich and diverse history. Though it began as farmland, it developed as a fashionable locale for the second homes of bourgeois Manhattanites. Eastern Parkway soon was studded with cultural institutions and mansions. Furthermore, the 20th century marked an influx of Jewish and later Caribbean immigration, with both communities infusing Crown Heights with new cultures and making their mark on the neighborhood.

Ludwig Nissen Mansion, 1932. Ludwig Nissen was a German immigrant and son of aristocratic German family, who arrived in New York alone and poor in 1872. He went on to find much success as a leading diamond dealer. He also was a Mason, president of a number of Brooklyn social clubs and professional associations, and served as a Civil Service Commissioner of Brooklyn. In 1904 he bought a plot of land on St. Marks Avenue which included a mansion, built in the 1870s, for sugar refining executive John G. Searles. Nissen had the original mansion razed and erected his own huge house, modeled after a palace in Potsdam, Germany. The house went through a number of owners after Nissen, including the Russian (Soviet) consulate and Abraham Shapiro, a local developer of mansion-replacing apartment houses. In the early 1970s the mansion was one of the last homes still standing on what was known as "Millionaire Row." in 1976 it was demolished for the construction of the Marcus Garvey Senior Residence.