Atlantic Avenue and Bond Street, looking west along Atlantic, May 17, 1945.

Belgian blocks once lined the streets of New York (and still do in some small sections of DUMBO and Red Hook). Atlantic Avenue was once one of those streets.

In the 18th century the road that became Atlantic Avenue (so named between 1855 and 1870) was a private street in the Dutch settlement near to the East River. As the settlement turned into village, the road became the village's southernmost boundary.

As the City of Brooklyn grew, the street developed into a busy thoroughfare that stretched from the East River to Nassau County. In the 1830s the Long Island Railroad laid their fenced in tracks down the middle of Atlantic Avenue from Boerum Place all the way to Jamaica, on the strip of land they actually owned. (West of Boerum Place the railroad went through the Cobble Hill or Atlantic Avenue Tunnel to the waterfront.) Because most of the street was occupied by the railroad tracks, the rest remained unpaved by most accounts. The section of the LIRR line between the East River and East New York became grade level horsecar and later streetcar service after the City of Brooklyn banned steam locomotives in the late 1850s. It was likely during this transition that the pavers seen here were laid and here they remained for decades.

Once again as transportation changed, so, too, did the look of the street. In the 1950s after the discontinuation of trolley service and the removal of the trolley tracks, Atlantic Avenue was paved over smooth. It is unknown what remains of the pavers under the current asphalt of the Avenue.