Built in 1824, the New Lots Reformed Church and Cemetery was one of the first community buildings in the area. Back then the surrounding land was used mostly for farming, William Suydam began parcelling the land for sale, but it quickly became clear that it was undesirable and he was forced to sell to Charles S. Brown.

Brown, dubbing the land "Brownsville," was a better salesman, and found buyers in the Jews of the Lower East Side. Marketing the land and the space of the then pastoral Brownsville, it proved an enticing alternative to the slums of the Lower East Side.

Brown's advertising took hold and migration from the Lower East Side caused Brownsville to be mostly Jewish until the later half of the 20th Century. Its distance from Manhattan meant that it didn't attract the rich, but Brownsville steadily grew. Motivated by a desire to escape labor unions, Elias Kaplan built his factory there, housing for his workforce, and Brownsvilles first synagogue: Ohev Sholom (pictured here in a later building.) Others soon followed suit, building more factories and along with them housing.

The housing that was fairly utilitarian. Mostly wooden, two-family residences, the houses often lacked running water or plumbing of any sort. As the housing became overcrowded, it began to resemble the Lower East Side slums that most residents had hoped to escape. New houses were built, but these brick buildings tended to tenement housing. Indeed, by 1910, only one in twenty-five housing units wasn't a tenement.

Moreover, there was little green space in early 20th century Brownsville, with the Betsy Head Memorial Park providing the only recreation area.

The neighborhood began to develop dueling reputations. On one side, it was known as a politically active and upwardly mobile neighborhood of the city, entrenched in religious life (it was one of the densest populations of Jews in America.) On the other, it was the home of Murder Incorporated and other violent street gangs.

However, the demographics were changing. Brownsville had always been an immigrant neighborhood, indeed the vast majority of people in the depression years were first-generation Americans. But its factories and the promise of work had begun to draw a large population of African-Americans from Jim Crowe and newly arrived Latinos.

In the mid-century, the face of the neighborhood was radically altered. Notorious urban planner, Robert Moses pushed the city to build housing projects in Brownsville. Brownsville, long in need of better housing, had a series of housing projects built.

Mostly developed in a small area, the projects would make the Brownsville neighborhood the densest concentration of public housing in the United States. These new towers began to accelerate the demographic change that had already been occurring.

However, the factories that had drawn Blacks and Latinos began to shut down just as the new population arrived. Moreover, racial and ethnic de facto segregation separated the neighborhood, and as the towers went up, the part of Brownsville's Jewish population that could afford to left.

The new arrivals were met with a rapidly changing neighborhood and the absence of the jobs that they had desired. By the 1960s, Brownsville's rate of unemployment was double that of the city and the public housing now dominated the neighborhood. Though the crime rate had always been high, the police cracked down on Brownsville's Black residents in a way they never had on the Jewish population.

Towards the end of the 60s, these social problems reached a boiling point. The killing of an 11 year old boy sparked widespread riots that were aggressively suppressed. The next year, Brownsville was the center of the contentious teachers strike that served to further segregate the already cloistered neighborhood. With promised investment in the neighborhood never materializing, violence and theft skyrocketed, leading the city to advice its residents not to travel to Brownsville.

The people of Brownsville would not have been unjustified in saying they had been abandoned. The mayor of New York referred to it as "Bombsville", the Department of Sanitation spurred riots when it reduced its trash collection from six days a week to two, and whole blocks of storefronts were left empty.

Throughout the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st, Brownsville continued to suffer from a lack of investment. As the quality of life improved throughout the rest of city, community leaders were disheartened to find a continued lack of focus and an agenda on the neighborhood by city authorities that prioritized policing over education and improvement.