Early history

Kensington Post Office, listed on the NRHP

The land where Kensington now sits was first colonized by Dutch farmers during the seventeenth century within the town of Flatbush. It was re-settled by British colonists in 1737. First developed in 1885 after the completion of Ocean Parkway, the neighborhood was named after the place and borough in West London, at the turn of the century.^[3]

The small area between 18th and Foster Avenues, in the southern portion of the neighborhood, contains a distinctive, slightly diagonal street grid and is also known as Parkville. The area, originally part of the town of Flatbush, was originally known as Greenville and its land was first acquired in 1852 by the Freeman's Association, shortly after the completion of Coney Island Avenue on the eastern boundary of Kensington and Parkville. Public School 92 (later P.S. 134) and the Roman Catholic Church of St. Rose of Lima were built to service the subsection in 1870. A librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library wrote that "Parkville is one of those wonky neighborhoods that isn't often referenced" because of its small size.^[1]

Despite political tensions, the town of Flatbush was annexed by the city of Brooklyn in 1894, presaging the consolidation of the five boroughs of New York City on January 1, 1898. Accordingly, further spates of development occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, much of which was initially concentrated in the village of Windsor Terrace (which had more southerly borders than the contemporary neighborhood, being bounded by Church Avenue on the south, Gravesend [McDonald] Avenue on the west, the historical Brooklyn–Flatbush town line near Terrace Place on the north, and Prospect Park Southwest and Coney Island Avenue on the east).^[4] These efforts also encompassed Brooklyn Real Estate Exchange President Jeremiah Johnson, Jr.'s circa 1891 Kensington Heights^[5] and circa 1894 Kensington-in-Flatbush developments, the former in the vicinity of Ditmas Avenue and the latter possibly in the vicinity of Church Avenue; detached suburban villas on and adjoining Ocean Parkway that attracted wealthier residents from more urbanized areas, including Brooklyn Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick; hybrid commercial/walk-up apartment structures on commercial thoroughfares; and a variety of limestone- and brick-fronted townhouse rows.

Early and mid-20th century

As the area was gradually rezoned amid the construction of the IND Brooklyn Line, six-story elevator apartment houses^[6] became increasingly prevalent on upper Ocean Parkway and in its periphery between the late 1920s and 1941, replacing many of the suburban villas.^[7] Following World War II, the development of the Prospect Expressway ensured that luxury buildings (by now often exceeding six stories due to building code revisions and further zoning changes, as exemplified by the Marlene J. [later known as the Caton Towers]^[8] and the Americana Towers^[9]) continued to be developed on Ocean Parkway and in its immediate vicinity until the mid-1960s. Since the 1990s, there has been a notable resurgence in various forms of residential development, including new apartment houses on Ocean Parkway and smaller structures on side streets.

Throughout much of the 20th century, Kensington was seldom distinguished as a distinct neighborhood, with many residents and demographers identifying the area as the western section of Flatbush.^{[10][11][12][13][14][15][16]} The descriptor West Flatbush was also used by various religious & civic organizations and urban planners in the first half of the 20th century before largely falling into disuse after 1954.^[17][18][19] While the Kensington moniker continued to be employed by branches of certain governmental institutions (including the Post Office Department and the Brooklyn Public Library), it was also used by demographers to differentiate the largely working class, ethnically heterogeneous^[20] tracts west of Ocean Parkway (then an upper middle class, predominantly Jewish American enclave roughly situated between the well-heeled residential thoroughfares of the Upper West Side and the more steadfastly middle class Grand Concourse in socioeconomic standing among New York City's Jewish American community at its late 1940s social apogee) from the historically affluent, Old Stock and Jewish American-dominated tracts east of Coney Island Avenue.^[21] A 1945 fifteen-year retrospective study of Brooklyn Protestantism by the Committee for Cooperative Field Research included the Kensington tracts between the historical villages of Windsor Terrace and Parkville (alternatively characterized as the "Ocean Parkway corridor") within the boundaries of Flatbush, also noting that a contemporaneous survey of 3,072 families indicated that 41% of residents identified as Roman Catholic (exemplified by a recent influx of second and third-generation Italian Americans from South Brooklyn and other northern neighborhoods), 33% as Jewish (primarily concentrated in apartment houses on "main traffic ways") and 26% as Protestant, with the latter population remaining concentrated in "private dwellings on the side streets" amid an ongoing decline.^[22] In his 2015 memoir, musician Marky Ramone (who resided at 640 Ditmas Avenue throughout much of his childhood in the 1960s) noted the area's distance from major thoroughfares in eastern Flatbush, necessitating a two-fare public transit zone via bus to Erasmus Hall High School.^[23]

Beginning in the 1950s, demographic shifts in eastern Flatbush — exemplified by white flight among the Jewish American community and the concomitant emergence of an Afro-Caribbean immigrant community in the vicinity of Flatbush Avenue — would contrast with comparative stability in the Kensington tracts, notwithstanding the effects of a decade-long population decline^[24] likely stemming from a variety of factors, including the beginning of post-Levittown mass suburbanization and the broader amelioration of New York City's postwar housing shortage. In 1956, the closure and ensuing "bustitution" of the Church Avenue streetcar line irrevocably altered a longstanding facet of the neighborhood's public transit landscape.^[25]

Recognition as separate neighborhood and increasing diversity

Although New York City Deputy Municipal Reference Librarian Thelma E. Smith described the Kensington tracts from McDonald Avenue to Coney Island Avenue as a "sub-neighborhood" of Flatbush in a 1966 annotated bibliography of neighborhood histories and reportage for city officials,^[26] The New York Times would characterize Ocean Parkway as the western boundary of Flatbush in early 1968.^[27] Shortly thereafter, the New York City municipal government informally designated the tracts between McDonald and Coney Island Avenues as Kensington in the 1969 Plan for New York City.^[28] Similarly, Gilbert Tauber and Samuel Kaplan asserted that southern Windsor Terrace, the traditional Kensington tracts and western Midwood constituted the sprawling neighborhood of "Kensington-Ocean Parkway" in The New York City Handbook, first published by Doubleday in 1966.^[29] (Indeed, after the contemporary community boards of New York City were established in 1963, much of present-day Kensington was appended to the Borough Park-dominated Brooklyn Community Board 12, possibly stemming from Kensington Democratic leader Howard Golden's affiliation with Borough Park's then-powerful Roosevelt Club.^[30] Conversely, the eastern Flatbush and Midwood tracts were incorporated into Brooklyn Community Board 14, a division that endures to the present.)

Although the formation of such community organizations as the Kensington-Flatbush Preservation Association would further popularize the moniker throughout the 1970s, press accounts continued to describe the area as Flatbush.^[31] Brooklyn-born sports journalist Stan Fischler also identified the IND Church Avenue station as being located in Flatbush in Uptown, Downtown, his 1976 history of the New York City subway system.^[32]

During this period, the Kensington tracts began to experience significant demographic changes. Most of the area's long-endangered mainline Protestant churches (including the historically prominent Prospect Park Baptist Church^[33]) were forced to close due to a lack of parishioners, while the area's deeply-rooted Irish American community continued to be supplanted by new waves of upwardly mobile Italian Americans moving out from less desirable sections of central and northern Brooklyn, paralleling developments in nearby Sunset Park. In a 1974 interview with Wendy Schuman of The New York Times, a banker opined that Ocean Parkway "just [wasn't] prestigious anymore" as younger residents fully embraced suburbanization, leaving a substantial and rapidly aging white ethnic population (most of whom settled in the area between the early 1930s and the early 1950s)^[34] that proved reluctant to move due to New York's favorable rent regulation laws. Another resident who recently moved to Ocean Parkway cited the area's perceived isolation from eastern Flatbush, by now a predominantly Caribbean American community, as his impetus for relocation: "I'm a bigot. I don't care how much money they have. I'm not going to live with Blacks and Puerto Ricans. I'll move out and keep on moving. Five years ago I would have punched a guy in the nose for talking like this."^[35]

By the early 1980s, the Kensington designation was rapidly adopted by real estate interests as these tenants (who often identified as Flatbush residents) began to die or retire elsewhere, leading to a greater awareness of the name through a surfeit of advertising. During this period, the area became desirable to a wide range of New Yorkers (including Park Slope residents adversely affected by gentrification; Orthodox Jews, African Americans and Hispanic and Latino Americans from other nearby neighborhoods; and a variety of post-1965 immigrant communities) as a locus of relatively affordable rentals and the city's burgeoning co-op conversion movement, further entrenching the notion of Kensington as a discrete neighborhood among new residents.^[36] In 1983, The New York Times described the Ocean Parkway boundary as a vestigial border in a feature about the Community Board 14 tracts of Flatbush.^[37] Nevertheless, City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center sociologist William B. Helmreich included Kensington within the boundaries of Flatbush (while acknowledging its unique demographic mix and comparatively downscale architectural profile) in The Brooklyn Nobody Knows (2016).^[38] Additionally, members of "frum" Orthodox Jewish communities in the area frequently extend the boundaries of Flatbush to an area that corresponds to (and often exceeds) the pre-consolidation township, including contemporary Kensington and Midwood.

Library

18th Avenue library

The Kensington branch of the Brooklyn Public Library is located at 4207 18th Avenue, near the intersection of Seton Place and East Second Street. It was originally created in 1908 as a "deposit station" with a small collection, and was located at P.S. 134, three blocks east of the current library. Within four years, it had moved twice, and in 1912, it relocated to 770 McDonald Avenue, at the southwest corner of Ditmas Avenue. The library moved again in 1960 to a location four blocks east, on 410 Ditmas Avenue, between East 4th & East 5th Streets. The current facility opened in 2012.^[53]

Schools

Public schools in Kensington include four public primary schools: P.S. 130 (shared with Windsor Terrace), P.S. 230, P.S. 179, and P.S. 134. There are three middle schools: M.S. 839, J.H.S. 62 and J.H.S. 23. The area has no public high schools.^[54] There is also an Orthodox Jewish school called Yeshiva Torah Vodaas.^[55]