Crown Heights
Neighborhood Intelligence

Crown Heights is organized around Eastern Parkway, which Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed and which opened in the 1870s as the world's first parkway. Through the twentieth century the neighborhood's population changed substantially, and Black residents from the American South and immigrants from the Caribbean became the majority. The Lubavitch Hasidic community remained, and 770 Eastern Parkway is the headquarters of the worldwide Chabad-Lubavitch movement. The official area covered here combines NYC Planning's Crown Heights (North) and Crown Heights (South), from Atlantic Avenue south to Empire Boulevard.

The housing includes rowhouses, limestone and brownstone townhouses, and large prewar apartment buildings, and the Crown Heights North Historic District protects many of the blocks. Weeksville, a community of free Black landowners established in 1838, is commemorated at the Weeksville Heritage Center, and the Brooklyn Children's Museum, founded in 1899, is regarded as the first children's museum in the United States. Brower Park, Medgar Evers College, and the Jewish Children's Museum are also located here, and the Brooklyn Museum and Brooklyn Botanic Garden sit just beyond its western edge.