About the project

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Bedford Avenue has been around since the days of Dutch reign. Pre-revolutionary “Bedford Road” served as a main artery north to Williamsburg and south to Flatbush out of the area’s first major settlement, Bedford, which sat at the present-day intersection of Bedford Avenue and Fulton Street.

Just after the Civil War, Bedford Avenue was one of the first roads in Brooklyn to be paved, inviting legions of bicycles and a never-ending controversy.

With the 20th century came automobiles, and Automobile Row, which formed on Bedford in Crown Heights. Just ten blocks south was a house of worship for another budding American export, baseball, with the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Ebbets Field.

In the following decades Bedford extended south to Sheepshead Bay, saw massive urbanization, riots, and segmentation into ethnic pockets that largely still exist today.

This project explores the revealing contrasts that exist on Bedford, now as they have for centuries.

Hear what Bedford-Stuyvesant resident Winston has to say about the way the neighborhood has changed in his lifetime.