Borderlands: Flushing and Broadway, 1905

Where is Bushwick and Why?
Part 1: Lines on a map.

Let’s start with a simple question: where exactly is Bushwick? And where is it not? It’s a question that comes up a lot, and the answer depends on who you ask — especially if you are asking a real estate agent!

Bushwick lies between Williamsburg, Bed-Stuy, and Ridgewood on the Queens border, all without a natural geographic border, save for the green hills of the Cemetery Belt. So it can a bit tricky to figure out what is what, and where is where. Let’s get that out of the way.

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Bushwick is the new home to many of our readers, but its history stretches back to the founding of Brooklyn. So join local historian Adam Schwartz (and guests) for Bushwick Geographic, a series of historical excursions across time and the space of Bushwick, in what was once the city of Brooklyn.

But this is no mere trip down memory lane. With the use of our handy locator maps, you can walk the same streets of Bushwick with a whole new view on the past of our community.

Bushwick’s southern end marks the beginning of the cemetery belt, a vast grouping of 29 cemeteries where over 5 million New Yorkers are buried. The Belt developed in the mid to late 19th century, as a product of the Rural Cemeteries Act, as bodies were taken out of backyards and churchyards in Manhattan to move to the "Green Hills" of Brooklyn, as they were once known.

The most interesting of these cemeteries is certainly Bushwick’s own Most Holy Trinity, at the end of Central Avenue, just south of the intersection of Central and Chauncey Street (map). Many of us see it everyday as we pull past it on the L train at Wilson Avenue Station.

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