South Brooklyn · The Garden Brownstones · Longshoremen and Longevity
Heritage guide for Italian-American descendants
| Location | South Brooklyn, between the BQE and Smith Street, south of Atlantic Avenue |
| Distinctive feature | Deep front garden brownstones — unusually deep gardens by NYC standards, a planning quirk from the 19th century |
| Primary Italian origins | Campania (Naples and Salerno provinces), Sicily |
| Economic base | Brooklyn waterfront and Red Hook piers — Italian longshoremen and dock workers |
| Key parish | Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary (the Italian parish), and St Mary Star of the Sea |
| Today | Heavily gentrified; the original Italian-American community has substantially dispersed, though a visible presence remains |
Carroll Gardens — or South Brooklyn, as residents called it before the real estate industry renamed the neighbourhood in the 1970s — was built on the labour of the Brooklyn waterfront. The Red Hook piers and the Brooklyn Army Terminal, a mile to the south, were major employers for the Italian immigrant men who settled in the area from the late 19th century, and the neighbourhood's working-class Italian character was shaped by the rhythms of dock work: the shape-up at 6am, the irregular hours, the union politics, the culture of physical labour and its social solidarities.
The Italian population of Carroll Gardens came predominantly from Campania — the Naples and Salerno provinces — and from Sicily, with the specific migration chains that brought particular villages to particular Brooklyn blocks. The neighbourhood occupied roughly the grid of streets between the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and Smith Street, south of Atlantic Avenue, and was distinguished from the first by its unusual physical character: the brownstone row houses on Carroll Street, President Street, and First, Second, Third, and Fourth Places have front gardens deep enough to be genuinely usable — a quirk of the original 19th-century street plan that makes these blocks unlike anything else in Brooklyn.
The Italian community that settled these streets in the early 20th century used those front gardens in ways that marked the neighbourhood's character: vegetable gardens, grape arbours, fig trees kept alive through New York winters by the elaborate winter-protection techniques that Italian gardeners had developed. The Carroll Gardens fig tree, wrapped in burlap and tied against the wall for winter, is a documented local tradition that persisted as a visible marker of Italian identity into the late 20th century.
Carroll Gardens held its Italian-American character longer than most comparable Brooklyn neighbourhoods. While Bensonhurst began to change in the 1980s, Carroll Gardens remained predominantly Italian-American into the early 1990s — a combination of homeownership, strong parish ties, and the relative geographic isolation of the neighbourhood (the BQE to the east, the waterfront to the west) that made it less immediately accessible to the gentrification wave that swept other Brooklyn neighbourhoods earlier.
When gentrification came, it came quickly. Carroll Gardens in 2000 was still substantially Italian-American; Carroll Gardens in 2010 was a high-rent neighbourhood of young professionals. The displacement was rapid and, from the perspective of the families who had lived there for three generations, brutal. The brownstones that Italian longshoremen's families had bought in the 1940s for a few thousand dollars were now worth millions.
What persists today is concentrated in the parish, the pastry shops, and the social clubs on Court Street — the commercial spine of the neighbourhood. The Italian-American community in Carroll Gardens is older, smaller, and more visible in its absence than in its presence. But it has not entirely gone.
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