History
Brighton Beach was developed by William A. Engeman as a beach resort in 1868, and was named by Henry C. Murphy and a group of businessmen in an 1878 contest; the winning name evoked the resort of Brighton, England.
The centerpiece of the resort was the large Hotel Brighton (or Brighton Beach Hotel), placed on the beach at what is now the foot of Coney Island Avenue and accessed by the Brooklyn, Flatbush, and Coney Island Railway, which opened on July 2, 1878. After a series of winter storms threatened to swamp the hotel, an audacious plan was developed to move it in one piece 520 feet further inland by placing railroad track and 112 railroad flat cars under the raised 460 ft. by 130 ft. building and using six steam locomotives to pull it away from the sea. Engineered by B.C. Miller, the move was begun on April 2, 1888 and continued for the next nine days, being the largest building move of the 19th century.
Adjacent to the hotel, Engeman built the Brighton Beach Race Course for Thoroughbred horse racing. The village was annexed into the 31st Ward of the City of Brooklyn in 1894.
Brighton Beach was re-developed as a fairly dense residential community with the final rebuilding of the Brighton Beach railway into a modern rapid transit line, known as the BMT Brighton Line of the New York City Subway c. 1920. The subway system in the neighborhood is above ground on an elevated structure.
The years just before and following The Great Depression brought with them a neighborhood consisting mostly of first- and second-generation Jewish-Americans and, later, concentration camp survivors. Of the estimated 55,000 Holocaust survivors living in New York City as of 2011, most live in Brighton Beach.
Today, the area has a large community of Jewish immigrants who left the Former Soviet Union since 1970. Some non-Jewish immigrants, such as Armenians and Georgians, have also settled in Brighton Beach and the surrounding neighborhoods, taking advantage of the already established Russian-speaking community.
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“As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“We may pretend that we’re basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.”
—Terry Hands (b. 1941)