Flatbush Avenue is one of the major avenues in the New York City Borough of Brooklyn. It runs from the Manhattan Bridge south-southeastward to Jamaica Bay, where it joins the Marine Parkway Bridge, which connects Brooklyn to the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens. The north end was extended to the Manhattan Bridge as "Flatbush Avenue Extension."
The diagonal path of Flatbush Avenue creates a unique street pattern in every neighborhood it touches. It is the central artery of the borough, carrying traffic to and from Manhattan past landmarks such as Junior's, Long Island University, the Fulton Mall, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Long Island Rail Road's Atlantic Terminal at Times Plaza, Grand Army Plaza, the Brooklyn Public Library, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Prospect Park, Erasmus Hall High School, Brooklyn College, and Floyd Bennett Field. Flatbush Avenue is the border of Prospect Heights / Park Slope and many other neighborhoods.
Other main Brooklyn throughfares start at Flatbush Avenue, including Ocean Avenue, Linden Boulevard, Empire Boulevard, Eastern Parkway, and Utica Avenue.
Flatbush Avenue is a four-lane street throughout the majority of its run, but south of the intersection with Utica Avenue near Kings Plaza, it is an eight-lane median-divided street, making it one of the widest "avenues" in New York City.
Flatbush Avenue is the main thoroughfare through the Borough of Brooklyn. It was originally an Indian trail that took advantage of a low point in the terminal moraine that forms the spine of Long Island, running roughly along what is now the eastern edge of Prospect Park. A monument beside the former Flatbush Road, now inside the park, commemorates an attempt to block the road during the Battle of Long Island. Historic homes line the neighborhoods around the avenue, which in the late 1920s was straightened to its current form. Streets such as Amersfort Place that are remnants of old parts of the avenue remain in the city grid as an echo of the past.
Flatbush Avenue is served by the B41 bus line (formerly a trolley line) and the Q35 bus line, which goes to Rockaway Beach via the Marine Parkway Bridge. Many subway lines run under the avenue in Downtown Brooklyn, and the IRT Nostrand Avenue Line terminates southward at the Flatbush/Nostrand station at Brooklyn College.
Famous quotes containing the words flatbush and/or avenue:
“Pockets: What color is a giraffe?
Dallas: Well, mostly yellow.
Pockets: And what’s the color of a New York taxi cab?
Dallas: Mostly yellow.
Pockets: I drove a cab in Brooklyn. I just pretend it’s rush hour in Flatbush and in I go.”
—Leigh Brackett (1915–1978)
“Only in America ... do these peasants, our mothers, get their hair dyed platinum at the age of sixty, and walk up and down Collins Avenue in Florida in pedalpushers and mink stoles—and with opinions on every subject under the sun. It isn’t their fault they were given a gift like speech—look, if cows could talk, they would say things just as idiotic.”
—Philip Roth (b. 1933)