Brighton Beach
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For other uses, see Brighton Beach (disambiguation).
Brighton Beach is a community on Coney Island in the borough of Brooklyn in New York City.
It is bounded by the community of Coney Island proper on the west, Manhattan Beach on the east, and the Atlantic Ocean on the south.
Brighton Beach was developed as a beach resort in 1878 and was named in a 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, later known as the BMT Brighton Line, which opened on July 2, 1878.
Brighton Beach was redeveloped as a fairly dense residential community with the final rebuilding of the Brighton Beach railway into a modern rapid transit line of the New York City Subway system c. 1920. The area has a large community of Jewish immigrants who left what was the Soviet Union in the 1980s and 1990s. However, living in the USSR has made them in many ways culturally distinct from the Jewish immigrants that moved to the neighborhood decades earlier from Tsarist Russia. Assimilation into mainstream Soviet culture has resulted in most of these émigrés being more culturally similar to Russians and Ukrainians than to the earlier Jewish immigrants. Brighton Beach has been dubbed "Little Odessa" by Russians and is allegedly the home of the Russian Mafia in the United States. In 2006, Alec Brook-Krasny was elected to the New York State Assembly, the first elected official from the Jewish community of Brighton Beach.
Brighton Beach is also home to many other ethnic groups such as immigrants from Pakistan. On Brighton 7th Street, there is a mosque where Muslims (mostly Pakistani) go to pray. There is another mosque located between Brighton 8th Street and Banner Avenue. Brighton is also home to many Italian-Americans, Mexican-Americans and African Americans.
Currently, Brighton Beach is replete with restaurants and food stores. During daytime, the street is filled with people – generally Jewish immigrants. The community, with an estimated population of 150,000, has a distinctively ethnic feel – akin to Manhattan's Chinatown. The proximity of Brighton Beach to the city's beaches (the street runs parallel to the Coney Island beach area and the Boardwalk) and the fact that the street is located right under the Brighton Beach Avenue subway station, makes it a popular summer weekend destination for thousands of NYC residents.
[edit] Education
Brighton Beach, like all of New York City, is served by the New York City Department of Education. Manhattan Beach is zoned to PS 225 The Eileen E. Zaglin School for grades K-8, as well as PS 100 located on Brighton Beach and West 3rd for grades K-5. Brighton Beach is not zoned to any high schools as all New York City high school students are required to apply to their high schools of choice.
Nearby high schools include:
- Rachel Carson's School of Coastal Studies
- John Dewey High School
- The Leon M. Goldstein High School for the Sciences
- William E. Grady Vocational High School
- Abraham Lincoln High School
