Brooklyn
Breukelen was just one of a scattering of small Dutch villages along the western shore of what the colonists called Langue Eylandt (Long Island). Jelly-Schapiro writes that “Breukelen was founded as a ferry landing for farmers in 1646.” The name Breukelen is borrowed from a Dutch town outside of Amsterdam and it means “broken land.”
When the British took over, they named the collection of towns around Breukelen Kings County after King Charles II and anglicized the name of Breukelen to Brooklyn. Many Brooklyn neighborhoods bear the names of notable Dutch figures, including the Bensons (Bensonhurst) and the Nostrands (Nostrand Avenue). Jelly-Schapiro also points out in his book the descriptive Dutch names like Buschwick and Flatbush which come from “Boswijk” or “town in the woods” and “Vlacke Bos” or “wooded plain,” respectively. The small village of Brooklyn grew rapidly and by 1834 was its own city. A few decades later, in 1890, census data revealed that Brooklyn was the fourth-largest city in the United States. It finally joined became one of the five New York boroughs in 1898.
