Bushwick

Bushwick’s Italian enclave was centered around the Italian National Parish of St. Joseph Patron church and a strip of businesses along Knickerbocker Avenue. Bushwick borders Williamsburg, Freshpond, Ocean Hill Brownsville and Glendale. Bushwick’s main strip, Knickerbocker Avenue, was filled with Italian cafés, bakeries, restaurants, pork stores, etc. In 1977, New York was hit with crippling blackouts, and many residents belonging to other ethnic groups outside of the Italian enclave, began looting Bushwick’s stores along a main commercial center that stretched under the El along Broadway. The looting turned to vandalism and arson. Fires swept through buildings and storefronts uncontrollably. Racial tensions were high in New York at this time and particularly so in Bushwick. Real estate agents began using blockbusting tactics to scare white homeowners into selling their homes which they did in droves. Italians left and went to nearby neighborhoods in Queens such as Glendale, Ridgewood, and Middle Village. Bushwick is a working-class neighborhood in the northern part of the New York City borough of Brooklyn. It is bounded by the neighborhood of Ridgewood, Queens, to the northeast; Williamsburg to the northwest; East New York and the cemeteries of Highland Park to the southeast; Brownsville to the south; and Bedford–Stuyvesant to the southwest. The 20th century saw an influx of Italian immigrants and Italian-Americans up to the 1980s.