Borough Park, Brooklyn

Based on Wikipedia: Borough Park, Brooklyn

The Baby Boom Capital of New York City

In a city where the average family has fewer than two children, one Brooklyn neighborhood defies every demographic trend. Borough Park recorded 4,523 births in 2004—more than any other neighborhood in New York City. The birth rate of 24.4 per 1,000 residents would be unremarkable in many developing nations, but in twenty-first century America, it's extraordinary. The secret? Orthodox and Haredi Jewish families here average 6.72 children each.

This isn't just a statistical curiosity. It's reshaping the physical landscape of southwestern Brooklyn.

Since 1990, the Building Department has issued more permits for private construction projects in Borough Park than in any other residential neighborhood in Brooklyn. The math is simple: when you have seven children, you need more bedrooms. Across the neighborhood, homes are being expanded, renovated, and rebuilt to accommodate the ever-growing families. A special zoning law passed in 1992 established Borough Park as a district where residents could build on sixty-five percent of their lot—far more than typical—reducing the size of required setbacks and backyards to maximize living space.

Welcome to one of the largest Orthodox Jewish communities outside of Israel.

From Blythebourne to Borough Park

The neighborhood's story begins in 1887, when a developer named Electus Litchfield established a small hamlet called Blythebourne. The name has the ring of English countryside optimism, and indeed, early development here followed the pattern of many Brooklyn neighborhoods: speculators buying land, building homes, and hoping the city would grow toward them.

They were right to hope. The Brooklyn, Bath, and Coney Island steam railroad—which would eventually become the BMT West End Line carrying the D, R, and W trains—had been running through the area since the 1860s, connecting Green-Wood Cemetery to Coney Island. When the line was elevated onto a raised structure in 1917, the neighborhood's accessibility improved dramatically.

Another railroad, the Sea Beach, took its name from the Sea Beach Palace Hotel at its southern terminal. By 1913, it had been electrified and placed in an open cut—a trench below street level—and today serves the N train.

In 1902, State Senator William H. Reynolds purchased the land northeast of Blythebourne and christened it Borough Park. By the 1920s, Blythebourne had been absorbed entirely, its quaint English name surviving only in a post office station at 1200 51st Street.

The Arrival of the Jews

Jewish immigrants began settling in Borough Park at the turn of the twentieth century, with significant numbers arriving between 1904 and 1905. By 1914, a Young Men's Hebrew Association had formed and purchased a lot on 58th Street and 14th Avenue to build a community center.

Through the 1930s, 13th Avenue pulsed with the energy of pushcart vendors and pickle sellers—a scene familiar to anyone who knows the history of the Lower East Side. The city eventually opened a public market on 42nd Street in the late 1930s, forcing an end to the pushcart trade and imposing order on the colorful chaos.

A lesser-known chapter involves Yemenite Jews. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, families emigrated from both Yemen and Mandatory Palestine, creating their own small enclave within Borough Park. They established a synagogue called Ohel Shalom, which eventually moved from a small storefront to a more permanent home in a purchased church building on 12th Avenue and 44th Street. The image captures something essential about immigrant religious communities: finding sanctity in structures built for other faiths, transforming them into spaces of their own tradition.

The Great Transformation

The Borough Park of the 1970s bore little resemblance to what it would become. The neighborhood was home to Italians, Irish, and Modern Orthodox Jews—a diverse mix typical of many Brooklyn communities. Modern Orthodox Judaism, for those unfamiliar with the distinctions, represents a middle path: observant of Jewish law but engaged with secular culture, attending universities, pursuing professional careers, watching television.

Then the Hasidim arrived in force.

By 1983, an estimated eighty-five percent of Borough Park's residents were Jewish, and the character of that Jewish population had shifted dramatically. The Hasidic Jews who now dominated were different from their Modern Orthodox predecessors in fundamental ways. Hasidism, which emerged in eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, emphasizes mystical experience, joyous worship, and strong community bonds organized around a spiritual leader called a rebbe.

The transformation was sometimes described as "suburb to shtetl"—a reference to the small Jewish towns of Eastern Europe that were destroyed in the Holocaust. Many of the new arrivals were indeed Holocaust survivors or their descendants, along with immigrant families from Eastern Europe. They brought with them not just religious observance but an entire way of life that had survived Hitler's attempt to eradicate it.

The neighborhood's commercial strip along 13th Avenue evolved to serve this new population. In 1987, two establishments that would become local institutions opened their doors: Eichler's Judaica bookstore and Kosher Castle Dairy Cafeteria. New stores selling imported goods and computer technology followed. By the end of the 1990s, businesses had discovered the internet as a way to sell electronics, Jewish books, music, and videos to overseas customers—connecting Borough Park to Jewish communities around the globe.

A Religious World Apart

To understand Borough Park today, you need to understand what it means to live by halakha—Jewish religious law. The Shulkhan Arukh, a sixteenth-century code of Jewish law, governs daily life in ways that might seem extraordinary to secular Americans.

Saturday is Shabbos—the Sabbath—and it is observed with a strictness that reshapes the week. In some areas of Borough Park, a siren sounds on Friday before sundown, announcing the Sabbath's arrival. From that moment until Saturday night, no work is performed, no electricity is turned on or off, no cars are driven. The streets empty of traffic and fill with families walking to synagogue.

Many families do not own televisions. They do not attend movies. Children attend yeshivas—religious schools—rather than public schools. Adolescent girls ensure their knees and elbows are covered before leaving the house. At weddings and funerals alike, women and men sit separately, avoiding physical contact as required by religious law.

Every store in Borough Park sells or prepares only kosher food made under rabbinical supervision. The kosher laws extend far beyond avoiding pork and shellfish; they require separate dishes for meat and dairy, specific slaughtering methods, and constant rabbinical oversight.

Scattered across the neighborhood are mikvehs—ritual baths used for spiritual purification. You might walk past one without realizing it; they are rarely advertised, to protect the privacy of those who use them. Yet they are considered absolutely vital to Orthodox Jewish life.

The Eruv Controversy

One of the more fascinating religious disputes in Borough Park concerned the eruv—and understanding this controversy requires a brief explanation of a peculiar aspect of Jewish Sabbath law.

On the Sabbath, carrying objects in public spaces is prohibited. This creates practical problems: you cannot push a baby stroller, carry house keys, or wheel someone in a wheelchair. The solution, developed centuries ago, is the eruv—a symbolic enclosure that transforms a public area into a kind of extended private domain where carrying is permitted.

An eruv typically consists of poles and wires that create a boundary, often using existing structures like utility poles and fences. To the untrained eye, it's nearly invisible. But its religious significance is profound.

Building an eruv in Borough Park became a major controversy because different rabbinical authorities had different interpretations of Jewish law. Some argued that creating a valid eruv in Brooklyn was impossible or inappropriate. Others saw it as essential for helping families with young children observe the Sabbath fully.

An eruv was eventually built in 1999-2000, encompassing about 225 blocks of Borough Park. Its use remains controversial among some religious authorities, a reminder that even in a community united by devotion to Jewish law, the interpretation of that law can be fiercely debated.

The Hasidic Mosaic

To outsiders, Hasidic Jews might appear as a monolithic group—men in black hats and coats, women in modest dress. But Borough Park is actually home to a remarkable diversity of Hasidic communities, each with its own history, customs, and leadership.

The largest group is Bobov, including an offshoot known as Bobov-45, numbering several thousand families. The community has followers not just in Brooklyn but in Canada, England, Belgium, and Israel.

The Satmar community is one of the largest Hasidic groups in Brooklyn overall. It is characterized by extreme religious rigidity, complete rejection of modern culture, and fierce anti-Zionism—a theological position that opposes the modern State of Israel on religious grounds, believing that only the Messiah can legitimately restore Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land. Satmar runs a comprehensive education system with large schools for boys.

But the list goes on: Boyan, Belz, Ger, Karlin-Stolin, Vizhnitz, Vien, Munkacz, Spinka, Klausenburg, Skver, Puppa. Each name represents a town in Eastern Europe—usually Hungary, Poland, or Ukraine—where the dynasty originated before the Holocaust. The names are geographic ghosts, preserved in Brooklyn while the original communities were destroyed.

There is also a minority of Haredi non-Hasidic Jews, typically called Litvish or Yeshivish, who follow a Lithuanian tradition emphasizing rigorous Talmud study over the mystical and emotional aspects that characterize Hasidism. Some Sephardic Jews—those descended from Spanish, Portuguese, or Middle Eastern communities—have made their home here as well. A smaller number of Modern Orthodox Jews remain, though they are now far outnumbered.

Politics in Black and White

The political evolution of Borough Park reflects its religious transformation. During much of the early 1900s, the Jewish population in Brooklyn was part of a liberal-leaning voting block—typical of American Jews at the time, who largely supported Democratic candidates and progressive causes.

But the Jewish families who shaped that political character eventually moved to the suburbs or other parts of the city. The Hasidic Jews who replaced them—survivors of the Holocaust, immigrants from Eastern Europe—brought a different political sensibility. More traditional, more conservative, more focused on issues like religious education funding and community security.

A 2002 study by the UJA Federation-New York revealed just how dramatic the shift had been: only two percent of Borough Park's Jews identified as Reform Jews, while nearly three-quarters identified as Orthodox. Reform Judaism, the most liberal branch of American Judaism, emphasizes personal autonomy in religious practice and tends to align with progressive politics. Its near-absence in Borough Park is a measure of the neighborhood's religious distinctiveness.

The Safest Streets in Brooklyn

The 66th Precinct, headquartered at 5822 16th Avenue, covers Borough Park. In 2010, it ranked as the third safest out of sixty-nine patrol areas in New York City for per-capita crime. By 2018, the non-fatal assault rate was just nineteen per 100,000 people—far below the citywide average.

Crime has plummeted even more dramatically when measured against the past. Between 1990 and 2018, crimes across all categories in the 66th Precinct decreased by 87.7 percent. In 2018, the precinct reported zero murders, twenty rapes, 101 robberies, 141 felony assaults, 186 burglaries, 447 grand larcenies, and seventy-nine grand larcenies of automobiles.

What explains this remarkable safety? The answers are complex, but community structure plays a role. Borough Park has various volunteer neighborhood patrols, mostly composed of members of the Hasidic community. Hatzolah is a volunteer ambulance group staffed by emergency medical technicians and paramedics. The City Wide Safety Patrol Shmira and Brooklyn South Safety Patrol Shomrim are citizens' watch groups sanctioned by the New York City Police Department's community affairs division. They respond to security calls and assist police in searching for missing persons.

The names themselves are telling. "Shmira" and "Shomrim" both derive from Hebrew roots meaning "to guard" or "to watch." These are not just neighborhood watch programs; they are expressions of a community that takes collective responsibility for its own protection, a sensibility perhaps shaped by centuries of Jewish vulnerability in Europe.

Where New Yorkers Are Born

Maimonides Medical Center anchors the neighborhood's healthcare infrastructure. With 679 beds, a full emergency room with a level two trauma center, maternity wards, and psychiatric services, it is a major teaching hospital in New York State.

The hospital's Stella and Joseph Payson Birthing Center handles more births than any other hospital in the state—a direct consequence of Borough Park's extraordinary fertility rate. The Maimonides Infants and Children's Hospital of Brooklyn is accredited as a "children's hospital within a hospital," one of only three such facilities in New York City.

Given the community's birth rate, this specialization makes perfect sense. Maimonides has become expert at precisely what Borough Park needs most.

The Economics of Faith

Borough Park's demographics create unusual economic patterns. The median household income in Community District 12, which includes Borough Park along with neighboring Kensington and Ocean Parkway, was $45,364 as of 2016. That's lower than you might expect for a neighborhood with such low crime and strong community bonds.

The explanation lies in family structure. When you have nearly seven children on average, household expenses are enormous even before accounting for yeshiva tuition, kosher food costs, and the various requirements of religious life. An estimated twenty-eight percent of Community District 12 residents lived in poverty in 2018, compared to twenty-one percent in Brooklyn overall and twenty percent citywide.

Rent burden tells a similar story: sixty-four percent of residents have difficulty paying their rent, compared to about fifty-two percent citywide. Large families need large apartments, which are expensive.

Yet unemployment is relatively low—just six percent, compared to nine percent in Brooklyn and New York City overall. People are working; the money simply doesn't stretch as far when divided among so many family members.

A Healthier Population

Perhaps surprisingly given the poverty statistics, Borough Park's population is healthier than average in many respects. Only ten percent of residents smoke, compared to fourteen percent citywide. Fifteen percent are obese, compared to twenty-four percent citywide. Nine percent are diabetic, compared to eleven percent citywide. Seventeen percent of children are obese, compared to twenty percent citywide.

Ninety-two percent of residents eat some fruits and vegetables every day, compared to eighty-seven percent citywide. The concentration of fine particulate matter—the deadliest type of air pollutant—is lower than citywide and boroughwide averages.

What explains these better outcomes? The community's values likely play a role. Jewish tradition emphasizes caring for the body as a religious obligation. The strong family and community structures may reduce isolation and its associated health problems. And the neighborhood's walkability—with 13th Avenue's shops serving as a pedestrian commercial strip—encourages physical activity in daily life.

Life expectancy in Community District 12 is 84.2 years, compared to 81.2 years for New York City overall. That's a remarkable three-year advantage.

13th Avenue: A Mile of Jewish Life

Thirteenth Avenue runs roughly one mile from 39th Street to 55th Street, and it functions as Borough Park's commercial heart. The storefronts here supply Jewish households with everything they need: kosher food, religious books and items, clothing appropriate for Orthodox modesty standards, wigs for married women who cover their hair.

The street draws Hasidic Jews from across New York City, from other states, and even from other countries. The internet has extended this reach further; businesses now ship Jewish books, music, videos, and electronics to customers worldwide.

Two hotels serve visitors: the Park House Hotel, established in 1987 as the first kosher hotel in Borough Park, located between 12th and 13th Avenues on 48th Street; and the Avenue Plaza Hotel, which opened on 13th Avenue in 1999. Israeli tourists are particularly common visitors, along with other Hasidic travelers who need accommodations that meet their religious requirements.

A City Within a City

Borough Park's 2010 census population was 106,357, an increase of 5,302 (5.2 percent) from the 101,055 counted in 2000. But the 2011 estimate was 140,000, suggesting the census may have undercounted a population where large families live in crowded quarters and suspicion of government is not uncommon.

The racial makeup, according to the 2010 census, was 77 percent White, 11.7 percent Asian, 9.4 percent Hispanic or Latino, and just 0.7 percent African American. The Asian population represents a newer wave of immigration that has touched many Brooklyn neighborhoods.

But racial categories fail to capture what makes Borough Park distinctive. This is a neighborhood defined by religion, not race—by a commitment to a way of life that has survived persecution, migration, and the relentless pressures of American assimilation.

In Brooklyn overall, about thirty-seven percent of Jews consider themselves Orthodox. Borough Park is often called the "heartland" or "home" for New York's Orthodox Jewish population. It is a place where the rhythm of life follows the Jewish calendar, where the Sabbath actually brings the world to a halt, where the year is measured in holidays and Torah portions.

The neighborhood exists in New York City, but it is also a world apart—connected to ancient traditions and to Hasidic communities around the globe, but separated from the secular life that surrounds it. It is a remarkable experiment: can a pre-modern religious community thrive in the heart of the modern world's most dynamic city?

The birth rate suggests an answer. Borough Park is not just surviving; it is growing. The baby boom capital of New York City is building more bedrooms, opening more schools, expanding into surrounding neighborhoods. Whatever the future holds for secular America, Borough Park's Hasidic communities seem determined to outlast it—one large family at a time.