Amboy, Oh Amboy

Amboy Rd., seen here near Giffords La. in Great Kills, Staten Island, is one of the lengthiest routes in Staten Island, splitting off from Richmond Rd. in New Dorp and running through Great Kills, Annadale, Pleasant Plains and other neighborhoods to the Arthur Kill waterway in Tottenville. Amboy Rd. house numbering in New Dorp doesn’t begin at #1; it continues Richmond Rd.’s numbering in the 2500s, with Richmond Rd. skipping to #3009 and continuing west from there. Though a busy route, it’s mostly a two-lane road with parking, occasionally expanding to four but never becoming a behemoth as Richmond Ave. does.

Staten Island is a borough whose street names have changed over the centuries. In southern Staten Island the few routes that ran through the area have changed: Washington to Arden; Bridge to Richmond; Fresh Kills Rd. to Arthur Kill Rd.. Yet, Amboy Rd. has remained consistent since at least 1873, as on this set of maps. Also see another set from 1917.

Amboy Rd. is named for Perth Amboy, New Jersey, which in previous centuries was accessible by ferry from Tottenville. The city, in turn, has two names of different origins: Amboy from the Lenape Indians, who called the region Ompage, and Perth after Scotsman James Dummond, 4th Earl of Perth; in the colonial era, Scottish immigrants settled in the area (across the Arthur Kill, southern Staten Island was dominated by French Protestants called Huguenots, and immigrant Belgians, called Walloons).

The street name can also be found in Brooklyn and Queens. Irving Shulman’s novel The Amboy Dukes tells the story of East New York street gangs in the 1940s. Amboy St., in the heart of Brownsville, runs from E. New York Ave. south to Linden Blvd., interrupted between Dumont and Livonia Aves. by the Betsy Head Pool, one of 11 large public swimming pools built by the Works Progress Administration during the Depression.

A glimpse into Brownsville’s past can be seen at #139 Amboy, just north of Sutter. Here you’ll find St. Timothy’s Church, of a Protestant denomination, yet clearly a converted synagogue as seen from the Star of David near the roofline and the inscription in Hebrew over the front entrance.

According to my friend Sergey Kadinsky, who helps me out with occasional articles for Forgotten NY in addition to his own Hidden Waters Blog and his book, Hidden Waters of New York City, the inscription reads, Hevra Torah Anshei Radishkovich, which translates as “Torah Community of the People of Radishkovich.” This was a synagogue of immigrants from Radoshkovichy, a town in present-day Belarus. The congregation was founded in 1930, but I’m uncertain when it became St. Timothy’s.

There are some NYC neighborhoods I find myself in frequently. I never tire of Coney, and I always seem to be in the Long Island City–Astoria area; and in Staten Island it seems I’m always exploring the semi-wild areas in Great Kills and Eltingville. But there are some parts of the city where I’ve trafficked very little.

Brownsville and East New York are neighborhoods of eastern Brooklyn delineated by the Bay Ridge branch of the Long Island Rail Road. In the north, Brownsville runs from E. New York Ave., on the Bedford-Stuyvesant border, south to its border with Canarsie at the railroad; East New York begins at the railroad and continues east to the Queens line at Ozone Park, with the neighborhoods of Highland Park and Cypress Hills to its north and Jamaica Bay on its south. The southeast section of East New York is called New Lots after Dutch farmers who were getting crowded out in Flatbush struck east and formed new community here in the 1670s.

Though the Dutch established some homes and farms in Brownsville and East New York in the 1700s, the area didn’t gel as a community until the early-to-middle 1800s. East New York was developed by John R. Pitkin, a Connecticut merchant beginning in 1835; at the time, this was the easternmost town in greater New York City, though not yet a part of the city proper. Brownsville is named for Charles S. Brown, who subdivided it in 1865.

Like many parts of NYC, Brownsville and East New York have been occupied by many nationalities. In the 1850s Germans predominated in East New York, to be followed by Italians, Russians and Poles in the early-20th century and then by African-Americans in the late-1950s. Brownsville attracted Jewish residents from Manhattan’s Lower East Side as early as the 1890s and by the 1920s it was known as “The Jerusalem of America.” It has been the home base of Murder Incorporated, the organized crime family that included Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano; Margaret Sanger‘s first birth-control clinic; and has been home to Joseph Papp, Danny Kaye, and Mike Tyson. The area became impoverished and dangerous in the 1970s, hitting rock bottom after the lootings and riots during the 1977 blackout, but has been on a slow comeback trail, with major chain stores opening on Pitkin Ave.

The triangle of Pitkin and E. New York Aves. and Legion St. in Brownsville, Brooklyn was called Zion Park as early as 1911. The Zion Park War Memorial, also known as the Brownsville War Memorial, was created by sculptor Charles Cary Rumsey (1879–1922) and dedicated in 1925. It lists local war heroes who died in World War I. The space was renamed Loew Square in honor of the massive Loew’s Pitkin Theatre across the street in 1930, but by 1997 the theater was long-shuttered and the name changed back to Zion Triangle.

Street name mavens have plenty to chew on here in Brownsville, as many streets have changed monikers over the decades. Barrett St. was changed to Legion in the late 1930s, while Ames St. became Herzl in honor of Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) the Austrian journalist and father of modern Zionism, a movement that led to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. I’m not sure when that change was made, but it was between 1913 and 1938.

Getting back to Amboy St., its name has touched the popular imagination, from the Shulman novel mentioned previously to the 1960s rock group the Amboy Dukes, who had a big hit in 1968 with “Journey To The Center of the Mind.” (In 1977, Joey Ramone answered with the lyric “Now I guess I’ll have to tell ‘em/That I got no cerebellum.”) The Dukes’ Ted Nugent saw my Forgotten New York entry on Brownsville several years ago and mentioned on the website he was maintaining at the time that he hadn’t read Shulman’s book but was influenced by it to name the band.

—Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)