Brighton Beach is a community on Coney Island in the borough of Brooklyn in New York City.It is bounded by Coney Island at Ocean Parkway to the west, affluent, but non-gated Manhattan Beach at Corbin Place to the east, Gravesend at Neptune Avenue to the north (at the Belt Parkway), and the Atlantic Ocean to the south (at the Riegelmann Boardwalk/beachfront).
Brighton Beach was developed by William A. Engeman as a beach resort in 1868, and was named in 1878 by Henry C. Murphy and a group of businessmen in an 1878 contest[1] ; 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. The village was annexed into the 31st Ward of the City of Brooklyn in 1894.
Brighton Beach was re-developed 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 1950s brought with it a neighborhood consisting mostly of second generation Americans, born of concentration camp survivors who had lost their husbands, wives and some of their children. Everywhere were the signs of the refugees who had fled, with numbers on their forearms, making their home in a small and welcoming town near Coney Island. The generation brought forth a well educated and industrious group of baby boomers, born into freedom and knowing of oppression and extreme antisemitism only from their parents' memories. These were the years filled with the odd and quirky stores that so embellished the little neighborhood seaside resort.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_Beach
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