It’s All in the Name: New Utrecht

By Y.M. Lowy

We pass these names every day, see them on street signs, buildings and businesses, and often never stop to think about where they came from. But behind many of the names we know is an interesting story. In this weekly series, we take a closer look at familiar names around Boro Park and beyond and uncover the people, places and stories that gave them their names.

Boro Parkers don’t need an explanation of what New Utrecht is. There’s New Utrecht Avenue, with the tracks running through it, and there’s Old New Utrecht Road. But why are they both called New Utrecht?

The answer goes back hundreds of years, long before the Boro Park we know existed.

In the 17th century, Dutch settlers established a town in what is now southwest Brooklyn and named it New Utrecht, after Utrecht, a city in the Netherlands. In 1657, the settlement was officially recognized as a town, making New Utrecht one of the original towns that made up what was then Kings County.

The town covered a much larger area than the New Utrecht Avenue we know today. Its boundaries stretched across parts of what are now several Brooklyn neighborhoods.

For generations, the area remained largely rural, with farms and country roads connecting the scattered settlements. One of those old roads eventually became what we know today as Old New Utrecht Road.

As Brooklyn grew and the farmland was developed, the old road network remained. New streets were built alongside the older routes, and the name New Utrecht continued to live on.

Eventually, New Utrecht Avenue became one of the major north-south streets in the area. The elevated train tracks that once ran above the street were later replaced by the subway line we know today, but the old name remained.

So when you’re driving or walking down New Utrecht Avenue today, remember its a name that dates back not merely to the days when Boro Park was developing, but to a Dutch settlement established more than 350 years ago.

The old Town of New Utrecht left more than just its own name behind. As roads were built and improved, they connected the growing communities of Brooklyn to important destinations beyond them. One of those destinations was a military fort on the shore of New York Harbor. That fort was Fort Hamilton.

Today, we know the name from the street, Fort Hamilton Parkway. But how did the name of a military installation become the name of one of our most familiar streets? That’s the story we’ll uncover next week.