NEW WEEKLY SERIES: It’s All in the Name: Borough Park

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.

Today, the name Borough Park is so familiar that it is hard to imagine our neighborhood being called anything else. But the name is actually only a little over a century old.

In the late 1800s, the area that is now Boro Park was still largely farmland, and it was part of the old Town of New Utrecht. As Brooklyn expanded, developers began turning the farmland into residential neighborhoods.

One of the first developments in the area was created in 1887 by Electus B. Litchfield, who built a small cottage community and called it Blythebourne. The name was derived from Scottish words meaning “happy home.”

A few years later, developer and former state senator William H. Reynolds acquired large portions of the surrounding land and began developing a much larger neighborhood. By 1902, the name Borough Park had been adopted for the new development. 

The name was a fitting one for a neighborhood that was being built as part of the growing borough of Brooklyn. Over the following decades, Borough Park expanded and Blythebourne was eventually absorbed into the larger neighborhood. By the mid-1920s, Blythebourne had largely disappeared as a separate name.

But it never disappeared completely. The old name can still be found today at the Blythebourne Post Office branch, a small reminder of the neighborhood that existed here before the name Boro Park became the one everyone knew. 

And even before Blythebourne, this land was part of New Utrecht, one of the original towns of Kings County, established by Dutch settlers in the 1600s. That name remains very much a part of the neighborhood we know today - and we’ll get to that story next week.