Hunterfly Road Historic District

Four small wood-frame houses on Bergen Street in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood sit along a surviving fragment of Hunterfly Road, a seventeenth-century route that once linked farms with Jamaica Bay. Most of the surrounding land was leveled and fitted to the street grid in the 1880s, yet these lots and the old right-of-way were kept. The house at 1702-04 Bergen Street, a one-story double house dating to about 1830, is believed to be the oldest. The houses at 1698 and 1700 were built around 1883-1886. The fourth house, at 1706-08, burned and was replaced in 1993 by a replica, so it is counted as non-contributing. All four were later owned by one owner and rented to tenants. The group is tied to the nineteenth-century African American community of Weeksville and preserves evidence of early Brooklyn settlement that is otherwise absent from the modern streetscape. Restorations in the 1980s altered windows, roofs, and interiors. The district includes three contributing buildings and the road right-of-way as a contributing structure.