Brighton Beach

Brighton Beach is a community on Coney Iceland in the southern part of the Borough of Brooklyn, New York City. It currently has an estimated population of 150,000.

Brighton Beach is bounded by the municipality of Coney Iceland in the west, Manhattan Beach to the east and the Atlantic Ocean to the south.

History

Brighton Beach was founded in 1878 as a beach resort and named after the famous English seaside resort of Brighton. The center of the resort was the large Hotel Brighton (or Brighton Beach Hotel), placed on the part of the beach, which is the terminal portion of Coney Iceland Avenue today, and was accessible via Brooklyn, Flatbush and Coney Iceland Railway, then as now also known as the Brighton Beach Line, which went into operation on September 2, 1878.

In the following years, a horse and a dog race track, a vaudeville, theaters and casinos were built.

1907, the Brighton Beach Baths were opened, two years later, the New Brighton Theatre. Unfortunately, the baths were destroyed by a fire in 1911, another fire in 1919, which ran from Brighton Beach Hotel, then cremated the majority of the once great summer community. But in the same year, the first Yiddish theater was built, and the New Brighton Theatre was made famous by the performances of George Jessel, Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, Will Rogers, Adele and Fred Astaire, the Marx Brothers and Douglas Fairbanks. The Brighton Beach Baths were also rebuilt and had their weddings in the 1950s and 1960s, up to 10,000 members.

Brighton Beach was then 1920 re-designed to be tight to be colonized community for residents, in particular by the Brighton Beach railway has been transformed into a modern underground line of the New York Subway system. 1938 bought the building contractor Robert Moses the entire beach ( about eight kilometers) from private owners for $ 75,000 and donated it to the city of New York.

The first newcomers were refugees who were able to successfully escape the repression of the European fascism in the 1930s and 1940s. The community is, however, now mostly of Russian, Ukrainian and Jewish immigrants, who immigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States since the early 20th century Russia, and later in the 1970s and 1980s. The street scene in Brighton Beach is today dominated by the many Russian restaurants and grocery stores, which the district also earned the nickname Little Odessa. Apart from Russian immigrants but also to this day many Georgians, Armenians, Pakistanis, Afghans, Poland, Turks and Hispanics are drawn. Brighton Beach is reputed to have due to this particular multicultural influence similarities to Manhattan's Chinatown.

In the media

Brighton Beach is also present in the media. In films such as Little Odessa, Requiem for a Dream or Lord of War - Merchants of Death Brighton Beach was one of the central locations. In the computer game Grand Theft Auto IV and played a big part of the action in the virtual Brighton Beach, which bears the name of " Hove Beach " there.