The Hunterfly Road Houses of Weeksville

Off Bergen Street, between Buffalo and Rochester Avenues, four modest wooden houses stand along a surviving stretch of Hunterfly Road, a route older than the street grid around it. They are among the last visible pieces of Weeksville, a community that grew after James Weeks, a free Black man, bought land here in 1838, eleven years after slavery ended in New York State. By the 1850s Weeksville had around 500 residents, with its own churches, a school, businesses and a newspaper, the Freedman's Torchlight. As Brooklyn grew around it, the village was absorbed into what became Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant, and by the 1960s it was largely forgotten. In 1968 the historian James Hurley and the engineer and pilot Joseph Haynes went looking for it, found the houses, and with local residents and Pratt students set about saving them. They became city landmarks in 1970 and are now the heart of the Weeksville Heritage Center.