All Brooklyn neighborhoods should have as colorful a name as Pigtown.
This poor part of Flatbush seems to have been centered south of Empire Boulevard between Prospect Park and New York Avenue, where Prospect Lefferts Gardens and East Flatbush are today.
A lowland of roaming pigs, goats, and shanties, Pigtown had a lot of crime. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle archive (where the story above comes from) has clip after clip of arrests made there in the late 19th century.
The New York Times archive contains some gruesome stories of gangster murders in Pigtown, which was populated by Italian immigrants.
Like so many other rough neighborhoods in New York, Pigtown was cleaned up as the 20th century progressed.
[Above photo, from the NYPL digital collection: Flatbush Avenue and Maple Avenue, about 1920, after Pigtown was smoothed over]
One family who remained there until the 1950s: the Giulianis. Yep, Rudy lived the first years of his life in what was once Pigtown until his parents decamped to Long Island.
Nineteenth century Manhattan had a Pigtown too—a hardscrabble neighborhood known as the Piggery District.
Tags: Brooklyn, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Brooklyn in the 19th century, crime in Brooklyn, Flatbush Avenue, Flatbush Brooklyn history, New York Avenue Brooklyn, Pigtown, poor neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Rudy Giuliani Brooklyn
Ephemeral New York 
December 8, 2010 at 7:34 pm |
[…] an exploration of the extinct neighborhood of Pigtown, Brooklyn, home of a young Rudolph W. Giuliani. [Ephemeral New […]
December 9, 2010 at 12:36 am |
Actually, Pigtown was leveled in 1912 by Charles Hercules Ebbets, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, to build Ebbets Field. Of course from there Robert Moses leveled Ebbets Field and built the Ebbets Field Apartments on the site.
December 9, 2010 at 12:44 am |
Funny, when they razed the Polo Grounds, they put up the Polo Ground Towers. I guess old ballparks are memorialized by housing projects.
December 9, 2010 at 2:22 am |
William Caunitz wrote a police procedural set in the area called……
Pigtown
July 13, 2012 at 7:25 pm |
What is the date on the Brooklyn Eagle article?
July 13, 2012 at 8:08 pm |
October 23, 1902
http://eagle.brooklynpubliclibrary.org/Default/Skins/BEagle/Client.asp?Skin=BEagle
July 13, 2012 at 8:13 pm |
Thanks! But I couldn’t find this specific article in their archives. Was wondering if you guys just happen to know the year that this article was published?
July 13, 2012 at 8:15 pm
If you type in Pigtown, it comes up on the second page of the search results in their archive. The headline is “High Time In Pigtown”
July 13, 2012 at 8:23 pm
Got it, thanks!
September 11, 2014 at 5:14 am |
[…] ramshackle huts, and collapsing shanties made up the grounds of squatter villages with names like "Pigtown" and "Hard Lucksville". Rag pickers, bone boilers, and soap makers ejected from the general […]
June 26, 2015 at 9:39 am |
[…] a small neighborhood not-so-affectionately known as “Pigtown.” The area straddled what is now Prospect Lefferts Gardens and East Flatbush. It earned its moniker from its high density of pig farms, which filled the air with sounds and […]
February 25, 2018 at 9:38 pm |
The photograph of Flatbush Avenue & Maple STREET [NOT Avenue] shows the Lefferts house and can’t be later than 1918, when the family finished selling off the lots in their former farm and donated the 18th Century house to the City, after which it was moved to its present location in Prospect Park. The immediate neighborhood, named Lefferts Manor by residents who formed the Lefferts Manor Association in 1919, is considerably west of the old “Pigtown”
July 17, 2021 at 3:45 pm |
I was raised on the very edge of Pigtown at the corner of Midwood and Kingston. The item about Guiliani is in error. He did not move to Queens with his parents, rather he moved there with his mother after his parents divorced. His father remained in Pigtown where he was a local bookie and loanshark. He could at a local tavern and pizza joint at the corner of Kingston and Rutland Road now occupied by Wingate High School.