On any December night, the streets between 11th and 13th Avenues in the low 80s glow like a fairground. Forty-foot inflatable Santas, motorised toy soldiers, nativity scenes the size of garden sheds: this is the spectacle the world knows. What fewer visitors realise is that the lights are the loud, joyful surface of something quieter and older. The Italians in Dyker Heights built this neighbourhood block by block over three generations, and the bulbs are simply how a proud, house-loving community says Buon Natale to anyone who will look.
The Place
Dyker Heights sits in the south-west corner of Brooklyn, roughly bounded by 7th and 14th Avenues and running from 65th Street down to Bay Ridge Parkway, with the Belt Parkway tracing its western edge near the harbour. It is residential to its core: detached and semi-detached houses on generous lots, front gardens, driveways, the kind of space that is rare in New York City. The neighbourhood is profiled in detail on Wikipedia.
The land was first bought in 1643 by the colonist Anthony Jansen van Salee and farmed for the better part of two centuries. Developers turned it into a planned suburb of substantial homes around the turn of the twentieth century, which is why the housing stock here still feels grander and greener than the dense rows of neighbouring Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge.
To the south lies Dyker Beach Park and its 18-hole municipal golf course, one of the oldest public courses in the country, giving the neighbourhood a rare expanse of open green by the water.
How It Became Italian
Dyker Heights did not begin as an Italian neighbourhood. For its first decades it was a comfortable, mixed enclave of Scandinavian and Irish families who had moved out from the older parts of Bay Ridge and Sunset Park once the subway lines under 4th Avenue and along New Utrecht Avenue made the trip to Manhattan possible.
The first arrivals, 1920s and 1930s
Italians were nearby long before they were numerous here. The great wave of Southern Italian immigration between 1880 and 1924 had filled the tenements of Manhattan’s Little Italy and then spilled across the East River into Brooklyn, settling thickly in Red Hook, Carroll Gardens and, above all, Bensonhurst. The pattern was the same one that filled Italian enclaves across the New York region, from the Italian families of Whitestone in Queens to the long-settled Italian community of Throgs Neck in the Bronx.
From those crowded streets, the most established families began looking for room to breathe. Dyker Heights, just to the west, had the room. By the 1930s a steady trickle of Italian households had crossed into the neighbourhood, and they brought their institutions with them. The Shrine Church of Saint Bernadette, founded around 1935 on 13th Avenue between 82nd and 83rd Streets, was built in large part by these early Italian-American residents and remains a parish anchor today.
The postwar tide, 1940s and 1950s
The transformation happened after the Second World War. The 1940s and 1950s brought a decisive influx of Italian immigrants and, more often, their American-born children, many of them returning servicemen able to buy a house for the first time through the mortgage guarantees of the GI Bill.
The appeal was obvious. A family that had grown up sharing a walk-up in Bensonhurst could now own a free-standing home with a garage, a garden and a little distance between itself and the neighbours. For Italian-American families who measured success in property and proximity to kin, Dyker Heights was close enough to walk back to the old block and far enough to feel like an arrival. The same postwar instinct carried other families further out, to the Italian community of Hawthorne in Westchester and across the Hudson to the Italians of Bloomfield and Clifton in New Jersey.
Around the new homeowners grew the businesses that still define the commercial spine of the neighbourhood. Family-run bakeries, pork stores, pastry shops and restaurants opened along 13th Avenue and 86th Street, run by people who knew their customers by name and by parish.
A settled enclave, 1960s onward
By the 1950s the neighbourhood had solidified into one of Brooklyn’s most stable Italian-American communities, and it stayed that way for the rest of the century. Children went to the parish schools, married within the neighbourhood or close to it, and frequently bought a house a few streets from their parents.
It was into this settled, house-proud, churchgoing community that the tradition which made Dyker Heights famous was born. In 1986 a resident named Lucy Spata decorated her home at 1152 84th Street with an extravagant display of Christmas lights, illuminated soldiers and choirboys, in honour of her late mother. Some neighbours grumbled at first. Then, in the most Dyker Heights way imaginable, they competed.
What had been one woman’s act of devotion became a friendly arms race of light, and then a phenomenon. Today the displays draw well over 100,000 visitors each December, with tour buses rolling in from across the city. The community’s Catholic sensibility shows in the details: many families still hold back the figure of the infant Jesus from their nativity scenes until Christmas Day itself.
The Landmarks
Shrine Church of Saint Bernadette, 13th Avenue between 82nd and 83rd Streets. Founded around 1935, this Roman Catholic parish was raised largely by the neighbourhood’s first Italian-American families and remains the spiritual heart of Dyker Heights. Its feast-day processions and parish life set the rhythm of the year for generations of residents.
Colandrea New Corner, 7201 Eighth Avenue. Opened in 1936 by Vincenzo and Theresa Colandrea as a one-room pizzeria, New Corner grew into a beloved three-room white-tablecloth institution famous for veal parmigiana and baked clams. Run by the family for 84 years, it finally closed in 2020 after the pandemic, a closure reported across Brooklyn and mourned throughout the borough.
La Villa Pizzeria, 1529 86th Street. A fixture of the 86th Street dining corridor, La Villa is the kind of family pizzeria where Sunday lines form out the door. It anchors the stretch where Italian-American Dyker Heights still eats out, orders catering trays for First Communions and gathers after Mass.
Grandma’s Bakery, 7208 13th Avenue. A from-scratch bakery on the avenue that has changed little in decades, turning out the classic Italian sweets, lard bread, sfogliatelle and cannoli that mark every holiday table in the neighbourhood. Its consistency is the point: regulars order the same things their parents ordered.
B & A Pork Store, 7907 13th Avenue. A traditional salumeria of the kind that once lined Italian-American Brooklyn, where the sausage is made in house and the cured meats hang in the window. For a community that cooks seriously, the pork store is as essential an institution as the church.
Dyker Beach Park and Golf Course, near the Belt Parkway. The green lung of the neighbourhood, with one of the oldest public golf courses in the United States stretching toward the harbour. On weekends its paths and ballfields fill with the families who give the neighbourhood its name.
The Christmas Lights, around 84th Street between 11th and 13th Avenues. Not a single address but a district of devotion, this cluster of blocks is where the December displays reach their dazzling peak, anchored by the original Spata house at 1152 84th Street. It is the neighbourhood’s gift to the city, and its loudest expression of Italian-American identity.
Where They Came From
The Italians who built Dyker Heights came overwhelmingly from the Mezzogiorno, the south of Italy. The great migration that began in the 1880s drew first from Calabria, Campania, Apulia and Basilicata, and after 1900 increasingly from Sicily, as drought, poor soil, heavy taxes and rural poverty pushed families to seek work across the Atlantic.
They did not arrive in Dyker Heights directly. They came through the older Italian quarters of Brooklyn, especially Bensonhurst and the streets of southern Brooklyn, where chain migration had reassembled whole villages. Families moved to blocks recommended by paesani, people from the same town, so that an apartment building might be filled with neighbours who had been neighbours in Sicily or Calabria.
Dyker Heights was the next step up that ladder. The move there was a move within the Brooklyn Italian world, not out of it: a few blocks west, a generation on, into a house with a garden but the same parish, the same dialects and the same Sunday table. It is a journey that echoes across the suburbs the same generation reached for, from the Italian families of Howard Beach to the Italian neighbourhoods of Staten Island and the Italian community of New Rochelle in Westchester.
Dyker Heights Today
Dyker Heights is changing, as every New York neighbourhood does. The 2010 census counted around 42,400 residents, and by 2020 the Asian population, largely Chinese, had grown to surpass the white population for the first time. The bakeries and pork stores of 13th Avenue now share the street with Chinese groceries and restaurants, and the schools reflect a far more mixed neighbourhood than the one of 1960.
Yet the Italian-American character has not vanished so much as concentrated. Self-reported Italian heritage still runs strong block by block, the parishes endure, and the family restaurants and pasticcerie that survive do steady business. The closure of New Corner in 2020 was felt as a genuine loss precisely because so much else has held.
And every December, the neighbourhood reasserts itself in the brightest possible terms. The lights go up, the buses arrive, and the houses that postwar Italian families bought with GI Bill mortgages blaze for the city to see. It is, in the end, a very Italian-American statement: the home is everything, and the home should be magnificent.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Italians in Dyker Heights?
The Italians in Dyker Heights arrived chiefly after the Second World War, moving west from crowded Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge to buy the spacious single-family houses the neighbourhood offered, often with GI Bill mortgages. By the 1950s it had become one of Brooklyn’s most stable Italian-American enclaves, and it has stayed strongly Italian in character ever since.
When did the Dyker Heights Christmas lights tradition begin?
The modern tradition dates to 1986, when resident Lucy Spata covered her home at 1152 84th Street with an elaborate display in honour of her late mother. Neighbours soon joined in, turning the blocks around 84th Street into the famous spectacle that now draws well over 100,000 visitors each December.
What are the boundaries of Dyker Heights?
Dyker Heights sits in south-west Brooklyn, roughly between 7th and 14th Avenues and running from 65th Street to Bay Ridge Parkway, with the Belt Parkway and Dyker Beach Park forming its western and southern edges. It lies just west of Bensonhurst and south-east of Bay Ridge.
Where did the Italians in Dyker Heights come from?
Most trace their roots to Southern Italy, the regions of Sicily, Calabria, Campania, Apulia and Basilicata, which sent the great wave of Italian emigrants to America between 1880 and the 1920s. The Italians in Dyker Heights generally reached the neighbourhood by way of older Brooklyn Italian quarters such as Bensonhurst rather than directly from Italy.
Is Dyker Heights still an Italian neighbourhood?
It remains strongly Italian-American in character, with enduring parishes, bakeries and family restaurants, though it is increasingly diverse. By the 2020 census the Asian population had grown to surpass the white population, so today Dyker Heights is best described as a historically Italian neighbourhood that is now shared with a large and growing Chinese community.
What Italian landmarks can you visit in Dyker Heights?
The Shrine Church of Saint Bernadette on 13th Avenue is the spiritual anchor, while 13th Avenue and 86th Street remain lined with Italian bakeries, pork stores and pizzerie such as Grandma’s Bakery and La Villa. In December, the Christmas light displays around 84th Street are the neighbourhood’s most famous attraction.
If your family’s story passed through Dyker Heights, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in Calabria or Sicily to a tenement in Bensonhurst, to a house with a garden and a blaze of Christmas lights in Brooklyn, to wherever you are now.