On a Sunday morning on Church Avenue, the smell reaches you before the shopfronts do: butter and flour from a patty oven, then the sharp green note of parsley being chopped for epis. Somewhere a radio is running in Kreyol, loud enough to carry across the pavement. The Haitians in East Flatbush have been shaping this stretch of central Brooklyn for sixty years, and they have done it without a single monument, mostly through storefronts, church basements, and a radio transmitter above a shop.
The Place
East Flatbush runs from Empire Boulevard and Crown Heights in the north down to the Bay Ridge rail cut and Canarsie in the south, with Brownsville and East 98th Street on its eastern edge and New York Avenue marking the border with Flatbush proper. It is not one neighbourhood so much as three stitched together: Erasmus in the west, Farragut in the middle, Remsen Village and Rugby in the east.
The housing is mostly two and three storey brick and limestone rowhouses on numbered East streets and lettered avenues, built for a white working class that has been gone for two generations. Three hospitals anchor it, all clustered around Clarkson Avenue.
The 2010 census counted 135,619 people here, of whom 88.7 percent were Black and roughly half were born outside the United States. It is the largest West Indian neighbourhood in New York, and within it, Haitians are the single biggest group. In Brooklyn Community District 17, which covers most of East Flatbush, Haitian Creole is the most common non-English language spoken at home, in just under 15,000 households.
How It Became Haitian
The Duvalier exiles, 1957 to 1970
When François Duvalier took power in Haiti in 1957 and began dismantling every institution that might oppose him, the people who left first were the ones with the most to lose. Doctors, teachers, lawyers, journalists, civil servants, mostly from Port-au-Prince, urban and educated and not intending to stay away long.
Most landed in Manhattan, on the Upper West Side, in the same blocks that had absorbed other political exiles. It was meant to be temporary. Duvalier died in 1971 and his son took over, and the temporary arrangement became permanent.
Crossing the river, 1965 to 1980
Brooklyn pulled them for the reason Brooklyn has always pulled people: you could get more room for less money. White flight was emptying Flatbush and East Flatbush of the Jewish and Italian families who had filled it before 1950, and landlords who had spent a decade refusing Black tenants suddenly had vacancies they could not fill.
The manufacturing jobs helped too. The Brooklyn Navy Yard, the Red Hook waterfront and the factory belt along Third Avenue were all reachable on the Nostrand Avenue line.
A second wave followed through the 1970s, less credentialled: people born in the provinces who had passed through Port-au-Prince before leaving, then people straight from the countryside. They went into hospital work, home care, car service and the small trades. The exiles had made the beachhead. The second wave made the neighbourhood.
The commercial spine
By the early 1980s three avenues carried the whole thing. Nostrand, Church and Flatbush filled with Haitian groceries, bakeries, dry cleaners, money transfer agencies and taxi bases, all competing for the same clientele. Nostrand became the address you gave when you meant the community rather than the map.
The geography is worth being precise about. Nostrand runs a block west of the East Flatbush boundary, so the shopping strip technically sits in Flatbush while the households it serves spread east across New York Avenue, Brooklyn Avenue, Utica and out towards Remsen Village. East Flatbush is where Haitians live. Nostrand is where they shop.
1990: the year of two fights
In January 1990 a Haitian woman named Ghiselaine Félissaint said she had been searched and assaulted by staff at Family Red Apple, a Korean-owned grocery at 1823 Church Avenue. The store denied it. What followed was an eighteen-month boycott that split the borough and consumed the attention of two mayors. It ended only when the owner sold his lease.
Three months later came a fight that united rather than divided. In February the Food and Drug Administration had barred anyone born in Haiti or sub-Saharan Africa from donating blood, treating a passport as evidence of infection. On 20 April 1990, more than 50,000 Haitians shut down the Brooklyn Bridge, having come out of Flatbush, East Flatbush, Cambria Heights, and Newark. The ban was lifted that December.
Building institutions, 1990 to 2010
The blood ban years taught the community that it needed its own megaphone. Radio Soleil went on the air in 1992 out of a storefront at 1622 Nostrand Avenue, broadcasting in Kreyol and French, and it has functioned ever since as a town square with a transmitter. In October 1999 Garry Pierre-Pierre, who had just left the New York Times, launched The Haitian Times as an English-language weekly for the second generation.
The churches multiplied at the same rate. Bishop Philius H. Nicolas established the Evangelical Crusade of Fishers of Men in February 1973, and by the 2000s Haitian Baptist, Pentecostal and Evangelical congregations filled Remsen Avenue and the lettered avenues by the dozen.
Then, on 12 January 2010, the earthquake. Hundreds of Haitian New Yorkers stood on the pavement outside Radio Soleil waiting for names, because the station had lines into Port-au-Prince that the networks did not. Director Ricot Dupuy later described teenagers effectively running the studio while he fed information to the national press.
Recognition, 2007 to 2021
Political representation arrived late. Mathieu Eugene won a special election in 2007 to become the first Haitian-born member of the New York City Council, holding the 40th District seat until the end of 2021. In 2018 the city designated a Little Haiti business and cultural district running from East 16th Street to Brooklyn Avenue, between Church Avenue and Avenue H, and co-named the Nostrand and Newkirk junction Toussaint Louverture Boulevard. On 15 November 2021 the subway stop itself became Newkirk Avenue-Little Haiti.
The Landmarks
Radio Soleil, 1622 Nostrand Avenue. A narrow storefront studio that has broadcast in Kreyol since 1992 and become the default emergency service for Haitian Brooklyn. After the 2010 earthquake, crowds stood outside on the pavement for days, listening for names read on air.
Newkirk Avenue-Little Haiti station, Newkirk Avenue at Nostrand. Renamed on 15 November 2021 after a campaign led by Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn. The surface junction above it carries a second sign reading Toussaint Louverture Boulevard, for the general who led the revolution that made Haiti.
Immaculee Bakery, 1411 Nostrand Avenue. A mom-and-pop patty counter turning out beef, chicken and cod patties in flaky Haitian pastry, plus pain patate and sweet breads. There is a second Immaculee down the avenue at 1227 Nostrand, which tells you something about demand.
Haitian-American Community Coalition, 3807 Church Avenue. Founded during the years when a Haitian passport was treated as an HIV diagnosis, the coalition has run testing, counselling and linkage-to-care out of East Flatbush ever since. Its waiting room is one of the few places in Brooklyn where the whole intake conversation happens in Kreyol.
Life of Hope, 4123 Avenue D. Started in 2006 for Haitian and other immigrant households in central Brooklyn, it has served more than 65,000 residents. In 2025 it bought an 18,000 square foot warehouse on Avenue D for 12 million dollars, an unusual thing for a Haitian nonprofit to own outright.
Kings County Hospital Center, 451 Clarkson Avenue. The public hospital that serves more than 800,000 people in central Brooklyn, and the single largest employer of Haitian nurses, aides and technicians in the borough. Generations of East Flatbush families have measured arrival by getting somebody onto that payroll.
Blueline Fry Plantain, 1610 Nostrand Avenue. Griot, tasso, legume and fried plantain served fast to people on their way somewhere. It sits a few doors from Radio Soleil, which means you can eat lunch within earshot of the argument you were listening to in the car.
Where They Came From
Brooklyn’s Haitians came overwhelmingly from Port-au-Prince and the towns, not the countryside. That is the crucial difference between here and Florida. The first New York cohort was the urban professional class fleeing Duvalier’s regime by aeroplane, with visas and qualifications and French.
The boat migration of 1977 to 1981, which brought some 60,000 Haitians ashore in south Florida, went mostly to Miami and pulled the diaspora’s centre of gravity southward. Brooklyn kept receiving arrivals by air and by family petition, which meant people with urban skills and relatives already here.
So the chain ran through households rather than villages. A nurse sponsored a sister, the sister brought a husband, and within a decade a Port-au-Prince neighbourhood had reassembled itself across twenty blocks of East Flatbush. Later waves came after the 1991 coup against Aristide, after the 2010 earthquake, and after the collapse of public order in the 2020s.
East Flatbush Today
Every May the neighbourhood turns red and blue. Haitian Flag Day on 18 May marks the tearing of the French tricolour in 1803, and Nostrand Avenue is one of the few streets the NYPD will close for it. The Haitian Culture Day parade comes down from Church Avenue to Flatbush Junction behind a rara band, past the same bakeries and money transfer windows that have been there since the eighties.
The economics are harder than the parades suggest. Median per capita income sits near 37,000 dollars and roughly one resident in five lives below the poverty line. Rents have climbed as displacement pushes east out of Flatbush and Crown Heights, and the Caribbean homeowners who bought limestone rowhouses in the seventies are now the ones being courted, or harassed, by buyers.
And 2026 has been brutal. Temporary Protected Status for Haiti ended on 27 July, stripping work authorisation from an estimated 40,000 Haitian TPS holders in New York City. Restaurants on Nostrand have laid off half their kitchens. Nurses warn of a care shortage. Parents are skipping medical appointments and keeping children home from summer programmes. Officials have been canvassing Little Haiti with know-your-rights leaflets since August.
What has not changed is the density of the thing. The bakeries still open at six. Radio Soleil still takes calls. The churches on Remsen Avenue still fill on Sunday. East Flatbush has absorbed a dictatorship, a blood libel, a boycott, an earthquake and now a legal cliff edge, and it is still the largest Haitian neighbourhood in the United States by any measure that counts households rather than headlines.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where exactly is the Haitian neighbourhood in Brooklyn?
The Haitians in East Flatbush occupy the residential blocks east of New York Avenue, roughly from Empire Boulevard down to the Canarsie line, while the commercial strip runs along Nostrand, Church and Flatbush Avenues just to the west. The city’s designated Little Haiti district covers East 16th Street to Brooklyn Avenue, between Church Avenue and Avenue H.
When did Haitians start moving to East Flatbush?
The first wave arrived in New York after François Duvalier seized power in 1957, settling initially on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. They began crossing into Flatbush and East Flatbush in the mid-1960s, drawn by cheaper housing left behind by departing Jewish and Italian families and by factory jobs reachable on the Nostrand Avenue subway.
Why is Nostrand Avenue important to Haitian Brooklyn?
Nostrand became the community’s commercial spine in the 1970s and 1980s, lined with Haitian bakeries, groceries, taxi bases and money transfer offices. It hosts the annual Haitian Flag Day celebrations on 18 May, and its junction with Newkirk Avenue is co-named Toussaint Louverture Boulevard.
What is Little Haiti BK and when was it created?
Little Haiti is a business and cultural district that New York City designated in 2018, recognising the highest concentration of Haitian-owned businesses in the city. In November 2021 the Newkirk Avenue subway station was formally renamed Newkirk Avenue-Little Haiti after a campaign by Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn.
How many Haitians live in East Flatbush?
Precise ancestry counts are hard to pin down, but Haitian Creole is the most common non-English household language in Brooklyn Community District 17, spoken in nearly 15,000 households. Brooklyn as a whole has the largest Haitian population of any county in New York State.
Is the Haitian community in East Flatbush still growing?
It is under real strain. The Haitians in East Flatbush lost Temporary Protected Status on 27 July 2026, affecting an estimated 40,000 people in New York City, and businesses along Nostrand Avenue have reported layoffs and quieter streets since. The institutions, churches, radio stations and nonprofits remain firmly rooted.
The Haitian story here does not stand alone. It sits beside the Jamaicans who built their own Flatbush, the Barbadians who reached East Flatbush a generation earlier and the Trinidadians of Crown Heights. The same migration produced Haitian Mattapan in Boston and Little Haiti in Miami, while the Garifuna of the South Bronx and the Irish of Inwood show the same pattern in other hands.
If your family’s story passed through East Flatbush, or any of the places Haitians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a Port-au-Prince street corner in the Duvalier years to a limestone rowhouse east of New York Avenue, to wherever you are now.