They called it Bajan Brooklyn. Not on any subway map, and not on any street sign, but for the better part of a century, if you walked the avenues of central Brooklyn and heard a particular lilt, soft, clipped, unmistakably British in its cadence, you had found the largest community of Barbadians anywhere outside the island itself. The smell of salt bread from a corner bakery. A grandmother counting out her share of a savings club at the kitchen table. This is the story of how the people of a tiny coral island built a home in East Flatbush.
East Flatbush: The Place
East Flatbush sits in central Brooklyn, bordered by Crown Heights to the north, Flatbush to the west, and Canarsie to the south. Its spine runs along three commercial corridors: Utica Avenue, Nostrand Avenue, and Church Avenue, where small independent shops have long catered to a Caribbean clientele.
The housing is mostly low-rise: brick rowhouses, two-family homes, and the brownstones that became central to the immigrant story here. The IRT subway, with the 2 and 5 trains running under Nostrand Avenue and along New York Avenue, stitched the neighbourhood to the rest of the borough. It is, above all, a residential, owner-occupied, working- and middle-class district.
How East Flatbush Became Bajan
Before the Barbadians
For most of the nineteenth century, Flatbush was farmland and Dutch settlement, dotted with old colonial homesteads like the Wyckoff House. As the elevated and subway lines pushed east in the early twentieth century, developers filled the open lots with rowhouses and apartment buildings.
The first residents of those new blocks were largely Jewish, Italian, and Irish families moving out from older, denser parts of Brooklyn. The Caribbean wave that would define East Flatbush came later, and it came in two distinct chapters.
The Barbadians Arrive
The first chapter began before there were many Barbadians in Flatbush at all, on a steamer leaving Bridgetown. On 18 January 1905, hundreds of Barbadian men sailed for Panama to dig the canal. Over the next decade roughly 45,000 Barbadians, around a quarter of the island’s population, made that journey.
They sent home more than a million dollars in wages, money that islanders called “Panama money.” For many families, that hard isthmus labour became the first seed capital of a longer migration, the savings that paid for the next passage north. Between 1900 and 1924, about 100,000 West Indians, Barbadians prominent among them, arrived in the United States, and they concentrated overwhelmingly in Brooklyn.
These early arrivals first clustered in Bedford-Stuyvesant and the western edge of Crown Heights, near the churches and the Fulton Street line. By 1970, roughly 73 percent of Barbadian immigrants in the country were living in Brooklyn. As families bought and outgrew those first homes, the community pressed steadily eastward into Flatbush and East Flatbush.
The second chapter opened with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which lifted the national-origin quotas that had throttled Caribbean migration for forty years. A fresh wave of Barbadians arrived through the late 1960s and 1970s, drawn by relatives already settled, decent schools, and the familiar rhythm of church on Sunday. Winston Lewis, who left Barbados in 1966, was one of them.
East Flatbush at Its Peak
By the 1980s and 1990s, East Flatbush had become the beating heart of Caribbean Brooklyn, and Barbadians were a defining thread in it. The avenues carried the sound of calypso and the smell of frying fish. Bakeries sold salt bread and currant slices, and barbershops and churches doubled as community centres.
The Bajan reputation was for thrift and home ownership above almost everything else. Many families ran a “meeting turn,” the informal rotating savings club known across the Caribbean as su-su or esusu, where each member contributed a fixed sum and took the whole pot in turn. It was a brownstone-buying machine built on trust rather than banks.
No one captured that drive better than the novelist Paule Marshall. Her 1959 book Brown Girl, Brownstones, drawn from her own Barbadian childhood in Brooklyn, follows the Boyce family and a mother, Silla, consumed by the dream of owning the brownstone they rent. It remains one of the first great portraits of Caribbean life in America, and its emotional engine is precisely that hunger for property and permanence.
The same ethic ran through the wider West Indian Brooklyn taking shape around it, from the Trinidadian masquerade camps that gave rise to the carnival culture of Crown Heights to the Jamaican strongholds that defined nearby Flatbush. Each island community pulled the next across, generation by generation.
The Change
The neighbourhood never emptied of West Indians, but the Bajan share of it thinned over time. Barbados is a small island, and its outflow was modest compared with Jamaica, Haiti, and Guyana, whose later and larger waves came to dominate the streetscape.
As the original Barbadian arrivals aged, some retired back to the island they had never stopped calling home, and their American-born children spread to Queens, Long Island, and beyond. The change was gradual rather than sudden, a quiet rebalancing rather than a rupture. Bajans remained, woven into a broader Caribbean fabric they had helped to weave first.
The Landmarks of Bajan East Flatbush
Culpepper’s, 1082 Nostrand Avenue. Opened in 1998 by Winston Lewis, who came from Barbados in 1966 and once played on the island’s first Olympic basketball team in 1962, Culpepper’s has served authentic Bajan food on the Nostrand corridor for more than 25 years. Its in-house bakery turns out salt bread, currant slices, jam puffs, and conkies, and its flying fish and cou cou, the national dish of Barbados, draw a steady crowd.
The Utica Avenue corridor. The strip along Utica Avenue, anchored by the Utica Avenue subway station, has long been a Caribbean main street of groceries, bakeries, and roti shops. For decades it was where Bajan households shopped for the ingredients of home.
The Church Avenue corridor. Running west toward Flatbush, Church Avenue forms part of the area now nicknamed “Little Caribbean,” a designation that took hold around 2017. It threads together the bakeries, restaurants, and storefronts that keep island cooking within walking distance.
Eastern Parkway and the West Indian Day Carnival. Just north of East Flatbush, Eastern Parkway hosts the West Indian American Day Carnival every Labor Day, a Caribbean spectacle drawing between one and three million people. Barbados marches under its own flag here, one island voice in the largest Caribbean gathering in North America.
Brooklyn Public Library, East Flatbush Branch. The neighbourhood branch on Linden Boulevard is the kind of civic anchor that the home-owning, education-minded Bajan families prized. Shirley Chisholm, raised in part on the island, often credited her strict Barbadian schooling for the discipline that carried her to Congress.
Q in the Community. Each summer the Barbadian government has sponsored Bajan social events around carnival season in Brooklyn, including the “Q in the Community” dance held at Nazareth High School on East 57th Street. It is one of several gatherings that bring a taste of Crop Over, the island’s three-month harvest festival, to a Brooklyn audience.
Where the East Flatbush Barbadians Came From
Barbados is small enough that its emigrants came from across the whole island, but the southern parishes feature heavily in the Brooklyn story. Ruby Seale, the mother of Shirley Chisholm, was born in Christ Church on the island’s south coast and reached New York in 1921. Chisholm herself spent ages five to nine on her grandmother Emaline Seale’s farm in the village of Vauxhall, in Christ Church, attending a one-room schoolhouse.
What pulled these families out was a crowded island with a stagnant sugar economy and few prospects, and what pulled them to Brooklyn was word of mouth and the steady tug of relatives already there. The Panama generation had shown that leaving could pay, and the path north simply extended the same logic. That same chain-migration instinct shaped other corners of the Caribbean Northeast, from the Guyanese who filled Richmond Hill in Queens to the Haitians who built a stronghold in Mattapan, Boston.
East Flatbush Today
East Flatbush is still the largest West Indian neighbourhood in New York, and one of the most Caribbean places in the United States. Recent estimates put the area at roughly 91 percent Black, with about half its residents foreign-born, the majority of them Caribbean. Barbadians are a smaller share now than Jamaicans or Haitians, but they remain present and rooted.
Compared with much of Brooklyn, the neighbourhood has resisted the sharpest edges of gentrification, held in place by owner-occupied homes and family-run businesses, the very things the Bajan savings clubs were built to secure. Pressure does creep in from Prospect Lefferts Gardens and Crown Heights, and long-time residents watch the rents. Yet the Sunday churches, the bakeries, and the carnival on the Parkway carry on.
You can still buy salt bread on Nostrand Avenue and hear that soft island cadence in a Flatbush queue. For a community that crossed an ocean on Panama money and bought its brownstones one meeting turn at a time, that is not the end of a story. It is the part where the next generation decides what to do with what was handed down.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Barbadians settle in East Flatbush, Brooklyn?
Barbadians in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, followed relatives already settled in central Brooklyn, drawn by affordable rowhouses, decent schools, and familiar churches. Early arrivals clustered in Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights, then moved east into Flatbush and East Flatbush as families bought homes and prospered.
Is East Flatbush still a Barbadian neighbourhood today?
East Flatbush is still overwhelmingly Caribbean and remains the largest West Indian neighbourhood in New York City. Barbadians are a smaller part of the mix now than Jamaicans, Haitians, or Guyanese, but the community persists through bakeries, restaurants, and churches along Nostrand, Utica, and Church Avenues.
What are the most famous Barbadian landmarks in East Flatbush?
Culpepper’s on Nostrand Avenue, open since 1998, is the best-known Bajan restaurant and bakery, serving flying fish, cou cou, salt bread, and conkies. The Utica and Church Avenue corridors anchor everyday Caribbean shopping, and Eastern Parkway hosts the West Indian American Day Carnival each Labor Day.
Where in Barbados did the East Flatbush Barbadians come from?
They came from across the small island, with the southern parish of Christ Church strongly represented. Shirley Chisholm’s mother, Ruby Seale, was born in Christ Church and emigrated in 1921, and Chisholm spent part of her childhood on a family farm in the Christ Church village of Vauxhall.
When did Barbadians first arrive in East Flatbush?
The earliest Barbadian migration to Brooklyn came between 1900 and 1924, often funded by “Panama money” earned building the canal, though those families first settled further west. The wave that populated East Flatbush itself grew after the Immigration Act of 1965 opened the door to a new generation through the late 1960s and 1970s.
If your family’s story passed through East Flatbush, or any of the places the Barbadians made home, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a one-room schoolhouse in Christ Church to a brownstone on Nostrand Avenue, to wherever you are now. Explore your story →
Sources include Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones and the biography of Shirley Chisholm.