Residents of this quaint beach community in southeastern Brooklyn were wise to choose “Gerritsen” from the lengthy moniker of the man whose legacy they commemorated.
Wolfert Gerritsen von Kouwenhoven (there are various spellings) was born in Amersfoort, the Netherlands, in 1579, and in 1625 was hired by the Dutch West India Company to manage some farms in the New World colony of New Netherland.
In 1629, the company offered a group of Dutch farmers 15,000 acres of land across the East River from New Amsterdam. The land included today’s Gerritsen Beach, the peninsula in southeastern Brooklyn that carries his name.
But it was a descendant of his, Hugh Gerritsen, who, in 1665, built a house and tidewater mill there on Gerritsen Creek, now part of Marine Park. The mill stood there until 1931, when it was destroyed by fire.
In the late 1800s, the area was still primarily rural except for some squatters’ bungalows. But investors soon saw its potential. In 1899, William C. Whitney, President Cleveland’s secretary of the Navy, bought 67 acres of land there, and others followed. It became a popular summer resort and boating community.
Its boundaries are Knapp Street and Shell Bank Creek on the west to Burnett Street and Gerritsen Avenue on the east, Avenue U on the north and Plumb Beach Channel on the south.
