Ask a historian: How did Brighton Beach become its own neighborhood?
Steven from Brighton Beach asks: “How did Brighton Beach develop into a separate neighborhood?”
Actually, Steven, Brighton Beach was the original Coney Island, as we know it. Before the neighborhood developed as a bathing beach, it was an island divided into sections: West End (Sea Gate), West Brighton (Coney Island), Brighton Beach and Manhattan Beach.
In 1868, after the Civil War, William Engeman visited his brother who owned a restaurant in Brooklyn. Engeman had been a sailor and a cook but also a sutler who sold horses and mules to the armies on both sides in the war. On a visit to the ocean, he found the middle division of the island was for sale, if you knew the right people: William Stillwell and John McKane. Money changed hands and in 1875, the Engeman Pier and Bathhouse rose on the waterfront, followed by his Ocean Hotel.
Other projects soon materialized: the West Brighton Hotel built by Paul Bauer in 1876, the Hotel Brighton in 1878 and the Brighton Beach Bathing Pavilion in 1881. Investors sat up and began to take notice. So in 1877, Engeman sold his beachfront property.