Mulch Delivery Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, NY

Brighton Beach is included in an area from Sheepshead Bay to Sea Gate that was purchased from the Native Americans in 1645 for a gun, a blanket and a kettle.

Brighton Beach was located on sandy terrain, and before development in the 1860s, had mostly farms. The area was part of the “Middle Division” of the town of Gravesend, which was the sole English settlement out of the original six towns in Brooklyn. By the mid-18th century, thirty-nine lots in the division had been distributed to the descendants of English colonists.

In 1868, William A. Engeman built a resort in the area. The resort was given the name “Brighton Beach” in 1878 by Henry C. Murphy and a group of businessmen, who chose the name as an allusion to the English resort city of Brighton. With the help of Gravesend’s surveyor William Stillwell, Engeman acquired all 39 lots for the relatively low cost of $20,000. This 460-by-210-foot (140 by 64 m) hotel, with rooms for up to 5,000 people nightly and meals for up to 20,000 people daily, was close to the then-rundown western Coney Island, so it was mostly the upper middle class that went to this hotel. The 400-foot (120 m), double-decker Brighton Beach Bathing Pavilion was also built nearby and opened in 1878, with the capacity for 1,200 bathers. “Hotel Brighton”, also known as the “Brighton Beach Hotel”, was situated on the beach at what is now the foot of Coney Island Avenue. The Brooklyn, Flatbush, and Coney Island Railway, the predecessor to the New York City Subway’s present-day Brighton Line, opened on July 2, 1878, and provided access to the hotel.