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Sunset Park is a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, originally known as South Brooklyn. Its notable features include Green-wood Cemetery, the Brooklyn Army Terminal, and the namesake city park, which is the highest point in Brooklyn and affords visitors views of Manhattan, New Jersey, and the Brooklyn Bridge. It is south of Park Slope and north of Bay Ridge.
In the heydey of the New York Harbor's dominance of North American shipping, Sunset Park grew rapidly, largely peopled with immigrants and their children, including the Irish, Polish, and Scandinavian. The neighborhood grew up around the Bush Terminal, a model industrial park completed in 1895, and continued to grow through World War 2, when the Brooklyn Army Terminal employed more than 10,000 civilians to ship 80% of all American supplies and troops.
After the war, with the rise of truck-based freight shipping, the growth of ports in New Jersey, the closing of the Army Terminal, and the decreasing importance of heavy industry in the American northeast, Sunset Park's fortunes began to decline. Families which had lived in the community for decades began moving out, and the neighborhood- composed largely modest but attractive of rowhouses- lost value. The construction of the Gowanus Expressway, in 1941, effectively cut the neighborhood off from the harbor, further wounding the area, in a fashion often associated with the expressway's builder, Robert Moses.
Sunset Park's second age began with a wave of immigration from Puerto Rico, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic, as well as other Latin American countries. By 1990, Hispanics comprised 50% of Sunset Park's population, rehabilitating property values and developing a thriving community. More recently, the neighborhood has attracted many East Asian immigrants, centered on a an area now known as Brooklyn Chinatown, where the city's third-largest Chinese community can be found.
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