Midwood - A Diverse Brooklyn Neighborhood

Midwood is noted for having one of the largest number of single-family, detached homes in Brooklyn as well as 18,000 shade trees. Its gracious two-story homes with deep front porches and luscious lawns were developed after the turn of the 20th Century when residents discovered the area following the expansion of the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit line in 1908 and the Interborough Rapid Transit line in 1920. The neighborhood also features two-family homes and multifamily walkups.

Midwood's residents are a mixture of Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, and immigrants from China, Haiti, Guyana, Jamaica, Iran, Pakistan, and India. Synagogues have been opened and on residential streets and at least a dozen yeshivas are in operation. Many retail stores on the commercial strips, which offer kosher restaurants, delis, pizzerias, butchers, and bakeries, and more sophisticated retail shops, observe the Jewish Sabbath and close at sundown on Friday through sundown on Saturday. To accommodate the influx of Muslims, primarily from Pakistan, a large mosque opened in 1982.

The area's hidden history includes a brush with the burgeoning motion picture business. Between 1906 and 1915, the Vitagraph film company made silent movies at its studio starring such greats as Rudolph Valentino and Norma Talmadge and directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Vitagraph's second, Hollywood-based studio was acquired by Warner Brothers. Later part of the Midwood studio was purchased by NBC television and used in the 1950s to produce The Steve Allen Show, The Perry Como Show, and Mary Martin starring in Peter Pan, and for three decades the soap opera Another World was filmed there. A Jewish girls' day school, the Shulamith School for Girls, is now located on the site.

Brooklyn College, which the Princeton Review called the “most beautiful campus in the country,” opened in 1937 at the northern border of Midwood. In recent years Brooklyn College opened a new library and began construction on a new building to house a state-of-the-art physical education and athletics facility and consolidate student services in one location. Brooklyn College also is the location for the Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts, which offers first-rate musical and dance performances throughout the year. The area high schools include Edward R. Murrow High School, James Madison High School in nearby Sheepshead Bay, and Midwood High School, the high school from which Woody Allen graduated, is in Flatbush a block from Brooklyn College.