Weeksville Heritage Center
158 Buffalo Avenue | Crown Heights | built 2012
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The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1968
Weeksville is rediscovered in 1968 through a Pratt workshop led by James Hurley
In 1968 a Pratt Neighborhood College workshop led by James Hurley launched the search for Weeksville; Hurley had read about the community in a local history book. Hurley and Joseph Haynes, a pilot and engineer, later flew over the area and photographed the old houses on Hunterfly Road. The two had met at the Brooklyn Children's Museum.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1970
Five founders start the society that would become the Weeksville Heritage Center
In 1970 Joan Maynard, Patricia Johnson, James Hurley, Dolores McCullough and Dewey Harley founded the preservation group under the name Society for the Preservation of Weeksville and Bedford Stuyvesant. It later became the Weeksville Heritage Center, which today offers public-school students tours, crafts, literacy and preservation programs.
“Founding members of the preservation group were James Hurley, Dewey Harley, Dolores McCullough, Joan Maynard, and Patricia Johnson.”
Source: Wikipedia
- 1973
The Weeksville Society buys the Hunterfly Road houses
In 1973 the Weeksville Society, which residents had gradually built from the Weeksville Project into a legally incorporated group, bought the Hunterfly Road houses. Rehabilitation work on them took place in the 1980s and again in the 1990s after vandalism, and a fire in that decade destroyed one of them.
Source: Wikipedia
- 2005
The restored houses reopen to the public as the Weeksville Heritage Center
After a $3 million restoration, the Hunterfly Road houses reopened to the public in 2005 as the Weeksville Heritage Center. The houses represent different periods of Weeksville history, from an 1860s single-story double house to a house where one family lived from 1923 to 1968.
“In 2005, following a $3 million restoration, the houses reopened to the public as the Weeksville Heritage Center. Each house showcases a different era of Weeksville history.”
Source: Wikipedia
- 2014
Caples Jefferson Architects design a new museum building that opens in 2014
Caples Jefferson Architects designed the Heritage Center's new museum building, which opened in 2014. The expansion, completed in 2013 and financed almost entirely with city money, included 19,000 square feet of performance and educational space with a cafe and library. The $14 million project was meant to raise annual visitors from about 7,500 to 50,000.
“Caples Jefferson Architects designed a new museum building that opened in 2014.”
Source: Wikipedia
- 2019
Weeksville raises $350,000 in an emergency drive and joins the city's Cultural Institutions Group
In 2019 the center launched an emergency crowdfunding campaign over budget shortfalls, asking for at least $200,000 and ultimately receiving $350,000. That June the city announced it would join the Cultural Institutions Group; no new institution had been added to the group for more than two decades, and it was the first Black cultural center in Brooklyn so named. The status lets the Department of Cultural Affairs fund its operating costs.
“…the center would become part of the city's Cultural Institutions Group, becoming the first new addition to that group in over 20 years…”
Source: Wikipedia
Further reading
- Weeksville_Heritage_CenterWikipedia
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