Abandoned Crown Heights Road Has Storied History

Today, Clove Road in Crown Heights is an underused one-way street behind a grocery store parking lot, filled with empty shopping carts, litter and loose gravel.

But when Brooklyn was young, the street was a Native American “trail to Canarsie,” according to a local architect and community board member, Michael Cetera, who has studied the road’s history. Later, he said, it served as a key location in the Revolutionary War and became one of the first paved roads in the borough. In fact, cobblestones still cover a few yards of Clove Road, peeking out from under cracked asphalt.

“This road is packed with history,” he said. “It’s been abandoned for years.”

Cetera is working to commemorate Clove Road’s history with a large monument placed at the start of the two-block-long road at Montgomery Street. There, artist Kenichi Hiratsuka plans to carve the street’s story into a gigantic, 7-foot-tall boulder, inlaid with pictograms.

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10 Comments

  • CHLEAKS.COM

    Yes, the world must have been created from Clove Rd, after all, where was the road(s) leading up to Clove Rd.

  • Malbone

    Malbone also has a storied history, of the big subway crash, and the subsequent renaming of most of the street to Empire Boulevard.

  • Malbone St. resident

    What a fuss about nothing! The cars get ruined driving on that road with the old cobblestones, the kids call it ” the bumpy road”. It would be nice if they would just pave it like a regular road and have it nice and smooth like a regular street!!

  • Clove road once went........

    Clove road went all the way up till union street between ny & nostrand (empty lot near popack building).

  • e

    when i was a boy they knew all this. why would the city invest in our community!!!(hey certainly don’t protect us from crime). Now that the volchers are coming so will the city with its”” investment “” in their crown heights.

  • mbuh

    As a child I recall a stable on Clove and a Carvel on Empire before cholov yisrael was invented

  • MrsAdler

    #3
    if they paved it, then how will you explain the word “cobblestone” (think about it) to generation fb ???

  • to #9

    They’ll see what it is on fb or instagram sooner than they’ll trek some backroad tucked into a corner of brooklyn.