Sheepshead Bay In Brooklyn, NY Walking Tour

Original Film Date: Monday June 23rd, 2025

I toured around Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, NY. Sheepshead Bay is a South Brooklyn neighborhood known for its local bay with the same name, the bay having piers and boats, old-school Italian restaurants, a big Russian community, a growing Chinese community on Avenue U, a Jewish community there, Central Asians, some Pakistanis, and a neighborhood that I grew up going to. I have been to Sheepshead Bay many times before and I still do every once in a while. I have went to this neighborhood for over a decade since 2009, when I was a young child. I attended high school not too far from here.

Sheepshead Bay is located next to Brighton Beach, Gravesend, Midwood, Gerritsen Beach, and Marine Park. It has a variety of local apartments with working class residents, middle class houses, condominiums (condos), now with some luxury apartments like Avalon Brooklyn Bay on Voorhies Ave, department stores, local family-owned businesses, restaurants, family-owned stores, and a melting pot of people from different cultures.

The name "Sheepshead Bay" originated in the bay piers, as it was named for the sheepshead, a fish found in the bay's waters. It used to be a fishing and farming community in the 1800s. In the 1840s, residents in north Brooklyn and Manhattan began to hunt and fish at the bay, they built summer-related hotels there, and opened up restaurants. Sheepshead Bay's allure as a fishing destination was further helped by the opening of Ocean Avenue in 1876 and the extension of the Long Island Rail Road's Manhattan Beach Branch in 1877–1878, which brought visitors both to the community of Sheepshead Bay and to the Manhattan Beach resort across the bay. The first of the community's farms was split up into several lots for residential development in 1877.

The Sheepshead Bay Race Track opened in the neighborhood, bringing even more visitors during the spring and fall. Near the racecourse, racing investor William Collins Whitney constructed a training track. With the development of the Sheepshead Bay community into a residential neighborhood, there were efforts to improve the facilities on the waterfront. The channel of the Sheepshead Bay waterway was dredged by 1916 to allow fishing boats to dock there, which they came from Canarsie. The neighborhood of Sheepshead Bay became a community of Irish and Italian immigrants.

The community of Irish and Italians started to change in the 1970s with Jewish and Soviet immigrants. It didn't go through white flights, like other places in New York during that time. The Soviet immigrants from the Soviet Union were Jews from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Some other immigrants were Polish Jews and Christians, and Greeks moving in.

There was a restaurant called Lundy's, which first opened in 1920, had been a seafood icon of Sheepshead Bay until it closed in 1979, then reopened and closed again in 2007. Now a new Lundy's restaurant opened at 44 Beard Street, at Dwight Street in Red Hook, north Brooklyn. Soviet-owned restaurants, nightclubs, stores etc. opened in the bay's waterfront and other streets like Voorhies Ave, Avenue Z, Avenue X, Avenue U, and Ocean Parkway. Sheepshead Bay does have a projects building with a small minority of Black people, Latinos, and Arabs living there in recent years. A lot of Chinese people moved in to Sheepshead Bay for a community in Avenue U since the late 1980s and 1990s, just like Bensonhurst and Sunset Park.

In 2018, Sheepshead Bay was a neighborhood that was considered a 'non-gentrifying' community. Now in 2025, there are changes to the neighborhood like every other place and gentrification is at a low rate. The only changes are luxury apartments, new businesses, new stores built, more ethnic groups moved in, and more houses were built. The Central Asians that live in Sheepshead Bay and other nearby communities are from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, some from Afghanistan, some from Pakistan, Georgia (country), Azerbaijan, and Armenia. I didn't recognize that there were Central Asians living in South Brooklyn until 2015, when an Uzbek-owned Halal restaurant was opening in Avenue U and there were a few residents from Uzbekistan who live in the Homecrest area and nearby streets.

Sheepshead Bay has iconic restaurants like Roll N Roaster, Brennan & Carr, Masal Cafe & Lounge, Randalazzo's, Opera Cafe Lounge (Turkish restaurant), Soup N Burger, Baku Palace Restaurant, Seaport Buffet, Bagel Boy (local bakery), Clemente's Crab House, Knapp Street Pizza, Michael's (Italian restaurant), and a Brunch restaurant called Mouette. There are local marketplaces like Netcost Market, Tashkent Supermarket, Stop & Shop, Chinese-owned grocery stores, ALDI etc. The local movie theater is Regal UA Sheepshead Bay. The local beaches near Sheepshead Bay are Brighton Beach, Manhattan Beach, Coney Island Beach, Gerritsen Beach, and Plumb Beach. A bit further away to add one more beach would be Rockaway Beach in Queens with Jacob Riis Park and its local boardwalk.

Background song: Tiesto & KSHMR feat. Vassy - Secrets