Fulton Street, named after Robert Fulton, is a long east-west street in northern Brooklyn. A street of the same name in Manhattan was linked to this street by Fulton with his steam ferries.
This street begins at the intersection of Adams Street and Joralemon Street in Brooklyn Heights. For a hundred years before the Fulton Ferry monopoly, Fulton Street was the Ferry Road through Jamaica Pass and, in the centuries before any ferry service, Indian path to the Hempstead Plains. It began at the Fulton Ferry Landing and climbed south through Brooklyn Heights past City Hall to where it now begins at Adams Street. Part of the original Fulton Street survives as Old Fulton Street in Brooklyn Heights/DUMBO and Cadman Plaza West. The segment of Fulton Street that traveled past Borough Hall has been turned into a pedestrian esplanade.
The initial segment of Fulton Street as it exists today is the Fulton Mall between Adams Street and Flatbush Avenue. The mall is an outdoor commercial center that primarily caters to African American clientele. East of Flatbush Avenue, Fulton Street becomes a major artery of Downtown Brooklyn, Fort Greene and Clinton Hill. At Franklin Avenue, Fulton Street then becomes the signature street of Bedford-Stuyvesant. At Broadway Junction in East New York, the street is interrupted by the intersection of Broadway and Jamaica Avenue, but continues on the other side as a one-way residential street through East New York and Cypress Hills until it crosses the border in Woodhaven, Queens, where it becomes 91st Avenue.
The elevated BMT Fulton Street Line used to run over Fulton Street. the IND Fulton Street Line subway has replaced it east of Washington Avenue. The BMT Jamaica Line runs above Fulton Street between Broadway Junction and Crescent Street.
On March 10, 2005, Fulton Street was co-named Harriet Ross Tubman Avenue along most of its length from Rockaway Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant to Elm Place in Downtown Brooklyn, on the anniversary of the death of the ex-slave and abolitionist, which has been designated "Harriet Tubman Day of Commemoration" in New York State.
Famous quotes containing the words fulton and/or street:
“New York has her wilderness within her own borders; and though the sailors of Europe are familiar with the soundings of her Hudson, and Fulton long since invented the steamboat on its waters, an Indian is still necessary to guide her scientific men to its headwaters in the Adirondack country.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What are you now? If we could touch one another,
if these our separate entities could come to grips,
clenched like a Chinese puzzle . . . yesterday
I stood in a crowded street that was live with people,
and no one spoke a word, and the morning shone.
Everyone silent, moving. . . . Take my hand. Speak to me.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)