The name of this neighborhood remembers Alexander Bathgate, even though a New York commission once tried to erase his name from the map. Bathgate, a Scottish immigrant, worked the land of the Morris estate in the early nineteenth century, and was eventually able to buy 140 acres from Gouveneur Morris II. His descendants sold the property to the city in 1884, for use as a park which they expected would carry their name. But after a surveying dispute, officials spitefully titled the new green space Crotona Park. Extension of the elevated line along Third Avenue at the turn of the twentieth century brought to Bathgate a European immigrant population largely drawn from lower Manhattan. (By the mid-twentieth-century, it had been replaced by Latinos and African-Americans.) In 1982, with many of its residential buildings derelict and abandoned, the area welcomed a new development, the Federally-assisted 21-acre Bathgate Industrial Park.


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