New Lots, Brooklyn: A Church Raised Without Nails

Local farming families built the New Lots Reformed Church at 630 New Lots Avenue themselves. They seasoned oak timber felled by a hurricane for nearly two years, then raised the wood-frame building in a communal building bee in May 1823 at a cost of about $35. It is assembled entirely with notched, pegged timber joinery rather than nails.

The adjoining two-acre cemetery holds an older section dating to the seventeenth century, with Revolutionary War soldiers and enslaved people among the burials; the present section was established in 1841. The church was designated a New York City Landmark on July 19, 1966 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places on May 19, 1983.

The building has not been a museum piece. In 1990 a large truss beam cracked and the church was declared unusable; the congregation raised the repair money and resumed services in 1991. It remains an active house of worship under the African Methodist Episcopal Zion denomination, operating as New Lots Community Church.

Further along New Lots Avenue, African Burial Ground Square was officially designated in 2013 after human remains were discovered on the block bounded by New Lots and Livonia Avenues and Barbey and Schenck Streets. It marks a burial ground associated with the neighborhood's early Black and enslaved population, and shares its block with the New Lots branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.

Both nearby subway stations are named for New Lots Avenue, and neither is placed in New Lots by the sources consulted.

New Lots Avenue on the IRT New Lots Line is the eastern terminal of the line, served by the 3 at all times except late nights, the 4 late nights, and the 2, 4 and 5 at limited rush hours; Wikipedia's own neighborhood tag for it reads East New York. It was built elevated because the water table made a tunnel prohibitively expensive, opening for shuttle service on October 16, 1922, with through service to Manhattan from October 31, 1924.

New Lots Avenue on the BMT Canarsie Line, at Van Sinderen Avenue, carries the L at all times and is recorded as sitting on the border of Brownsville and East New York. It opened on July 28, 1906 under the name New Lots Road.

Because no station is documented inside the neighborhood itself, the bus matters here: the B15 runs along New Lots Avenue and Linden Boulevard, the two streets that frame the neighborhood core, and currently ends at the Lefferts Boulevard AirTrain station in Queens, where riders transfer to AirTrain JFK.

The nearest Long Island Rail Road station is East New York on the Atlantic Branch, at Atlantic Avenue and Havens Place, described by its source as serving East New York and Ocean Hill rather than New Lots.