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Brooklyn

Bushwick

Warehouse walls painted top to bottom, wood-fired pizza, and tortillas still warm from the press.

Peter Stuyvesant chartered this corner of Brooklyn in 1661 as Boswijck, the neighborhood in the woods. Two centuries later it smelled of hops: by 1890 fourteen breweries worked a fourteen-block stretch known as Brewer's Row, and the last of them, Schaefer and Rheingold, did not close until 1976. The 1977 blackout hit Bushwick harder than almost anywhere in the city, and Broadway took decades to recover.

What came next is written on the walls. In the spring of 2012, Joe Ficalora, who grew up here and still ran his family's business nearby, invited a handful of street artists to paint the corner of Troutman Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. Neighbors lent their walls, and the Bushwick Collective spread block by block into one of the largest open-air mural galleries in New York — loading docks, roll-down gates and entire factory sides repainted, season after season.

Bushwick is still a Latino neighborhood at heart — about half its residents, most of them Puerto Rican and Dominican families, with newer arrivals from Mexico and El Salvador — and that shows in the tortillerias, panaderías and taco counters along Knickerbocker and Wyckoff. Around them, the old industrial blocks near the Morgan Avenue L stop hold some of Brooklyn's most talked-about dining rooms and a nightlife that runs very late.

Murals on every surface around Troutman Street and St. Nicholas Avenue

Fresh tortillas and BYOB tacos on Starr Street

Wood-fired pizza in old warehouse blocks off Morgan Avenue

The L and M trains meeting at Myrtle–Wyckoff

Local notes

The Bushwick Collective

Begun in 2012 by Bushwick native Joe Ficalora, the collective is anchored at Troutman Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, a short walk from the Jefferson Street L stop. Building owners donate the walls and artists paint them, so the murals change constantly — walk Troutman and the side streets off it, and come back in a year to find a different neighborhood.

Brewer's Row

By 1890, fourteen breweries operated within fourteen blocks here, and Bushwick called itself the beer capital of the Northeast. The William Ulmer Brewery complex on Beaver Street, landmarked in 2010, is the most legible survivor of that era.

Maria Hernandez Park

Nearly seven acres between Knickerbocker and Irving Avenues and Starr and Suydam Streets, formerly Bushwick Park. On a warm weekend it is the neighborhood's living room.

Through the lens

Shoot the murals in soft, even light — an overcast morning or the hour after sunrise, before cars and delivery trucks line the curbs. Troutman Street runs roughly east–west, so walls on its north side catch late-afternoon sun. A wide lens helps with the tallest pieces; step across the street rather than tilting up.

Editorial draft — core details last reviewed October 13, 2026. Confirm practical details with the official site before you go.

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