The Flatbush Tollbooth

When I think about the Flatbush tollbooth (what, you never think about the Flatbush tollbooth?), I think about how different Flatbush Ave must have been back then.

Until 1858, after Flatbush Ave left the village of Flatbush, it wended its way through the hills of what’s now Prospect Park before reaching the town of Brooklyn (now Brooklyn Heights and downtown) The tollbooth was moved to various locations on this section of the road throughout its tenure.

The money from the booth was used to upkeep Flatbush Ave and was maintained by the Brooklyn Plank Road Company which, as the name might suggest, constructed planks along much of street so that it wouldn’t turn into a disastrous mud pit like so many other roads of the day. This led the locals to call it “The Plank Road,” before it was popularly called Flatbush Avenue.

After they straightened the road around the future park, they moved the booth to the intersection of Flatbush Ave and Hawthorne St., and sold the streetcar rights to the Brooklyn City Railroad Company, which ran horse-drawn trolleys along the tracks.

Believe it or not, you can go see this very tollbooth in Prospect Park. It’s rather inconspicuous, a perpetually closed shack between the carousel and the Lefferts House. Don’t everyone rush there at once and cause a scene!

The Flatbush Tollboth is shown here sometime before 1914, at the intersection of intersection of Flatbush Ave and Hawthorne St. (Photo: Daniel Berry Austin, via the New York Public Library, Irma and Paul Milstein Collection)

You can visit the Flatbush tollbooth in Prospect Park and take your own photo with a guy in it who’s pushing a stroller and wondering why you’re taking a photo!

Brooklyn historian Eugene L. Armbruster took this photo of the Flatbush tollbooth in 1922, four years before it was moved to Prospect Park. (Photo: The New-York Historical Society.)

More posts about Flatbush Ave…