13th Avenue (Borough Park)

Thirteenth Avenue
(13th Avenue)

B16 bus on 13th Avenue at 47th Street in Borough Park, Brooklyn
Length	2.5 mi (4.0 km)
Location	Brooklyn, New York City

Thirteenth Avenue (or 13th Avenue) is a roughly 2.5-mile-long (4.0 km) street in the borough of Brooklyn in New York City. 13th Avenue is also the commercial center of the neighborhood of Borough Park, located in Brooklyn. The avenue, through Borough Park, extends roughly 1 mile (1.6 km) in length and contains a huge variety of stores, businesses and food establishments catering to the local and international Haredi Jewish community. While the sidewalks and streets are heavily congested during the week, all stores and businesses are shuttered on the Jewish Sabbath and Jewish holidays. In December 2012, the stretch of 13th Avenue from 36th to 60th Streets was co-named Raoul Wallenberg Way in honor of the Swedish diplomat who saved 100,000 Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. Many of these survivors settled in Borough Park after the war and raised their families here.

13th Avenue starts at 36th Street in Kensington. It maintains a relatively straight route through Borough Park and ends at 86th Street in Dyker Heights. The avenue is 2.5 miles (4.0 km) long. It is part of a one-way pair with Fourteenth Avenue, being one-way southbound to 60th Street (14th Avenue is one-way northbound north of New Utrecht Avenue and 60th Street).

Jewish immigrants began populating Borough Park at the turn of the 20th century. Through the 1930s, 13th Avenue was lined with pushcart vendors and pickle sellers. In the late 1930s the city opened a public market on 42nd Street to force an end to the pushcart trade. Thirteenth Avenue gentrified into an avenue of specialty shops interspersed with regular merchandise stores, and the avenue itself turned into a place "to see and be seen".