Brooklyn's Garden: Views of Picturesque Flatbush viewbook

Flatbush, located in central Brooklyn, was one of the original six towns of Brooklyn. First settled by the Dutch in the 1630s, Flatbush was granted a patent of township by Director-General Peter Stuyvesant in 1652. Flatbush then came under British rule when the British invaded New Amsterdam (now New York City) in 1664. During the 1670s, Flatbush fell back under Dutch control for a short time before returning again to British rule. The Town of Flatbush was annexed by the City of Brooklyn in 1894 and the City of Brooklyn was then incorporated into New York City in 1898. For most of its history, Flatbush was a rural community, populated with farms. Today, Flatbush is a neighborhood in the borough of Brooklyn and is comprised of numerous smaller neighborhoods including Midwood, Ditmas Park, Fiske Terrace, Beverly Square (East and West), Prospect Park South, Caton Park, and Albemarle-Kenmore Terraces.

Viewbooks, also called souvenir albums or view albums, are books that contain commercially published groups of photographs depicting a place, activity, or event.

Charles A. Ditmas (1887-1938) was a descendent of the Lott family, one of the early Dutch families that settled in Brooklyn in the mid-1600s. Ditmas was a local historian and genealogist who, in these capacities, was a founder and president of the Kings County Historical Society, served as assistant librarian at the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, and wrote and published numerous genealogies of Brooklyn families and histories of local places and events. Ditmas focused his work primarily on the present-day adjoining neighborhoods of Flatlands and Flatbush, which previously had been two of the original six towns of Brooklyn. Today, the Brooklyn neighborhood of Ditmas Park, as well as Ditmas Avenue, denote the influence the Ditmas family had on shaping Brooklyn.