From the (1939) WPA Guide to New York City:
Borough Park, Bensonhurst, and Bath Beach form one undistinguished neighborhood stretching from the southern tip of Greenwood Cemetery down to Gravesend Bay.
Bensonhurst today is inhabited mainly by Jewish and Italian families; a few of the latter cultivate small truck farms.
The Israel Zion Hospital, Tenth Avenue and Forty-eighth Street. A modern structure of brown brick and limestone trim designed by Mortimer Freehof, contains 450 beds. Among its innovations are a swimming pool for post-paralytic cases, a special department for refugee internes, and the installation of television apparatus in the operating room.
The Van Pelt Manor House, Eighty-second Street and Eighteenth Avenue, was erected in 1686, though the stone part of the house may be part of an earlier structure built by Jan van Cleef in 1664 or 1672. The beautiful Dutch tiles of the fireplace in the southwest room are said to have been brought from Holland in 1663. Lord Howe and George Washington both used the house during the Revolution and a tablet commemorates the "material aid" given by the Van Pelt family to the American cause. The house is now used by the park department.
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