The station began as Manhattan Terrace, named after a housing development.
The station opened around 1900 as Manhattan Terrace, the name of a development here, and was renamed Avenue J in 1907. A booklet of about 1902 from the Manhattan Terrace Improvement Company calls Avenue J ‘Jarvis Road’, though the historian Joseph Ditta doubts that name was ever official. Unlike Washington, D.C., which skips J Street, Brooklyn has both an Avenue I and an Avenue J.