After Three Strikes, Is Recent Bed-Stuy Arrival Out?
Writer Douglass Rushkoff made headlines last December when he announced in a blog post that he and his family were leaving Brooklyn after he was mugged on Christmas Eve outside his Park Slope apartment. While many people thought the response was an overreaction, getting mugged is a traumatic experience against which the rationality of statistics…
Writer Douglass Rushkoff made headlines last December when he announced in a blog post that he and his family were leaving Brooklyn after he was mugged on Christmas Eve outside his Park Slope apartment. While many people thought the response was an overreaction, getting mugged is a traumatic experience against which the rationality of statistics are of little comfort. Now another blogger is questioning whether he should stay in his neighborhood after having been mugged on Monday night for the third time in as many years. After five years in London and one on the Upper West Side, blogger Eating for Brooklyn scraped together enough dough for a down payment on browntone fixer-upper in Bed Stuy in 2003 only to get a rather jarring reception:
By the time we unloaded the last box from the rental truck, it was 1am. 1am and raining. The asphalt was shiny and slick and the street lights reflected yellow, red and green. Our block had the feeling of a movie set. It was picture perfect. Just as we closed the door to the truck with a thump, a passerby turned around and held us up. He ripped through my pockets frantically searching for cash. And I stupidly had $500.00 in my front pocket. I slipped a few singles off the wad of dough and gave it to him. He started walking away and came back with a vengeance as if the few singles I had given him were like spitting in his face. He ransacked my pockets again. Nothing. He never found the $500.00. Picture perfect and no one around.
We felt nothing but horror and panic later that night as we searched out the safest corner of the house to sleep — the fourth floor front room overlooking the top of the sycamore tree. With our sleeping bags on pine floors, our hearts pounded and kept us up all night. We had spent our life savings only to be held up at gunpoint. We felt we had been had.
All was quiet until February 2006 when the writer was pummelled in the head by a gang of teenagers; then on this past Monday night he was mugged again a block from his house.
I feel paralyzed. The rational voice says “Leave now.” The voice of fantasy says “Stick it out. It’ll be worth it in the long run.” Maybe I was stupid for not having left three and half years ago. With the neighborhood in transition and deep into renovation and debt, what would you do?
Well, what would you do?
3 Muggings in 3 Years, What Would You Do? [Eating for Brooklyn]
“When in fact it’s a class change, not necessarily an ethnic shift.” What’s going in these hoods are both Race and Class. Starting in the 1990s, college-educated blacks were starting to move back into Bed-Stuy, Fort Greene-Clinton Hill. Some grew up there and instead of moving away to the suburbs or other areas after college they came back, some were new who, after growing up on Spike Lee movies, rap which was more political or cultural back then, and the whole “black pride” thing going on, moved in as well. It was a Cultural Rennaissance, of sorts, and the crack epidemic was waning and crime went down, so things changed positively. Some whites were moving in too, and let’s not forget, there were ALWAYS a handful of whites who lived there, but it was different. Some were social worker/teacher types, some artists, and it wasn’t a sense that they were very different from everyone else economically. Many lived thru the crime wave of the eighties and were still there. Then came the real estate boom in late nineties, and prices shot up. Now when new people move in, particurly whites, people know that those newbies have more money. Also many moving in are naive about where there are, and people can sense it. Crime is still there. Poor kids seem more desperate and angry than ever. and they’re taking advantage of those they consider easy targets with money. It’s a shame, but I think it will only get worse ”
OMG…I’ve soo given this same speech to people. I was surprised when people started talking about CH an FG been gentrified over the course of the last few yrs..because that’s what it was called when I moved here in the late ’80s
ohh..those were the days of wine and roses
This story is a second installment of a three-part series looking at the gentrification of the Upper West Side, Park Slope and Soho more than two decades ago.
Explore Park Slope’s Seventh Avenue on a sunny weekend day and you’ll see mothers with children tucked in strollers, a packed Barnes & Noble and busy restaurants. Turn off the main drag and the tree-lined cross streets are full of tidy brownstones. Fifth Avenue, once shunned as less desirable, is now a strip of trendy restaurants, bars and shops.
Today’s Park Slope, a neighborhood enclave for families and upscale ex-hipsters, began to take visible shape in the 1970s and 1980s, around the same time as the transformation of the Upper West Side and Soho. Manhattan refugees began to discover its brownstones and moved to the neighborhood in search of great deals on more space.
“Park Slope is one of the great recent stories of the outer boroughs, an urban neighborhood that acquired a solid, family-oriented, middle-class identity in the late 1960s and early 1970s and has managed to hold on to that identity in the decade since,” The New York Times said in 1984. “It has not become an enclave of the rich, as so many parts of the Upper West Side of Manhattan have done, but neither has its economic base slipped away.”
Another Times story that year, by columnist Maureen Dowd – then a lowly beat reporter – recounted the tale of a mother of two who moved from Greenwich, Conn., to a Madison Avenue apartment in Manhattan, then to a four-story brownstone in Park Slope.
“What happened?” one of her acquaintances asked her sympathetically.
But what had happened was an up-and-coming neighborhood and good deals to be had. The woman and her husband paid $267,000 for the townhouse on Berkeley Place, the same amount they got for their two-bedroom coop on the East Side.
“There are some nice apartments on Park Avenue that would have the [same amount of room] for $750,000,” the woman was quoted as saying.
New York City planning officials even weighed in with their stamp of approval that year, with a study calling the area a model of “positive” gentrification.
from the REAL DEAL…
“The revitalization of Park Slope has spread to many other Brooklyn neighborhoods, including Clinton Hill, Fort Greene, Boerum Hill, Williamsburg and Bedford- Stuyvesant. Finding the bargains of the past in those areas is tough, if not impossible, Neinast said. Bargain hunters are moving to areas such as Red Hook, Bushwick and Greenwood Heights – the area between the south end of Park Slope and Sunset Park”
Dear Curious,
I certainly am NOT advocating white flight, I’m just conveying the feelings that some teens who live in housing projects have expressed to me. One kid was so scared that the government would sell his housing project in DUMBO to gentrifiers that he’d practically packed his bags. I wasn’t around when the Crown Heights riots took place, so I don’t know how much bad feeling there has to be in the air to spark that kind of activity, but I do know that before I started working in Bed-Stuy and Downtown Bklyn, racial tension was something that happened in novels about integration, not in real life.
Also- I’ve lived in Boerum Hill, and I have no idea why people seem to coexist better over there. I definitely felt a lot less hostility in the air.
There are no public housing projects in Park Slope
Just because it’s still well maintained and “nice” doesn’t make it prime.
“Brooklyn Heights was the original high-end neighborhood in New York City.”
Exactly. Fast forward now…when Wall Street money decided that they no longer found manhattan to be the place where they wanted to spend big money on their homes and were looking towards Brooklyn, they chose Brooklyn Heights – not Park Slope.
When Brooklyn Heights became “old news” they shifted focus to Williamsburg.
The only people that believe they started any type of trend when they moved to Park Slope, are those that live their.
For the record, there are a number of brooklyn brownstone neighborhoods that were affluent “originally”. Google is fun when you need a quick fact check. I prefer history volumes.
In the early 1970’a banks would not give you a mortgage to buy a house in Park Slope. Believe it or not. The early “pioneers” put pressure on the pols and with the help of Brooklyn Union Gas and other institutions, obliged local banks to give local mortgages. Most of brownstone Brooklyn was redlined.
Brooklyn Heights started to be re-gentrified in the 1960’s, read Clay Lancasters “Old Brooklyn Heights, America’s FIrst Suburb” for that lowdown.
Today we may be suffering from too much success. The middle class is being priced out of even marginal brownstone neighborhoods. Who would have guessed it? It’s one damn thing after another.
“…When in fact it’s a class change, not necessarily an ethnic shift.”
What’s going in these hoods are both Race and Class. Starting in the 1990s, college-educated blacks were starting to move back into Bed-Stuy, Fort Greene-Clinton Hill. Some grew up there and instead of moving away to the suburbs or other areas after college they came back, some were new who, after growing up on Spike Lee movies, rap which was more political or cultural back then, and the whole “black pride” thing going on, moved in as well. It was a Cultural Rennaissance, of sorts, and the crack epidemic was waning and crime went down, so things changed positively.
Some whites were moving in too, and let’s not forget, there were ALWAYS a handful of whites who lived there, but it was different. Some were social worker/teacher types, some artists, and it wasn’t a sense that they were very different from everyone else economically. Many lived thru the crime wave of the eighties and were still there.
Then came the real estate boom in late nineties, and prices shot up. Now when new people move in, particurly whites, people know that those newbies have more money. Also many moving in are naive about where there are, and people can sense it. Crime is still there. Poor kids seem more desperate and angry than ever. and they’re taking advantage of those they consider easy targets with money. It’s a shame, but I think it will only get worse.
wow. i’d say judging by this thread and the one on curbed a couple weeks ago about long island city that topped out at over 300 comments, we know which two neighborhoods in new york are the hottest right now.
everything in bed stuy is SOLD OUT!!!!!
sorry…bad joke.