Thursday Links
Bed-Stuy. Photo by pashasha. Couple Gets Ready to Renovate Sprawling, Dilapidated Bronx Mansion [NY Times] Notorious Brownsville Project Getting $39M in Funding [NY Daily News] Prospect Park One of City’s Safest Major Parks [NY Daily News] Gunplay Plagues Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy [NY Daily News] Slow Death for East New York High School [NY Daily…
Bed-Stuy. Photo by pashasha.
Couple Gets Ready to Renovate Sprawling, Dilapidated Bronx Mansion [NY Times]
Notorious Brownsville Project Getting $39M in Funding [NY Daily News]
Prospect Park One of City’s Safest Major Parks [NY Daily News]
Gunplay Plagues Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy [NY Daily News]
Slow Death for East New York High School [NY Daily News]
Gang Link Eyed in Xmas Eve Murders [NY Post]
Report: NY Bridges Safe [AP via NY Post]
“But it’s overpriced based on the crime statistics.”
And amenitites.
Crown Heights has some beautiful town houses that rival the UES and UWS. But it’s overpriced based on the crime statistics.
You’re right, Montrose, Crown Heights is (and was) a great place to live. And one of the reasons is its proximity to Prospect Park, which for the benefit of CH naysayers is one of the safest public parks in the city, according to the link above.
Around this time of year in the 1950’s, my boyhood pals and I would haul our sleds along New York Avenue to Eastern Parkway and then to the park, joining friends along the way for an afternoon of full-throated joy on the slopes, not returning home until twilight.
Indeed, the park sounds safer today than it was back then. (I had a bicycle snatched from me there once.) But we were city kids — and fearless — never letting tougher kids get in our way of having a great time.
To this day, I thank Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of park and parkway, for the pleasures of a Crown Heights boyhood. (As did my father. Emptying his library after he died, I came across a letter he’d written to the great man, thanking him for the hours of quality time he’d given him and his sons. Olmsted was long gone, of course, but for my father very much alive, because of the streams, lake, and hills where we spent so much time.)
Nostalgic on Park Avenue
Who cares about crime that will be up in down… Its all about the architecture Bedford Stuyvesant looks great to me ….
And of course, I welcome added police attention. Maybe now, as a community, we will be able to concentrate on attracting new businesses, added amenities and services, as well as improve social services and infrastructure.
Sometimes a bad thing – crime, can result in a good thing – all over improvement and attention by the city. We’ve been asking for more police for years.
An improved Crown Heights is in the best interest of everyone, except those who refuse to get past the negatives.
2:49, so what do you want – I should fall on my sword or something? What part of I-have-never-denied-the-problems-here don’t you get? I’m tired of you. Of what possible purpose do you get from this? Nobody is making you, or anyone else, move here. I happen to think it’s a great place to live. You are free to disagree, but that doesn’t make my choice less valid. I believe in my community’s renaissance and resurgence. You don’t. Fine. Next?
Ah, Montrose Morris, your denial and minimization know no bounds. In a related NYT article, the 77th precinct is specifically mentioned as one of only 6 citywide (out of 76) that saw an increase in crime. It, along with other troubled areas, will be targeted by the Operation Impact in hopes of making it a safer community (see link below, page 2, paragraphs 5 and 8).
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/27/nyregion/27crime.html?pagewanted=2&ref=nyregion
But, alas, if you disagree, then I guess I should listen. After all, what value have facts when compared to your opinions?
Brownstoner:
I remember early-1960’s NYC, whose murder stats are so much touted today (as in “only” 500 per year). At the time, everyone thought we were going through an awful crime wave. It’s all relative, I guess.
And want to know when times were really tough? Try 1900, when there were more than 700 homicides per year in a city about one-third the size New York is today. Back then, the old police headquarters on Centre Street had deliberately magnificent architecture to impress BOTH criminals and the police with the majesty of the law (according to newspaper accounts during a period of rampant official corruption).
Erroll Louis in the Daily News writes most effectively about Crown Heights’ struggle with crime. No doubt his columns would resonate with New Yorkers living in the “good old days.” (After all, one of the reasons people moved into apartment houses with doormen was to avoid brownstones’ vulnerability to burglars — and worse.)
Nostalgic on Park Avenue
Hey 12:03-how much more expensive can this city get?