Living in Crown Heights
Crown Heights gets the New York Times’ Living In treatment this weekend, along with a lead photo of the racial diversity on display at the popular watering hole Franklin Park. Since most of us are familiar enough with the area, we can dispense with the basics and cut straight to the controversy. The article mentions…
Crown Heights gets the New York Times’ Living In treatment this weekend, along with a lead photo of the racial diversity on display at the popular watering hole Franklin Park. Since most of us are familiar enough with the area, we can dispense with the basics and cut straight to the controversy. The article mentions a pair of couples that are in contract to buy a house together on Sterling Place. Here’s some of the rationale:
In the two couples’ eyes, attractions included ethnic diversity and affordability, and — in contrast with other possibilities, like Bedford-Stuyvesant — relative greenness. As Ms. Kelly put it, There were just a lot of trees around, and a lot of families, and a lot of walking space.
Diss! Our question is: Which of the two neighborhoods has one the Greenest Block honors more? Anyone know?
Living In: Crown Heights [Brownstoner]
Photo by nrvlowdown
thoughtful thread. Very instructive, I have nothing to add except to concur that the NY Times often seems clueless and out of touch with the real world.
quote:
Do people in these articles not know what “diverse” means?
usually they don’t. it’s just something white people like to say when they move to the hood. of course you just KNOW these people won’t be sending their brats to the local public schools. total hypocrites.
*rob*
DH, exactly. and I would like the hood to remain carribean black majority. maybe the folks in the article counted themselves as the “diverse” addition to the hood. Hood now is certainly not diverse as they implied it.
Love Crown Heights, used to live in there 3-4 years ago. Maybe it’s changed drastically since then but I wouldn’t exactly call Crown Heights a “diverse” neighborhood.
Jackson Heights diverse? yeah sure. Ft Greene? Yeah okay. Crown Heights is a predominately carribean black neighborhood. Do people in these articles not know what “diverse” means?
You’re the writer, Montrose.
I look forward to reading your definitive book about all things Brooklyn.
And Rob, I don’t catch the Waters/SNL reference because I don’t own a television. But I can say this: On meeting me, BxGrl told me she imagined me as a little old man and was surprised by what I turned out to be.
Where is BxGrl by the way?
And The What?
NOP, you are a poet. I salute you. Very beautiful, and quite true.
Crown Heights North Rules. hey, no need to piss on our little bit NYT coverage.
To whom does Crown Heights — or any neighborhood — belong?
“Ownership” can take several forms, from short- to long-term. Even people who frequently pass through a neighborhood between destinations can feel some sense of “owning” it.
Right now I’m in my third home. The mosques have called people to evening prayers. In the morning around 5am, the first call to prayer occurs and the pious pass night-clubbers returning home from their reveries.
To whom does this place belong?
My parents’ Crown Heights was different, I’m sure, from 1950’s long-timers. They rented, and spent less than a decade in the place. But the neighborhood “belonged” to them and they fought passionately with others to maintain it, until our landlord torched our building as part of the area’s block-busting.
Kids, occupying the margins of their parents’ social worlds, certainly owned Crown Heights, moving comfortably between ethnic groups and social classes based on friendships forged at school. And this was one of the rewards of being a kid in the neighborhood: that in each house or apartment there was something different to see and learn, our friends’ households reflecting their families varying relationships with Crown Heights, the larger city, and their places of origin. (The lessons, of course, were subconscious. We didn’t classify people the way adults do. But as my brother often reminds me, our relative ease with dealing with difference is rooted, in part, in growing up in Brooklyn when we did.)
I’m sure there were old-timers in Crown Heights who sniffed at the young bohemians who gravitated there in the 1950’s for the neighborhood’s low rents, proximity to the Brooklyn Museum, and quick subway ride to the Village. Were my parents any better — or worse — than the “hipsters” in the Times’ pic? Did they any less “belong?”
Although I spend only part of the year where I am now, I have a proprietory feeling for it. The view from my hotel, with its minarets and hills, is as comforting as the view of New York skyscrapers from my apartment in town. And on a quick business trip to another part of the country, I pined to get “home.” And home was here.
Quite true, Grand Pa, I realize this, but am still always disappointed. You’d think they’d learn after all this time. I don’t think there has been a piece favorably reviewed here on B’stoner EVER, for any of the neighborhoods they’ve covered.