The Brooklyn Nobody Knows by William B. Helmreich

Author:William B. Helmreich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2016-08-30T16:00:00+00:00

EAST NEW YORK

EAST NEW YORK CAN BE SAFELY WALKED during the day if you take the usual precautions, but this neighborhood has the highest crime rate in the city and should not be toured after dark. While gang activity has diminished citywide in the last twenty-five years, it’s still a problem in the more troubled neighborhoods. A local version of poetry reflects the continued existence of a gang culture. I use a bathroom in a Laundromat in East New York. Scrawled on the wall are the words, “Let it rain, let it flood; let a Crip killah Blood.” There are lots of storefront churches, sign-posts of poverty, and no fancy brown-stones like in Bedford-Stuyvesant. It’s a rough area. As recently as the early 1990s, East New York was still popularly referred to as the “murder capital of New York.”

The boundaries of the neighborhood are Atlantic Avenue on the north, Conduit Avenue and Queens on the east, Seaview Avenue on the south, and Louisiana and Van Sinderen Avenues on the west. Public transportation is pretty good, with several fast, convenient subway lines—namely, the A and L trains. The population was formerly German, Lithuanian, Polish, Irish, Italian, and Jewish. Today it’s mostly black with substantial numbers of Hispanics, and some South Asians, generally Bangladeshis and Guyanese.6

East New York has many community gardens tended by a mix of locals and volunteers from outside the neighborhood, like high school students from Stuyvesant High. The rural roots of many of the area’s Hispanic and black residents contribute in no small measure to the popularity of the gardens. There are few parks here; the areas with the fewest public parks tend to have the most gardens.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.