The New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back by Kay S. Hymowitz

Author:Kay S. Hymowitz [Hymowitz, Kay S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Public Policy, City Planning & Urban Development, History, Historical Geography
ISBN: 9781442266582
Google: 33qBDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2017-01-22T00:44:05+00:00

THE GHETTO AND THE BLACK MIDDLE CLASS

By the mid-1960s, with Bedford now merged with next door’s Stuyvesant Heights, the community was bulging at its seams. Some 450,000 mostly African Americans, the size of the population of a medium-size American city, were crammed into less than three square miles. It was the most populous neighborhood in Brooklyn and had one of the largest concentrations of African Americans, the vast majority of them poor, in the United States—second only to South Chicago. As in Chicago, the city government turned its back: garbage pickup was listless, at best; and the schools were dilapidated and disorderly.

The large majority of Bed-Stuy residents at the time—80 percent—were high school dropouts. The lucky ones had jobs at the Sheffield milk-bottling plant on Fulton Street, but their numbers were small; as of 1962, only seven of the 367 employees were black.8 During World War II, things were better at the Brooklyn Navy Yard; Local 968 of the longshoremen’s union had a membership of a thousand African American men, though union solidarity did not prevent blacks from being last hired, first fired.9 In any event, those jobs were disappearing for whites and blacks; after the Brooklyn Navy Yard was decommissioned in 1966, Sheffield also shut its doors in the mid-1960s, a victim of changing distribution methods in the dairy industry.10 Already 36 percent of children were born to unmarried mothers, a number that would continue its relentless rise into the twenty-first century. Rates of venereal disease and infant mortality were among the highest in the nation.11 Juvenile delinquency, gangs, and heroin added to the misery; merchants on the once-vibrant Fulton Street closed their doors; holdups and muggings were chasing away customers and making employees fear for their lives.

By the 1960s, the blight of Bed-Stuy brought the neighborhood a national reputation as a poverty-and-crime-stricken black ghetto. In July 1964, Harlem was torn by riots after a white police officer shot and killed a fifteen-year-old black youth, James Powell. Two days later, the flames spread to Bed-Stuy, where an estimated 4,000 rioters ransacked hundreds of local stores and pelted police and firemen with bottles and bricks.12 The memory of those days of chaos, which would flare up sporadically in “long, hot summers” through much of the 1960s, led New York’s newly elected senator Robert F. Kennedy to take a walking tour of the area. In 1966, journalist Jack Newfield, who accompanied the senator, described their excursion as “filled with the surreal imagery of a bad LSD trip.”13 Kennedy gathered a group of high-powered businessmen and Bed-Stuy community leaders to create the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, the first community-development corporation in the country, whose meager results were evident on the neighborhood’s dangerous streets for decades following.

Black poverty, crime, drugs, underclass misery: that’s the picture that most outsiders have had of Bed-Stuy since the 1960s—until very recently. But there was always another Bedford-Stuyvesant whose considerable strengths had the potential to serve as the foundation for an eventual revival. Even as whites and banks began

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