A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg by Nathaniel Deutsch & Michael Casper

Author:Nathaniel Deutsch & Michael Casper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press

CHAPTER SEVEN

A Fruit Tree Grows in Brooklyn

IN A TREE GROWS in Brooklyn, Betty Smith’s classic 1943 novel of poverty and childhood resilience set in Williamsburg, a central motif is a mythical plant called the “Tree of Heaven.” Growing only from concrete, the tree magically predicts the spread of tenements in the neighborhood. When one of these trees appears on a building’s property, people know that the building will soon become dilapidated. Once the tree takes root, “poor foreigners seeped in and the quiet old brownstone houses were hacked up into flats, feather beds were pushed out on the window sills to air and the Tree of Heaven flourished. That was the kind of tree it was. It liked poor people.” Although the tree is cut down, it miraculously grows again. In a Hasidic twist on Smith’s story, another kind of tree came to haunt Williamsburg in the first few decades of the twenty-first century. Rather than marking the decline of the neighborhood, however, fruit trees became a symbol of how, even as Hasidic developers in Williamsburg emerged as major players in the booming Brooklyn real estate market, they remained deeply rooted in the particular beliefs and practices of their community. On another level, fruit trees served as a particularly apt metaphor for the Satmar community in Williamsburg, whose symbol was the date palm, a fruit-bearing tree that could not be cut down or uprooted.

Like Smith’s Tree of Heaven, fruit trees inspired wonder and fear among many Hasidic residents of Williamsburg, who considered cutting one down to be strictly forbidden by long-standing custom, even if not by Jewish law.1 For those Hasidim in the burgeoning real estate business, fruit trees could hold up deals, delay construction, and cost millions of dollars in overruns or lost labor.2 Hasidic property owners built staircases and even entire buildings around fruit trees to avoid damaging them.3 In one case in Williamsburg, a desperate Hasidic developer pleaded with the local rabbinic court to help him figure out what do with a lot he had purchased for several million dollars, only to discover later that it contained a fruit tree. He lamented that other Hasidim did not want to purchase the property because they would then face the same problem, yet he could not sell the land to a non-Hasidic developer, because community members would condemn him for abetting gentrification. In a New York magazine profile, a Hasidic landlord described his experience with fruit trees:

Some people really don’t give a shit about fruit trees. But most of the Hasidic Jewish people will not cut down a fruit tree. There’s one house in Borough Park where they cut down a fruit tree and there was nine fires over there in the last two years. Sometimes weird stuff happens. So we had a building, and the only way it’s working for us is if the fruit tree comes down. We spent $50,000 doing the plans and then found out there’s a fruit tree. We didn’t know about it. So we had to sell the building.

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