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Brownsville, Brooklyn

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Brownsville is a low income residential neighborhood geographically located in east Brooklyn. The neighborhood is part of Brooklyn Community Board 16. Its boundaries, starting from the north and moving clockwise are: Atlantic Avenue to the north, Van Sinderen Avenue to the east, the L.I.R.R tracks to the south, and Ralph Avenue-East 98th Street to the west. Rockaway Avenue is the primary thoroughfare through Brownsville. Zip codes include 11212 and 11233. The area is patrolled by the 73rd Precinct located at 1470 East New York Avenue. New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) property in the area is patrolled by P.S.A. 2.

Demographics

Brownsville has a population over 65,000. Over half the population lives below the poverty line and receives public assistance (AFDC, Home Relief, Supplemental Security Income, and Medicaid). Brownsville is predominantly African American and West Indian including Jamaicans, Guyanese, Trinidad and Tobago, Puerto Ricans, Barbados, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. The vast majority of households are renter occupied.[1]

Land Use

Brownsville is dominated by public housing developments of various types. There is also a significant concentration of semi-detached multi-unit rowhouses similar to that found East New York and Soundview surrounding the public housing developments. Many of which however have been torn down and replaced by vacant lots or newly constructed subsidized attached multi-unit rowhouses. There is also a smaller number of tenements in the area. The neighborhood contains the highest concentration of NYCHA projects in Brooklyn. The total land area is one square mile.

Low Income Public Housing Projects

  • There are eighteen NYCHA developments located in Brownsville.[2]
  1. 104-14 Tapscott Street; one 4-story building.
  2. Brownsville Houses; twenty-seven buildings, 6 and 7-stories tall
  3. Glenmore Plaza; four buildings, 10, 18 and 24-stories tall.
  4. Howard Avenue; five buildings, 3-stories tall.
  5. Howard Avenue-Park Place; eight buildings, 3-stories tall.
  6. Howard Houses; ten buildings, 7 and 13-stories tall.
  7. Hughes Apartments; three, 22-story buildings.
  8. Low Houses; four buildings, 17 and 18-stories tall.
  9. Marcus Garvey (Group A); three buildings, 6 and 14-stories tall.
  10. Ocean Hill-Brownsville; five rehabilitated tenement buildings, 4-stories tall.
  11. Prospect Plaza, three vacant 12-story buildings in the process of being rehabilitated.
  12. Reverend Randolph Brown; two, 6-story buildings.
  13. Sutter Avenue-Union Street; three rehabilitated tenement buildings, 4 and 6-stories tall.
  14. Tapscott Street Rehab; eight, 4-story rehabilitated tenement buildings.
  15. Tilden Houses; eight, 16-story buildings.
  16. Van Dyke I; 22 buildings, 3 and 14-stories tall.
  17. Van Dyke II; one 14-story building.
  18. Woodson Houses; two buildings, 10 and 25-stories tall.

History

Brownsville was politically radical from the 1880s to the 1950s, it elected Socialist and American Labor Party candidates to the state assembly throughout the 1920s and 1930s. [3]

As early as the 1910s, the area had acquired a reputation as a vicious slum and breeding ground for crime. It has been known throughout the years for its criminal gangs and in the 1930s and 1940s achieved notoriety as the birthplace of Murder, Inc. A predominantly Jewish neighborhood until the 1960s, when its population had become largely African-American and Puerto Rican, Brownsville's unemployment rate was 17 percent. Half of all families in the district lived on less than $5,000 a year. As Jimmy Breslin wrote in 1968, that Brownsville reminded him of "Berlin after the war; block after block of burned-out shells of houses, streets littered with decaying automobile hulks. The stores on the avenues are empty and the streets are lined with deserted apartment houses or buildings that have empty apartments on every floor."

In 1968 Brownsville was the theater for a protracted and highly contentious teacher strike. [4]The Board of Education had experimented with giving the people of the neighborhood control over the school. The new administration laid off several teachers in violation of union contract rules. The teachers were all white, and mostly Jewish and the resulting strike served to badly divide the whole city. The resulting strike dragged off and on for half a year, becoming known as one of the "Ten Plagues" of John Lindsay. [citation needed]

Social Problems

Many social problems associated with poverty from crime to drug addiction have plagued the area for some time. Despite crime declines versus their peaks during the crack and heroin epidemics violent crime continues to be a serious problem in the community. [5] Brownsville has significantly higher drop out rates and incidents of violence in it's schools.[6] Students must pass through metal detectors and swipe ID cards to enter the buildings. Reminiscent a prison environment which many feel encourages bad behavior. Other problems in local schools include low test scores and high truancy rates. Drug addiction is also a serious problem in the community. Due to the lucrative drug trade in the area many addicted reside in the community. Peer pressure among children who come from broken homes contributes to the high rate of usage. Many households in the area are headed by a single mother which contributes to the high poverty rate.[7] Many of whom had their children at a very young age and unfortunately could not provide for their children.[8] Many of the families living in Brownsville have been in poverty for generations. The incarceration rate in the area is also very high.[9] Many if not most males in the community have been arrested at some point in their lives. [10] This has a direct correlation to aggressive policing tactics including "sweeps" due to the area's high crime rate. Brownsville is home to a significant number of inmates currently held in New York state prison and jail facilities.

Urban Renewal

After a wave of arson ravaged the low income communities of New York City throughout the 1970's, many if not most of the residential structures in Brownsville were left seriously damaged or destroyed. The city began to rehabilitate many formally abandoned tenement style apartment buildings and designate them low income housing beginning in the late 1970's. Also many subsidized multi unit townhouses and newly constructed apartment buildings have been or are being built on vacant lots across across the neighborhood.

Transportation

Brownsville is accessible from the IRT. Its main thoroughfare is Pitkin Avenue. The 3, 4, A, and C trains are accessible to Brownsville residents.

Facts

  • Brownsville is the only Brooklyn school district without a high school. Indeed, the site proposed decades ago for a public high school now houses a juvenile jail, built over long and loud protest by the community. The youth jail and the precinct across from it were among the first new buildings to go up in Brownsville in at least 20 years.
  • The Folk Nation gangs active in Brownsville operated out of the Riverdale Towers and Marcus Garvey Village housing facilities. The gang members were notoriously violent and murdered, shot at, stabbed and robbed members of several rival groups in the area, including the Bloods gang, the "Anybody Gets It," or A.B.G. gang, and a group of Guyanese crack cocaine and marijuana dealers known as the "Dreads."
  • Brownsville is burdened with one of New York City's highest crime rates as well as one of the largest concentrations of public housing in the country.
  • The Brookdale Hospital Center receives the most gunshot victims to its E.R in the USA. In 2003, the United States Army established a training program at the hospital called the Academy of Advanced Combat Medicine to train reserve medics in an emergency room that has received 600 cases per year of gunshot and stabbing victims.[11] Their numbers for shooting victims are significantly higher than the NYPD records, and they have been noticing a rise over the last few years.
  • Gang violence in the area includes the attempted murder of New York City Police Department officers on New Year's Eve 2002, a gang-related murder attempt which wounded an off-duty police officer caught in the cross-fire, and a gang-related murder attempt in which an innocent 13-year old was shot in the head. The charges are the latest phase in an on-going initiative by the FBI and NYPD, begun in 2002, to combat street gang and drug-related violence in the 73rd Precinct, covering the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.
  • Community District 16, which includes Brownsville, is third in Brooklyn and fourth citywide in infant mortality, with 10.7 infant deaths per 1,000 live births. The individual neighborhood of Brownsville, according to DOHMH, had “The highest infant mortality rate in the city” (12.2 deaths per 1,000 live births) in 2004
  • The fourth and final prong complements the first three by establishing a partnership with the New York State Division of Parole to improve the supervision of parolees who live in public housing. Parole officers will be dedicated to supervising parolees who reside in these developments and will use offices that are actually located in public housing buildings. Having a presence in the developments will provide greater opportunities for interaction between parole officers and the family members of parolees, as well as community residents. Closer proximity will also enhance the ability of Parole, NYPD, and NYCHA to work collaboratively. Tapscott, Tilden, Brownsville, Seth Low, Van Dyke I and II, Howard, and Langston Hughes low income public housing developments.

Notable Natives

References

  1. ^ Brooklyn Community District 16
  2. ^ NYCHA locations in Brownsville
  3. ^ Brownsville, Brooklyn : Blacks, Jews, and the changing face of the ghetto by Wendell E Pritchett. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2002. ISBN: 0226684466
  4. ^ Confrontation at Ocean Hill-Brownsville; the New York school strikes of 1968 by Maurice R Berube & Marilyn Gittell. New York, Praeger [1969] OCLC: 19279
  5. ^ 73rd Precinct CompStat Report
  6. ^ NYC Dropout Rates
  7. ^ Brooklyn Social Concerns
  8. ^ Brooklyn Social Concerns
  9. ^ Brooklyn Social Concerns
  10. ^ Brooklyn Social Concerns
  11. ^ Bleyer, Jennifer. "Battlefield Medics Shaped in Civilian Setting", The New York Times, December 6, 2005. "The program, called the Academy of Advanced Combat Medicine, started at Kings County two years ago when officers from the 5,300-person Eighth Medical Brigade, based at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island, decided to train their reservists in a civilian emergency room. The hospital's highly regarded, extremely busy emergency room admits 1,200 major trauma patients each year, among the most in the city."
  12. ^ Salamon, Julie. "Toil, Tears and Sweat in Brooklyn", The New York Times, February 6, 2004. Accessed November 19, 2007. "The words of a native son, Alfred Kazin, spoken by an actor evoking the writer's Brownsville childhood in the 1920's, resonate today."
  13. ^ Vecsey, George. "SPORTS OF THE TIMES; The Pearl Fits In At Syracuse", The New York Times, March 9, 1984. Accessed December 5, 2007. "This part of the legend does survive: Washington admits that when he was 8 years old at the Howard Housing Project in Brownsville, his elders asked him: Who do you think you are, the Pearl?"
  • Van Dyke I Houses.
    Van Dyke I Houses.
  • Local retail, the Tilden Houses sit in the background.
    Local retail, the Tilden Houses sit in the background.
  • Large vacant Lot.
    Large vacant Lot.
  • Brownsville Brooklyn Skyline.
    Brownsville Brooklyn Skyline.
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