Post-war changes in Crown Heights decisively re-shaped the demographic and geographical makeup of the neighborhood, and made it what it is recognizable as today.
Following the end of World War 2, suburbanization began to rapidly affect Crown Heights and Brooklyn. Robert Moses expanded the borough’s access to Long Island through expressway construction, and by way of the G.I. Bill many families began to move east. But these opportunities were overwhelmingly limited to white Americans. Levittown in Long Island, for example, forbid applications from black families. As the Jewish, Irish and Italian populations of Crown Heights moved out of Brooklyn they were quickly replaced by African-Americans from the southern United States and black immigrants from the Caribbean. The 1957 departure of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the destruction of Ebbets Field symbolically served as the end of the old white ethnic Crown Heights and in the 1960s the neighborhood experienced mass white flight. The demographic change was astounding; in 1960 the neighborhood was 70% white, by 1970 it was 70% black.[1] The one exception to this pattern were the Lubavitch Hasidic Jews.
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The Jewish population in Crown Heights prior to World War 2 was overwhelmingly secular, however in 1940 the Lubavitch Rebbe Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn fled Europe and moved to Crown Heights. Numerous Lubavitch Jews followed Schneersohn and after the war began re-creating their community in Brooklyn. Following secular Jewish emigration away from Crown Heights in the 1950s and 1960s, the then Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson was faced with the choice or re-locating elsewhere or remaining in a fast changing neighborhood. During Passover in 1969 the Rebbe chose the latter and, citing various religious sources, declared “the wholesale emigration from Jewish neighborhoods” to be “a plague.” He deemed it a religious duty to remain in Crown Heights and in the midst of unprecedented white flight, the Lubavitch population increased year on year.[2]
Interestingly, Lubavitch Jews subsequently developed their own etymology for the name Crown Heights. In 1987 Rebbe Schneerson claimed the neighborhood was prophesied in an ancient religious text that read, “There are three crowns: the crown of Torah, the crown of priesthood, and the crown of royalty. But the crown of a good name rises above them all.” According to Schneerson “the crown of a good name” rising above them all could be translated as “the highest crown,” or Crown Heights. In this way what had initially been a quick attempt by real estate to re-brand Crow Hill in the early twentieth century took on symbolic meaning for the Lubavitch community.[3]
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The borders of Crown Heights were formalized in 1968 through the creation of Community Board 8, but even then the borders of the neighborhood were often disputed. In 1978 the Landmarks Commission was forced to admit that, “the name Crown Heights, when used to define a specific neighborhood in Brooklyn, is subject to many interpretations as to location and boundaries.”[4] A 1985 New York Times article described Crown Heights extending as far west as Flatbush Avenue,[5] and in 1988 Toby Sanchez not only placed the western border at Grand Army Plaza but listed Winthrop Street as the southern extent of the neighborhood. He too accepted that “the definition of Crown Heights is imprecise and shifting.”[6]
But by far the greater border in Crown Heights was that of Eastern Parkway which separated Crown Heights North – symbolically African-American and Caribbean – and Crown Heights South – symbolically Lubavitch. This division was institutionalized in the 1976 separation of Crown Heights South from Community Board 8 and its transfer into Community Board 9.
Neighborhood tension culminated in the 1991 Crown Heights riot and it is little surprise that the post-riot project led by the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, and the Weeksville Society was entitled Bridging Eastern Parkway.
Today Eastern Parkway no longer serves as the symbolic dividing line that it once did. At the same time new groups and individuals are moving into Crown Heights and, alongside eager property developers, are contributing to a re-writing of the neighborhoods’ borders and landmarks. While there has been an identifiable area known as Crown Heights since at least the 1960s, the history of its neighborhood and community formation suggests that this has never been, and will never likely be, stable. Much as the neighborhood was re-drawn throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there is nothing to say a similar process will not take place again in the twenty-first. Yet, the history shows that whatever will be written on maps and in municipal documents, the informal and unofficial ways that the neighborhood is experienced will be just as important, if not more, than official designations.
[1] Henry Goldschmidt, Race and religion among the chosen people of Crown Heights (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 94.
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[2] Ibid., 16-17.
[3] Ibid., 85.
[4] New York Landmarks Preservation Commission. Crown Heights North proposed historic district (New York: The Commission, 1978).
[5] Myra Klockenbrink, “If you’re thinking of living in: Crown Heights,” The New York Times, January 20, 1985.
[6] Toby Sanchez, Crown Heights neighborhood profile (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn In Touch Information Center, 1988), 1.
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