Chapter 9: Fort Greene, New York Jan Rosenberg Long Island University Linked to lower Manhattan by the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, as well as by major subway lines, Fort Greene is just minutes away from Wall Street, City Hall, Chinatown, Little Italy, and Greenwich Village. Primarily a residential neighborhood, Fort Greene has been known for its racial and social class diversity since the 1840s. Two important characteristics differentiate it from other diverse urban neighborhoods. First, although Fort Greene shifted from mostly White to predominantly Black during its long history, its property values have increased and it has maintained a significant White population, currently about 15 percent. It neither tipped racially nor became poorer. Second, by the 1980s the social class differences between Black and White gentrifiers in the neighborhood's south end and the low-income residents concentrated in public housing projects became more salient than the racial differences between area residents. This article highlights some of the social policies, institutions, and groups that have contributed to Fort Greene's long and unusual history of racial and social class diversity.' Fort Greene Park, in the center of the community, offers common ground to the neighborhood's diverse residents, employees, and students. Built to provide a peaceful, green refuge from the wood-frame, brick, and brownstone buildings and city street life that surround it, the park helps define and differentiate the neighborhood's social geography and architecture. Historically, Fort Greene has been a neighborhood of contrasts that are visible in its architecture, racial and ethnic composition, social class mixture, public spaces, and development dynamic or through comparisons with adjacent neighborhoods. The architectural contrasts in Fort Greene could not be sharper. A large, 35-building public housing project of lowrise (6-story) and midrise (11- and 15-story) buildings spans much of the area north of Fort Greene Park and is bordered on the east by modest woodframe houses. Myrtle Avenue, a partially vacant and often dangerous commercial strip, separates the projects and wood-frame houses on the north from the park on the south and seems to sag under the weight of advancing deterioration. Elegant, well-maintained 19th-century brick and brownstone houses, many owned and inhabited by young artists and professionals, line streets that stretch south and east of the park. Brooklyn Hospital and Long Island University stand directly west of the park, adjacent to two middle-class apartment complexes. A number of educational, health, and cultural institutions dot the neighborhood. Fort Like the architecture, Fort Greene Park demarcates the neighborhood's social geography. The clearest lines of social differentiation reflect social class, not race. Public housing tenants differ markedly from the local brownstoners in a familiar range of social class characteristics: education, median income, percent below poverty, and occupation. Fort Greene's History of Diversity Fort Greene, like most of Brooklyn, was primarily farmland until the mid-19th century. Before 1850, active shipyards, located just north of the neighborhood on the edge of Wallabout Bay, attracted laborers, including a community of free Black workers and their families. Colored School Number 1 (now Public School 67) was built in 1847 for the children of the Black shipyard workers. Though Blacks were longtime Brooklyn residents (the borough had been the slaveholding capital of New York State), they were a small and declining proportion of Brooklyn's rapidly growing immigrant population during the 19th century. For the most part, this relatively small number of Blacks remained dispersed throughout the borough, unlike White immigrant groups that were far more concentrated. By 1870, more than one-half of Brooklyn's Blacks lived in Fort Greene, but even here Blacks made up only 10.3 percent of the population. By 1900 the area had the only major Black settlement in New York City. Many working-class Blacks and Whites (including the poet Walt Whitman) lived in Fort Greene's northern section. Between 1850 and 1900, houses for middle- and upper-class Whites were built south and east of Fort Greene Park, drawing business and professional people from Brooklyn Heights and Manhattan. Luxurious, freestanding Italianate mansions lined Clinton Avenue by the 1860s, and elegant brownstones similar to those in Brooklyn Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Park Slope were built in the following decades. Around the turn of the century, several hotels, apartment buildings, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music were built. Racial discrimination in housing intensified early in the 20th century, concentrating Blacks along the Fulton Street corridor, with Fort Greene as its western boundary. As large, single-family homes became less popular in the 1920s-some were destroyed to build apartment buildings for the middle class-the neighborhood began to change in ways that the Depression would soon accelerate. Housing values in Fort Greene, as elsewhere, dropped precipitously during the Depression, creating buying opportunities for newcomers. As German, English, and other older homeowners accepted low offers and moved out, large numbers of middle-class Italians moved to the neighborhood. By 1940 the outlines of what was to be central Brooklyn's ghetto were becoming clear. By then Blacks had the worst housing and health conditions in Brooklyn, regardless of neighborhood. Fort Greene was no exception. As Francis X. Connolly (1977), drawing on accounts from the Brooklyn Eagle, explained, "An intensive study of a heavily Black fiveblock area [in Fort Greene] known as 'the jungle' revealed the highest tuberculosis and infant mortality rates in the country." It is sobering to read this in the 1990s. The Fort Greene Strategic Neighborhood Action Partnership (SNAP), an organization funded by New York State, reported that the very same conditions (along with HIV/AIDS, teen pregnancy, and asthma) continue to plague the neighborhood today.2 Fort Greene's proximity to the Brooklyn Navy Yard paid off handsomely in the 1940s. The Navy Yard's shipbuilding and weapons manufacturing operations, which ran 24 hours a day, kept the Brooklyn economy humming and provided jobs for neighborhood and borough residents. Although the best jobs went to Whites, Blacks (particularly Black women) also advanced. Navy Yard workers needed housing, and brownstones were converted to rooming houses to accommodate them. In addition, and far more important in terms of its effect on the neighborhood, a major government-supported housing project (later split into two projects) opened in the area in 1944. At first, shipyard workers and their families (mostly White) were the majority tenants, although a substantial minority of Blacks also lived there. Although the housing projects remained racially integrated, working class, and relatively stable into the 1960s, the projects today are characterized by overwhelming poverty, joblessness, homogeneous minority populations, and dangerous conditions. These projects remained racially integrated for the first 15 years until Whites began stampeding to the suburbs in the 1950s. From 1950 to 1970, Fort Greene lost more than 10,000 residents to White flight. Public housing policies unintentionally hastened this out-migration by pressuring tenants (through rising rents) to move out of the projects as their earnings increased to make room for others who had a more compelling claim on public rent subsidies. In contrast to the projects' racial mix in the 1940s and 1950s, the areas south and east of Fort Greene Park remained exclusively White and middle-class until the 1950s, when they changed racially and deteriorated quickly. Suburbanization and the construction of the public housing projects had already begun to transform the neighborhood. The Navy Yard's decommissioning in 1966, coupled with the shock waves sent by Robert Moses' never-realized plan to build a new Dodgers' stadium and a campus for Baruch College, forced an increased racial turnover in neighborhood houses and other buildings. Banks stopped lending mortgage money in Fort Greene during the 1960s. Fort Greene Today Like most neighborhoods in New York, Fort Greene's boundaries are not officially defined. For the purposes of this study they extend from Flatbush Avenue Extension on the west to just beyond Classon Avenue on the east, and from Nassau Street on the north to Atlantic Avenue on the south (see exhibit 1). This includes the small area to the east sometimes called Clinton Hill3 but does not include the new MetroTech Center office complex or the downtown area across Flatbush Avenue. Before MetroTech was built in the 1980s, Myrtle Avenue continued straight through the center of what is now the MetroTech complex, linking the two sides of Flatbush Avenue. Here, dilapidated buildings housed dwindling marginal businesses, residential apartments, artists' lofts, and performance spaces. Now, Flatbush Avenue forms a natural western boundary for Fort Greene. Neighborhood activists, perhaps hoping to create a stronger connection between MetroTech companies and the neighborhood (and a stronger claim on corporate resources), may define neighborhood boundaries further west to include MetroTech. A recently published neighborhood profile, which deliberately separates the housing projects from the rest of Fort Greene, reports that median income in the projects is $11,344, although the median for all of Fort Greene is just under $25,000 (Brooklyn in Touch Information Center, 1993). A few census tracts south of Fort Greene Park have median incomes in the mid-$30,000s. The poverty rate is 46 percent in the projects and 31 percent in the rest of Fort Greene. Due north of the projects lies Brooklyn Navy Yard, a mostly vacant manufacturing-and now warehouse-district once central to the economy of the neighborhood and region. Across Flatbush Avenue to the west stands MetroTech, a large new office complex built with substantial private and public investment. South of MetroTech is bustling downtown Brooklyn and Fulton Mall, touted as "America's sixth most profitable commercial strip." Fort Greene differs notably from the areas it abuts, and those areas differ from each other. |