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Brownsville, Brooklyn
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Brownsville is a neighborhood in central Brooklyn. Brownsville was predominantly Jewish from 1880s to the 1950s, but the majority of its residents are Caribbean, Hispanic, and African-American today.
Brownsville was politically radical during its Jewish days; it elected Socialist and American Labor Party candidates to the state assembly throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
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.
By the 1960s, when its population had become largely African-American and Puerto Rican, Brownsville's unemployment rate was 17 percent and 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. At night, kids set fires to the empty buildings and apartments. Women on welfare sit up all night to watch for fires which could kill their children.
In 1968 Brownsville was the theater for a protracted and highly contentious teacher strike. 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.
Conditions in Brownsville have improved since the 1960s. Though there are still weedy lots and abandoned buildings, the neighborhood has seen much new housing built. Many from first developments were built by various non-profit groups, but now for-profit traditional developers are becoming active. Some of the vacant sites have been turned into attractive community gardens.
Brownsville is accessible from the IRT. Its main thoroughfare is Pitkin Avenue.
Famous people from Brownsville include Agallah, M.O.P., Heltah Skeltah, Masta Ace, Turner J. Thompson, Aaron Copland, Danny Kaye, Special Olympics CEO Bruce Pasternack, Moe, Shemp and Curly Howard of The Three Stooges, Smoothe Da Hustler and Trigger da Gambler, The RZA and U-God (rappers of the Wu-Tang Clan), Mike Tyson, Riddick Bowe, Willie Randolph, professional boxer Zab Judah, boxer Shannon Briggs, John Gotti (who lived there as a teen and was a member of the Rockaway Boys street gang) and Tony Cai, Abe "Kid Twist" Reles, "Lepke" Buchalter, Harry "Pittsburgh Phil" Strauss, and Alfred Kazin, whose memoir, "A Walker in the City," evokes Brownsville life during the depression.
