BROWNSVILLE, BROOKLYN

'Brownsville' is a neighborhood in central Brooklyn, New York, predominantly Caribbean, Hispanic, and African-American. In 2000, Brownsville's 73rd precinct recorded the highest incidence of murders compared to all other precincts in New York City.
North of Brownsville starts from East New York Avenue (on the Bedford-Stuyvesant border), the west is bordered on East 98th Street (East Flatbush), the east by Van Sinderen Avenue (East New York) and south by the BMT L Line (Linden Boulevard).
The zip code for the neighborhood is 11212. The area should not be confused with Ocean Hill, a subsection of Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Contents

History

Today

Notable Residents

References

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. ^[1]
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. 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. ^[2]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.

Today

By 2000, conditions in Brownsville had improved since the 1960s though there were still weedy lots and abandoned buildings. The neighbourhood has seen plenty of housing development of recent times. The 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.
Gang violence is common, and there was a certain level of organized crime in the area, most notably a group called "Murder, Inc." This group was most prominent in the 1920s and 1930s. Whether a Brownsville resident was involved with the criminal element or not, it took a certain amount of toughness to survive on the streets of Brownsville. It made sense to learn how to defend oneself during those times
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 shiny precinct across from it are about the only new buildings to go up in Brownsville in at least 20 years, as factories and businesses in the area have closed.
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 ABG 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 the largest concentration of public housing in the country.
=Transportation=
Brownsville is accessible from the IRT. Its main thoroughfare is Pitkin Avenue.

Notable Residents

★ Aaron Copland

★ Abe "Kid Twist" Reles

★ Agallah

★ Alfred Kazin

★ Bruce Pasternack

★ Curly Howard of The Three Stooges

★ Danny Kaye

★ George Gershwin

★ Harry "Pittsburgh Phil" Strauss

★ Heltah Skeltah

★ John Gotti

★ "Lepke" Buchalter

★ M.O.P.

★ Masta Ace

★ Mike Tyson

★ Moe Howard of The Three Stooges

★ Riddick Bowe

★ Shemp of The Three Stooges

★ Shannon Briggs

★ Terry Semel

★ The RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan

★ The GZA of the Wu-Tang Clan

★ U-God of the Wu-Tang Clan

★ Willie Randolph

★ Zab Judah

References

1. Brownsville, Brooklyn : Blacks, Jews, and the changing face of the ghetto'' by Wendell E Pritchett. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2002. ISBN: 0226684466
2. ''Confrontation at Ocean Hill-Brownsville; the New York school strikes of 1968'' by Maurice R Berube & Marilyn Gittell. New York, Praeger [1969] OCLC: 19279