Brownsville (New York City)
 
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Location in New York City
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Brownsville is a neighborhood ( neighborhood ) in New York City District ( Borough ) Brooklyn . Together with Ocean Hill, Brownsville forms Community District (CD) 16, one of the poorest boroughs of New York.
location
Community District 16 is in northeast Brooklyn and is bounded by 98th Street, Ralph Avenue and Saratoga Avenue to the west, Broadway to the north, Van Sinderen Avenue to the east, and the Long Island Railroad - Bay Ridge Branch to the south. The adjacent boroughs are clockwise from north Bushwick (CD 4), East New York and New Lots (both CD 5), Canarsie (CD 18), East Flatbush (CD 17), Crown Heights (CD 8) and Bedford-Stuyvesant. The boundary between Ocean Hill in the north and Brownsville runs roughly along the Eastern Parkway.
Residents
Ocean Hill and Brownsville had a population of 116,679 , according to a 2008 American Community Survey estimate. Compared to the 2000 census, this was an increase of 27%. The vast majority of residents (79%) are African American , 4.4% White, 0.7% Asian, 12.7% Other, and 2.1% of the population gave multiple races. 22.2% of Brownsville and Ocean Hills residents describe themselves as Hispanics .
Land use
Community District 16 is almost completely built up. Almost 60 percent of the land area consists of residential developments, mainly 1- and 2-family houses (22.7%) and apartment buildings (36.3%). The latter are mostly public housing operated by the New York Housing Authority NYCHA . Most of the public housing is in the eastern half of Brownsville, between East New York Avenue to the north and Riverdale Avenue to the south on either side of Mother Gaston Boulevard. The neighborhood's little industry (4.4%) is mostly found in the northeast, near Broadway Junction, and along the Long Island Railroad.
The main shopping streets of Ocean Hill Brownsville of national importance are Pitkin Avenue, and parts of Rockaway Avenue north and south of Pitkin Avenue. In addition to branches of national chains, there are also shops with very “ethnic” goods and services.
Larger fallow land, remnants of the 1970s decline, still exists along Livonia Avenue in southern Brownsville and between Eastern Parkway and East New York Avenue. Only a little less than 5% of the area of the Community District consists of public green spaces, the largest of which is Betsy Head Park in the southwest.
Although geographically relatively central in Brooklyn, the community district is fairly isolated from a traffic point of view. The Subway Line 3 along the Livonia Avenue and the line C along the Fulton Street merely pass through the extreme south or north of the district, and the line L tangent Brownsville only in the East.
history
The systematic settlement Brownsville began with the construction of 250 homes by Charles S. Brown in 1865. In 1879, the companies and Aaron Kaplan, large parts of Brownsville began to buy up to there tenements ( Tenements ), especially for textile workers of the Lower East Side to build, . The completion of Fulton Street El (1889) and Williamsburg Bridge (1903) opened up the area in terms of transport and led to a rapid increase in population, especially of Jews from Eastern Europe. In 1926 Brownsville had more than 400,000 inhabitants, more than 75% of whom were Jewish, and was known as the "Jerusalem of America".
Much like the Lower East Side , life in Brownsville was marked by poverty and other social problems in the first half of the 20th century, and organized crime took hold in the wake of Prohibition . The notorious gangster syndicate " Murder, Inc. " had essential roots here with the "Brownsville Boys" around Abe Reles and the Ocean Hill Hooligans . But other gangs of the Kosher Nostra also recruited their members from Brownsville, among others.
The distress in Brownsville also led to some progressive measures. Brownsville sent socialists to the New York State Assembly in Albany between 1915 and 1921, and the first American family planning and birth control clinic was founded in Brownsville in 1916 by Margaret Sanger . In 1914, New York City's first public swimming pool was built in Betsy Head Park. After the Second World War, most of the slums were demolished and the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) built public housing .
However, when the white population moved to the suburbs in the 1960s, the social situation deteriorated again and poverty, crime and neglect took on dramatic proportions. The 1968 Brownsville School Strike became a symbol of deteriorating racial relations. The low point was reached with the blackout of 1977, in which many houses that had not yet been completely neglected fell victim to arson. Community District 16 has improved somewhat since the early 1980s, not least due to the construction of Nehemiah houses on the wasteland. Brownsville and Community District 16 are still hot spots in New York.
Problems
Ocean Hill Brownsville is grappling with a number of social issues including poverty, crime, and substance abuse. The unemployment rate in 2008 was 13.5%, more than double the average for all of New York, and the median household income in the same year was $ 37,641, only about half that of New York City. The murder rate of 21 murders per 100,000 population in 2009 was almost four times the average for the city of New York. 21.4% of Community District 16 residents had no high school diploma in 2008, compared to 10.4% for all of New York. Also in the same year, only 7.4% of residents had a bachelor's degree or higher, compared with 19.2% across the city.
additional
Professional criminal Henry Hill , who later worked with law enforcement, wrote his memoirs in the novel Wiseguy . Here he describes how he grew up as an Irish-Italian boy in Brownsville, experiencing poverty, crime and violence. The novel served as a template for the feature film Goodfellas by Martin Scorsese .
See also
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ New York City Department of City Planning: '' Brooklyn Community District 16 ACS Demographic and Housing Estimates 2006–2008 ( Memento of the original from April 14, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. '' (accessed December 29, 2009).
- ↑ Brooklyn Community District 16 Profiles on the Department of City Planning website (accessed February 1, 2010).
- ↑ Kenneth T. Jackson, John B. Manbeck: `` The Neighborhoods of Brooklyn ''. Yale University Press, New Haven / London, 1998, pp. 40-43, ISBN 0-300-07752-1 .
- ↑ Landmarks Preservation Commission: Betsy Head Play Center Designation Report ( Memento of the original dated March 2, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 1.6 MB), September 16, 2008, Designation List 405, LP-2240, accessed December 30, 2009.
- ↑ Brooklyn Community District 16 ACS Selected Economic Characteristics 2006–2008 ( Memento of the original from April 14, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. '' (accessed December 30, 2009).
- ↑ The City of New York: NYC Neighborhood Statistics ( Memento of the original from May 29, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed December 28, 2009
- ↑ a b Community District 16 ACS Selected Social Characteristics 2006–2008 ( Memento of the original dated June 6, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. '' (accessed December 28, 2009).
Coordinates: 40 ° 40 ′ N , 73 ° 55 ′ W