Brooklyn Ron

White Fella Tells Me: Soon All Your People Will be out of Brooklyn, and I'll be So Happy

I was leaving Sun in Bloom vegan place over on Bergen Street off Flatbush a couple of hours ago, and I thought, Hey, $17 for one square piece of a pizza?

Seems I'm going to more and more places in Brooklyn where prices are zooming out of control and where I'm just about the only black person around

Regarding which: Last August I wrote a piece in the Daily News about gentrification and  how it was hitting Crown Heights ("The New Fight For Crown Heights: A quarter-century after the riots, the Brooklyn neighborhood is battling to hold onto its history").

Immediately after the piece went up, a guy who used the name Thaddeus Stanley sent me an email asking why blacks complain when whites move into their communities, making them cleaner, with cafes and expensive eateries.

Thaddeus said he was tired of ignorant black people griping about safer streets and better food. He wrote that he and his wife had once gotten a bottle thrown at them by racist black kids in Crown Heights. He finally got a measure of peace, he said, when it hit him that those kids (and most blacks) would soon be priced out of Brooklyn, a place once called the capital of the Black Diaspora.

Here's what he wrote:

I read your prejudice (sic) "articles" on the daily news website. One question that I've always had about gentrification, a question that remains unanswered, a question that you personally must've asked yourself: why are white people able to take the same resources, same real estate, and change the neighborhood from a socioeconomic hell into a thriving economic engine while the native inhabitants allow these neighborhoods to rot?

My wife and I, both white, on a recent visit to crown heights, were assaulted with a glass bottle by black teenagers who mocked us with racist slurs. In the moment I felt rage and anger, but afterwards I felt some delight knowing that "their" neighborhood is only their neighborhood for a few more years. I hope all these opponents of gentrification, all these community coalitions, look back and think to themselves, "wow, if we only put in this much effort to better our community while it was our community, it may still be our community."

I hope you all enjoyed your existence in Brooklyn. I can't wait to enjoy an overpriced cafe latte and a farm-to-table meal in the space that is currently being used for your community gatherings.

 

 

Website Names 'Brooklynites of the Year': Isaac and Robert Toussie

Why, you ask, would this popular website -- known through Brooklyn and, indeed, the world, as a progressive site that promotes justice and kindness toward fellow humans -- choose the Toussies as Brooklynites of the Year?

Well, the case of the Toussies -- perhaps more than any other revealed act of fraud and immorality in the past year -- exposed the connection between politicians and the mortgage brokers and realtors who got the country into its current huge financial mess. 

Brooklyn-based Isaac Toussie [photo, left] had been convicted in a scheme to get mortgages for unqualified homebuyers, and is also accused of defrauding minority home purchasers who ended up with shoddy, crumbling houses.

When President Bush pardoned Isaac Toussie last week, it was revealed that Toussie's father, Robert Toussie [photo, right], had donated more than $28,000 to the Republican National Committee.

Bush withdrew the pardon after the embarrassing stories surfaced about the donation. (See Daily News story.)

These mortgages schemes perpetrated by Isaac Toussie and others -- worse in so many ways than what Bernard Madoff did when he ripped off investors of billions in a Ponzi scheme -- were the acts of economic violence that finally shook the foundation of the American and later the world economy.

We hopefully will all remember the Toussies and their connection to President Bush, the wild free marketer who, given free reign, would have allowed cowboy entrepreneurs like that Toussiess to do what they wanted to whom they wanted.

Hopefully also, things are changing now and the hammer will continue to come down on those who did so much wrong to so many people.

Brooklyn is the Borough of Historic Homes, With Far More Than Manhattan

[Click above image to see numbers on chart more clearly.]

All you have to do is walk through Brooklyn Heights or Fort Greene or Bedford-Stuyvesant or Park Slope, or almost anywhere else in north central Brooklyn, to see that history is embedded in the structures of the borough.

The place, in fact, is all but synonymous with the word brownstone, which itself has come to signify the then-suburban elegance of eighteenth century New York.

Ah, yes, it's also called the "borough of churches," churches gleaming in marble beauty, from St. Anne's in Brooklyn Heights to the wonderfully preserved Our Lady of Victory in Bed-Stuy.

But now the American Community Survey, which has become the annual version of the decennial census, shows us with undeceiving numbers that our perception are based in fact.

Brooklyn has far more homes built before World War II, in both percentage terms and absolute numbers, than any other borough, with 52.6 percent of its houses (505,103 of them) constructed before 1939.

(The above graphic, by the way, is a breakdown of homes in Brooklyn, by decade of construction, with pre-1939 being the last category. Click the image to see the breakdowns more clearly. To see the housing survey with all of its significant detail, go to this New York City Planning Department site and choose "selected housing characteristics" for the year 2007.) 

Regarding pre-1939 homes in the city, Manhattan was next with 49.1 percent (or 414,464 structures) of its housing inventory in that category. The Bronx had 39.6 percent, Queens, 33.9 percent and Staten Island, 20.1.

(To see website with this accompanying photo of Brooklyn brownstones, click here.)

Like 2008, '68 was a Breakthrough Year, as Shirley Chisholm was Elected to Congress

In 1968, the skies opened up, politically speaking and locally speaking, as Shirley Chisholm, daughter of Barbadian immigrants, became the first black woman elected to Congress in U.S. history.

It was a tremendous honor for Brooklyn, true place of new beginnings.

And what a new beginning it was.

Just four years after Chisholm, who was elected from a specially drawn district in Central Brooklyn, including Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights, the fiery, super-confident Congresswoman made a leap for the U.S. Presidency.

She reached for, but did obtain, that ribbon.

Even so a precedent of sorts was established, and many Brooklynites are saying that she laid the groundwork for the recent, nation-transforming victory of Barack Obama.

On Nov. 25, scholars and elected officials will gather at Brooklyn College to celebrate "Shirley Chisholm Day." Attending the event, to be held at the Woody Tanger Auditorium, will be:

Assemblyman N. Nick Perry

Yvonne Graham, Assistant to Brooklyn Borough President 

Shola Lynch, producer and film maker

Daphne Brunet, recipient Shirley Chisholm Intern Scholarship

Barbara Winslow, Coordinator Women's Studies

Patricia Antoniello, Director Shirley Chisholm Center for Research on Women

The keynote speaker will be Gary Younge, author and Guardian correspondent.

The event is being sponsored by Brooklyn College's Shirley Chisholm Center for Research on Women.

It should be noted also that, in this year of remembrance of Congresswoman Chisholm, Sen. Velmanette Montgomery and Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries have introduced state legislation that would rename the Kings County State Office Building in Downtown, at 55 Hanson Place.

It would become the Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm State Office Building.

As Gustav Threatens Home Region With More Death, West Indians Ready for Parade in Brooklyn

[photo from 424 Smith.]

Already it seems that Hurricane Gustav has taken scores of lives in Haiti and Cuba, and the citizens of New Orleans are evacuating because of concern it will hit them and cause the kind of death and destruction that Katrina did three years ago.

Brooklyn is far from the eye, and Brooklynites are safe.

But this is the run-up to Brooklyn's annual West Indian Day Parade, held every Labor Day and attended by many hundreds of thousands with roots in the Caribbean, which means a good portion of the two and a half million residents of Brooklyn itself.

It's not clear at the moment how the hurricane will affect the parade, beyond expressions of concern for the fate of those threatened directly by it.

But surely Gustav will be on the minds of revelers, whose reveling will be, in many cases, a bit tempered perhaps.

[photo is from the official West Indian Day Parade web site.]

Brooklyn, the Most Pro Obama Place in Hillary Clinton's State, Awaits the Healing

Even those who were deeply offended by what they believed were race baiting tactics of Hillary and Bill Clinton during Hillary's campaign against Barack Obama would have to admit it.

Bill Clinton's speech on Wednesday night hit the ball out of the park.

Senator Clinton's speech the night before was powerful in its own right but the former President's address made one aware, once again, of the extraordinary intelligence and (let's admit it) superior education that lifted that man (and his many inner demons) to the heights of American politics.

They, the two Clintons, in their passion and rhetoric, left little room for doubting their commitment to the candidacy of Obama in the race against John McCain.

Don't get us wrong. There is doubt. We have written here, for instance, about Peggy Noonan who has virtually built a career (and a very successful one) at informing the world about the trickiness and narcisistic self-interest of Hillary Clinton.

There are those who believe that Hillary Clinton has her eyes on 2012 and would very much want to see Obama lose this race so that she can have a go at it again in that year. (Maureen Dowd of The New York Times has been in this category and has been expressing herself with wit and wisdom.)

But the New York delegation of Democrats, who must have been painfully stung by the polarization of the heated Hillary versus Barack primary race -- especially in Brooklyn where the districts of Congressmembers Yvette Clarke and Ed Towns went for Obama, even as Clarke and Towns stuck with Hillary -- are happy now that peace reigns on the surface.

That was a stroke of genius Wednesday, the way Hillary Clinton stopped the voting that pitted her against Obama, halting the tally as the country waited breathlessly to see how her New York State was going to vote, and then asking for a consensus backing of Barack.

This is indeed a critical juncture in what has been one of the most interesting, if also bitter, primary races in recent memory.

[The accompanying photo here -- of Sen. Hillary Clinton and [Brooklyn born] Gov. David Paterson -- is from the online New York Observer. See their article on The Morning After.]