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Infamous urban planner Robert Moses encouraged the city to tear down the over-crowded tenements and build NYCHA developments. But the community refused to let that label stick. These photos found in the New York City Municipal Archives show abandoned buildings in the late 1960’s.
Brownsville brooklyn crack#
Over the mid- to late-20 th century, racist housing, banking policies (like redlining) as well as racist police practices lead to systematic disinvestment in Brownsville.īy the 1980’s, when the crack cocaine epidemic swept through Brooklyn, the neighborhood was a nationally-known symbol of urban decay. The area began to transition from a mostly Jewish neighborhood to Black and Latinx beginning in the 1930’s with the Second Great Migration and later with an influx of Caribbean immigrants and Latinx migrants and immigrants. By the 1930’s Brownsville was the most densely populated neighborhood in Brooklyn. Unfortunately, the families who left Lower Manhattan for Brownsville, mostly low-income immigrants, found no respite from substandard, overcrowded housing. But back in the 1880’s, Charles Brown, who owned most of the land in the area and for whom the neighborhood is named, advertised the community to Jewish people, mostly immigrants, who were living in cramped tenements on the Lower East Side. Now are going to check out a neighborhood where Habitat NYC has worked a great deal: the Brownsville community of Brooklyn! Today, Brownsville is a majority Black and Latinx community. We’ll feature our projects, the history and culture of the neighborhood, and some fun facts along the way. So we’re going to take our followers on a tour of 10 NYC neighborhoods where we’ve built. We’re starting to peek out the door a bit, we still can’t experience our city in full. We missed our city while we’ve been sheltering at home: we missed all the different neighborhoods, cuisines, languages and histories of the five boroughs.