Where Old Brooklyn Lives. If It Ever Was.
Some in Bay Ridge cling to memories of the past — even as the world changes around
By Steph Beckett
Bay Ridge doesn’t feel like New York City. People have yards and houses with multiple stories. They park their cars on the street or in a driveway — not in a distant, expensive, indoor lot.
The neighborhood’s claims to fame are modest: the setting of the 1977 movie, “Saturday Night Fever,” (although Bensonhurst might object) and a 120-year-old ice cream shop. Its history and suburban feel aren’t unique — other Brooklyn neighborhoods Midwood, Marine Park, and Dyker Heights offer the same ambience. But Bay Ridge sets itself apart. In a city that never sleeps, part of the neighborhood never wakes up.
Bay Ridge is what’s left of “Old Brooklyn.” Or rather the myth of what Brooklyn used to be, before new people, different people moved in.
If there is a heart of this “Old Brooklyn” you can find it between 74th and 92nd streets — bound by Shore Road and Ridge Boulevard. Here the streets are lined with town houses and single family homes, with mini vans in the driveways, Halloween decorations in the windows and yards, and the occasional sign for Nicole Malliotakis, the Republican candidate for mayor. This is a neigborhood that, unlike the surrounding area, voted for Donald Trump in 2016.
Knock on doors and get people talking about “Old Brooklyn” and they begin with how it looked. One middle aged woman told me about the trolley tracks that used to wind around Fifth and Bay Ridge avenues — though even that memory was not of the trolleys, which stopped running in the 1950s, but of the tracks. They reminded her of when she was little.
Cynthia Gustafson, who has lived in Brooklyn all her life recalled things were better in Old Brooklyn. “Years ago, it was wonderful,” she said. “It was safer. You could go out, everybody was on the stoop and you could socialize and go places and do things. It was very nice years ago.”
The neighborhood, she went on, needed more street lights and more police.
“But everybody’s complaining, ‘racial this and racial that,’” she said. “They don’t want to be like ‘stop and frisk.’ I think that was a great thing, ‘stop and frisk.’ It was wonderful.”
Henry Kobasky, who is 86 and lives nearby on Ridge Boulevard also missed Old Brooklyn.
“In the old time people — they were much friendlier toward each other because there was no fear that they would be attacked,” he said. “Today, unfortunately, as you see, people are being shot for no reason. The world is sick. It’s absolutely sick. We didn’t have anything like that in my youth.”
In 1982, the New York Times, citing census data, reported that Bay Ridge was so overwhelmingly white — 95 percent, in fact — that one resident described it as “the last white enclave of Brooklyn.”
Today’s Bay Ridge is still mostly white, but just barely a majority — 52 percent according to data from Statistical Atlas. It is also Hispanic, Asian, a small black population and growing Arab population — over a quarter of Bay Ridge’s residents identify as Arab (including those who identify as Palestian, Egyptian, Lebanese and Syrian).
Some are recent immigrants — in 2015, 11 percent of Bay Ridge residents spoke Arabic at home. That’s almost 8,000 people. It’s the third most spoken language in the neighborhood, after English and Spanish. Bay Ridge is the home of the Arab American Association of New York. It’s also the home of Linda Sarsour, one of the organizers of the 2017 Women’s March, and widely known as a face of resistance to President Trump.
Reverend Khader el-Yateem is a minister at Salam Arabic Lutheran Church. He moved to Bay Ridge in 1995 to take over what had been established over 100 years ago as a Danish church. El-Yateem said what was a community of Norwegian, Swedish, German, Italian and Irish immigrants was then becoming something else.
“Now the immigrants who are coming to the country are a different kind of immigrants,” El-Yateem said. “Mainly to this neighborhood are Arabs and Muslims and Asians and that is how we changed — how the neighborhood is changing.”
The median household income in Bay Ridge is almost $60,000. But some make as little as $25,000 and as much as $205,000. Twelve percent of the population receives food stamps.
You can see the economic diversity on 86th Street, the neighborhood’s main shopping drag, where you can buy anything from a fragrance from Bath and Body Works to a knock-off suitcase. It’s where the big strip mall chains meet the mom-and-pop shops that only carry about two of everything in their inventory.
There are also a lot of churches — Greek Orthodox and the Bay Ridge Jewish Center and the Union Church of Bay Ridge, the Salam Arabic Lutheran Church, El-Yateem’s church, which shares its building with a church of Norwegian descent, Our Saviour’s Evangelical Lutheran Church.
“It’s an immigrant congregation,” El-Yateem said. “It’s a congregation that is changing all the time, it’s Brooklyn; people come here for a year or two and move somewhere else or they go back so it’s a transitional congregation, it’s like a revolving door every couple of years I have a new church.”
El-Yateem said people will often move because they cannot afford to stay. In Bay Ridge, the average price per square foot has risen in the past year from $650, to $705. But, he added, there is another phenomenon of immigrant neighborhoods: people who were professionals in their home countries whose licenses do not apply in the United States and who therefore have to take whatever they can.
Meanwhile, those who choose to stay enjoy a benefit associated with “Old Brooklyn:” Bay Ridge is the seventh safest neighborhood in New York City, according to NYPD statistics cited in a DNAinfo.com report.
“I will imagine the more families who will come will settle here because they have the connections,” said El-Yateem. “They have people who can help them and assist them and welcome them to start their new life in this country. So it is kind of family attracts family and we have a very large Arab community here and people are just comfortable coming here.”
And yet there are those who convinced the neighborhood is not as safe as once was. Statistics, however, do not back this up. In the past year, the NYPD reported 92 felony assaults in the 68th Precinct, which includes Bay Ridge. In 1990 there were 248; in 2001 there were 169. The one murder in the precinct in 2017 was not a street crime but a clash between roommates in an apartment.
That’s not to say Bay Ridge hasn’t had its share of random street crime: in 1957, a woman named Patsy Hylan was killed in cold blood. She was left on a curb with her coat open, dress above her waist, and without shoes or underwear. She had been beaten by a hammer.
Between 1967 and 1972, mobster Bartholomew Boriello was arrested six times for such charges as weapons possession, assault, larceny and gambling. It wasn’t until the 1990s that Boriello killed one man and unsuccessfully tried to kill another.
And most notoriously in the summer of 1976, the Son of Sam murders began, in which David Berkowitz killed six people and injured seven. He shot his 12th and 13th victims as they were parked in a car on Bath Beach, a few streets over from Bay Ridge.
Still, compared to the rest of the city, Bay Ridge was safe. In 1982, when crime was at an all-time high in New York City, Sgt. John Granite of the 68th Precinct told the New York Times, “from 65th Street to 101st Street is one of the safest areas in Brooklyn.”
But for those in Arab community, El-Yateem said, the election of Donald Trump — and his harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric, has been unsettling. He has felt it first-hand. El-Yateem ran unsuccessfully in the Democratic primary for City Council in September. People issued death threats against him on social media, he said — saying things like kill him and hang him. The anti-Arab language, he added, is worse now than it was after 9/11.
“I will say it is a new phenomena across the country and in a community like Bay Ridge where it is a very diverse community we are seeing the hate crimes,” he said. “We are seeing people on social media saying things that are just scary.”
Still, he conceded, this the nature of the changing community: “Change is always very difficult and not only change is difficult but also dealing with a new community is not comfortable. You don’t know who they are, what’s their norms for them, what’s their traditions and cultures.”
A few blocks from the center of Old Brooklyn, a woman wearing a traditional head covering was walking her child home from school. Her family had moved to Bay Ridge from Lebanon 40 years ago and two years later she was born here.
The neighborhood, she said, was getting more crowded but no less safe.
Then, she added, “But I don’t want to jinx myself.”
Follow Steph on Twitter @stephlbeckett
