Why Now?
Not everyone feels valued as Crown Heights changes
By Matthew Taub
For all that’s changed in her Crown Heights, Tracey Reid is not blind to the innocuous upgrade outside her storefront: a metal fence now contains the nearest tree, which Reid says went unprotected until last year.
“Whatever is done in society is done in a timing,” says Reid. “What is the need to have these changes transpire now?”
The need, say those like Reid who have been in Crown Heights for decades, is to satisfy their wealthier neighbors who have only recently arrived.
Since 2000, a year after Reid opened Lionheart Natural Herbs and Spices on Nostrand Avenue, the black population in her particular stretch of Crown Heights has shrunk from 92 percent to 66 percent in 2015. At the same time, the white population has ballooned from just over one percent to 23 percent. Striking as that shift is, its pace is only accelerating: consider that in 2010 the white population was just six percent.
The area’s economic profile has been likewise transformed: as recently as 2010, the neighborhood’s median household income trailed those of the rest of Brooklyn, and the city. Five years later, it had surged past the borough and the city, with a median annual household income of more than $54,000. Domestic property values, which also lagged behind the rest of the borough and the city, now eclipse both.
Black and white household incomes have both risen — and to much more impressive degrees than they have throughout the borough and beyond. Still, white household income in 2015 stood at just over $83,000 — nearly doubling the $46,500 median household income of black families.
Here, on Tracey Reid’s stretch of Nostrand — which extends from Saint Marks Avenue to Bergen Street — the transformation is apparent when you look at the storefronts, with the businesses catering to new customers sitting alongside businesses like Reid’s that have been around for years: Connecticut Muffin; Hing Hung Kitchen; and the Xtra 99 Cents store.
The calm that had persisted through the neighorhood’s transformation was punctured in July, when protestors took to the street to rally against a new “boozy sandwich shop” called Summerhill. Promoting a “bullet hole-ridden wall” and jokingly selling rosé in 40-ounce bottles — typically associated with malt liquor — the restaurant became a lightning rod for activists arguing that racism was intertwined with the neighborhood’s development. Summerhill has since covered the wall and stopped selling the wine.
But talking to people on the block, it becomes clear that the protests were not limited to anger about careless iconography.
“I got no issues with her being here,” said Ricardo Mondesir of Becca Brennan, Summerhill’s owner, from a Summerhill barstool. “Some people are scared of change, some people embrace it.” Mondesir, 37, maintains that any fair discussion of changes in Crown Heights — where he has spent his whole life — cannot omit reduced crime, expanded employment, and beautified spaces. He has a point: since 1993, the seven major felonies have decreased by over 82 percent in the 77th precinct (even if local unemployment is up since 2010).
For Mondesir, it all feels too much like being a sibling who watches with envy as his mother fusses over her favored child.
“Why for them, but you never gave us the chance or opportunity?” he said. “I doubt they would’ve given a lot of people the type of loan to really open a shop, to become what you see right now. My race, at least …”
It’s one thing to enjoy improvements in the local quality of life. It’s yet another to sense that such progress was not made with you in mind.
“I think that’s the tone of the neighborhood right now,” said Tabitha Kennedy, a real estate agent whose office is next to Summerhill. She tells her daughter a story uncannily similar to Mondesir’s: she has a second daughter “and everything that she had was like 40 times better.” The first child, says Kennedy, is like the people who have been in Crown Heights for a long time and who may ask “‘why wasn’t it good like that for me when I was here?’ All of a sudden you guys actually care that the streets are clean? Like all of a sudden, you want to paint over the graffiti on the side of buildings? All of a sudden you have to make sure that the apartment is renovated.” And, she added, “there’s nobody on the corner selling drugs.”
The memory of a past filled with crime and violence — even death — hangs heavily over those who lived through it, and literally over the corner of Nostrand and Saint Marks. A sign for Damon S. Allen Way commemorates a man shot and killed in 2006 during the West Indian J’Ouvert festival — an eerie, if easily missed, reminder of the past. Tracey Reid remembers years of “bullets” and “murders and people jumping off of buildings from ecstasy and all different type of things,” before “governmental intervention” reduced crime for new arrivals.
Suzanne Forrester, a real estate broker, is likewise grateful that children can now be out after midnight without the threat of gang violence, which she says was prominent “particularly on this street.” But that security, she added, “had to wait until white people started coming to live in the neighborhood.”
Even the most satisfied longtime residents feel that their benefits, however real, are incidental, a byproduct of change intended for others. Anthony Ervin, who has spent 21 years in his ABC 2 Barbershop, is glad that local kids can enjoy a renovated park and grateful that his new neighbors patronize his shop. Still, he wonders why police guard the Nostrand Avenue Pub, which opened in 2013, every night until closing time — a service Ervin says was never provided to the defunct Starlite Lounge through its decades around the corner.
“That’s just what black people and people from low-income neighborhoods have to deal with in this country, period,” said Kenneill Moultrie, a Summerhill line cook. When wealthier people move to a neighborhood “of course they’re gonna have more police presence.”
When his boss, Summerhill’s beleaguered owner Becca Brennan suggested that police response times might become quicker due to “more eyes on the street when there’s more businesses open,” Moultrie cut her off.
“Nah, Becca, I’m telling you,” he said. Now that “they know it’s more valued in the neighborhood, they gonna become quick.”
For Ricardo Mondesir, the cumulative benefits reflect a larger problem: looking past people like him; looking down; or not looking at all. “It’s a feeling,” he said, “that you’re better than us. I see it all the time.”
That same feeling prompted one of Forrester’s clients to back out of leasing a storefront to white tenants, after they asked about buying the property in the future. “She took it as, ‘Why do you wanna take my building?’” explained Forrester. “She was very insulted by it. Because she has stayed here, withstood the gunshots, the drugs, the gang warfare” — only to be made to feel dispensable.
Summerhill’s ultimate offense may have less to do with its walls or wine than its windows — those long, wide clearings lined by countertops and cocktails. Neighbors resent the restaurant’s ostentatious openness, its bright color scheme and exposed customers.
“It wouldn’t matter if it was Summerhill or another place,” said Reid. “It’s all about the look of things right now.” From her narrow storefront — a smaller window into the neighborhood’s Caribbean legacy — she added, “Brooklyn wasn’t always about façade.” For her part, Becca Brennan says she wanted her shop to be merely “open and vibrant.” But for many, that visibility is an unintended reminder of being overlooked for so long.
Just south on Nostrand, an even newer establishment called Cocoa Grinder blends in somewhat more seamlessly — nestled with tinted windows into the middle of the block. It is the latest of many sleek cafes that have opened along the avenue. Inside, a man congratulates an employee on the opening.
Cocoa Grinder, he said, was open for business in “uncharted territory.”
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