In response to the riots of the mid-‘60s, Walter Thabit was hired to work with the community of East New York to develop a plan for low- and moderate-income public housing. In the years that ...followed, he experienced first-hand the forces that had engineered East New York’s dramatic decline and that continued to work against its successful revitalization. How East New York Became a Ghetto describes the shift of East New York from a working-class immigrant neighborhood to a largely black and Puerto Rican neighborhood and shows how the resulting racially biased policies caused the deterioration of this once flourishing area.
A clear-sighted, unflinching look at one ghetto community, How East New York Became a Ghetto provides insights and observations on the histories and fates of ghettos throughout the United States.
The World in Brooklyn: Gentrification, Immigration, and Ethnic Politics in a Global City, is a collection of scholarly papers which analyze demographic, social, political, and economic trends that ...are occurring in Brooklyn. Brooklyn, as the context, reflects global forces while also contributing to them. The idea for this volume developed as the editors discovered a group of scholars from different disciplines and various universities studying Brooklyn. Brooklyn has always been legendary and has more recently regained its stature as a much sought after place to live, work and have fun. Popular folklore has it that most U.S. residents trace their family origins to Brooklyn. It is presently referred to as one of the “hippest” places in New York. Thus, this book is a collection of demographic, ethnographic, and comparative studies which focus on urban dynamics in Brooklyn. The chapters investigate issues of social class, urban development, immigration, race, ethnicity and politics within the context of Brooklyn. As a whole, this book considers both theoretical and practical urban issues. In most cases the scholarly perspective is on everyday life. With this in mind there are also social justice concerns. Issues of social segregation and attendant homogenization are brought to light. Moreover, social class and race advantages or disadvantages, as part of urban processes, are underscored through critiques of local policy decisions throughout the chapters. A common thread is the assertion by contributors that planning the future of Brooklyn needs to include multi-ethnic, racial, and economic groups, those very residents who make-up Brooklyn.
Krase and DeSena offer a comprehensive view from the street of two iconic Brooklyn neighborhoods, Crown Heights-Prospect-Lefferts Gardens and Greenpoint-Williamsburg. They analyze the neighborhoods' ...precipitous decline and subsequent spectacular rise.
Race first emerged as an important ingredient of New York City's melting pot when it was known as New Amsterdam and was a fledgling colonial outpost on the North American frontier. This book details ...the arrival of the first immigrants, including African slaves, and traces encounters between the town's inhabitants of African, European, and Native American descent, showing how racial domination became key to the building of the settler colony at the tip of Manhattan Island. During the colonial era, the art of governing the city's diverse and factious population, the book reveals, involved the subordination of confessional, linguistic, and social antagonisms to binary racial difference. Everyday formations of race are investigated — in slave owning households, on the colonial city's streets, at its docks, taverns, and marketplaces, and in the adjacent farming districts. Even though the northern colonial port town afforded a space for black resistance, that setting did not, this book argues, effectively undermine the city's institution of black slavery. This history of New York City demonstrates that the process of racial formation and the mechanisms of racial domination were central to the northern colonial experience and to the founding of the United States.
Drawing on more than fifteen years of research,Mexican New Yorkoffers an intimate view of globalization as it is lived by Mexican immigrants and their children in New York and in Mexico. Robert ...Courtney Smith's groundbreaking study sheds new light on transnationalism, vividly illustrating how immigrants move back and forth between New York and their home village in Puebla with considerable ease, borrowing from and contributing to both communities as they forge new gender roles; new strategies of social mobility, race, and even adolescence; and new brands of politics and egalitarianism. Smith's deeply informed narrative describes how first-generation men who have lived in New York for decades become important political leaders in their home villages in Mexico. Smith explains how relations between immigrant men and women and their U.S.-born children are renegotiated in the context of migration to New York and temporary return visits to Mexico. He illustrates how U.S.-born youth keep their attachments to Mexico, and how changes in migration and assimilation have combined to transnationalize both U.S.-born adolescents and Mexican gangs between New York and Puebla.Mexican New Yorkprofoundly deepens our knowledge of immigration as a social process, convincingly showing how some immigrants live and function in two worlds at the same time and how transnationalization and assimilation are not opposing, but related, phenomena.
Brooklyn style is eclectic, creative, and distinct from neighborhood to neighborhood. It's not about chasing labels. It is stylish on its own terms, and it's about dressing for real life.Brooklyn ...Street Style: The No-Rules Guide to Fashionexplores what has made the borough a global fashion mecca and presents style advice from a host of Brooklyn tastemakers. This diverse crew of notable women in the design, fashion, food, and entertainment worlds includes style expert Mary Alice Stephenson,Girlscostume designer Jenn Rogien, Urban Bush Babes blogger Cipriana Quann, Sleigh Bells's singer/beauty-industry activist Alexis Krauss, and award-winning actor/playwright Eisa Davis. Chapters distill what's happening in the borough today-from the maker movement to eco-conscious fashion-with more than 175 striking street-style photographs. Full of suggestions for both visitors and locals alike, the book's Brooklyn Guide offers a curated listing of the essential shops, markets, restaurants, and bars.
How a little-known industrial neighborhood in New York unintentionally became a nexus of creative activity for a brief burst of time. During the 1960s and 1970s in New York City, young artists ...exploited an industrial wasteland to create spacious studios where they lived and worked, redefining the Manhattan area just south of Houston Street. Its use fueled not by city planning schemes but by word-of-mouth recommendations, the area soon grew to become a world-class center for artistic creation indeed, the largest urban artists' colony ever in America--let alone the world. Richard Kostelanetz's Artists' SoHo not only examines why the artists came and how they accomplished what they did but also delves into the lives and works of some of the most creative personalities who lived there during that period, including Nam June Paik, Robert Wilson, Meredith Monk, Richard Foreman, Hannah Wilke, George Macuinas, and Alan Suicide. Gallerists followed the artists in fashioning themselves, their homes, their buildings, and even their streets into transiently prominent exhibition and performance spaces. SoHo pioneer Richard Kostelanetz's extensively researched intimate history is framed within a personal memoir that unearths myriad perspectives: social and cultural history, the changing rules for residency and ownership, the ethos of the community, the physical layouts of the lofts, the types of art produced, venues that opened and closed, the daily rhythm, and the gradual invasion of "new people." Artists' SoHo also explores how and why this fertile bohemia couldn't last forever. As wealthier people paid higher prices, galleries left, younger artists settled elsewhere, and the neighborhood became a "SoHo Mall" of trendy stores and restaurants. Compelling and often humorous, Artists' SoHo provides an analysis of a remarkable neighborhood that transformed the art and culture of New York City over the past five decades.
Before the American Revolution, the people who lived in British North America were not just colonists; they were also imperial subjects. To think of eighteenth-century New Yorkers as Britons rather ...than incipient Americans allows us fresh investigations into their world. How was the British Empire experienced by those who lived at its margins? How did the mundane affairs of ordinary New Yorkers affect the culture at the center of an enormous commercial empire?
Dangerous Economiesis a history of New York culture and commerce in the first two thirds of the eighteenth century, when Britain was just beginning to catch up with its imperial rivals, France and Spain. In that sparsely populated city on the fringe of an empire, enslaved Africans rubbed elbows with white indentured servants while the elite strove to maintain ties with European genteel culture. The transience of the city's people, goods, and fortunes created a notably fluid society in which establishing one's own status or verifying another's was a challenge. New York's shifting imperial identity created new avenues for success but also made success harder to define and demonstrate socially.
Such a mobile urban milieu was the ideal breeding ground for crime and conspiracy, which became all too evident in 1741, when thirty slaves were executed and more than seventy other people were deported after being found guilty-on dubious evidence-of plotting a revolt. This sort of violent outburst was the unforeseen but unsurprising result of the seething culture that existed at the margins of the British Empire.
Stroll through any public park in Brooklyn on a weekday afternoon and you will see black women with white children at every turn. Many of these women are of Caribbean descent, and they have long been ...a crucial component of New York's economy, providing childcare for white middle- and upper-middleclass families. Raising Brooklyn offers an in-depth look at the daily lives of these childcare providers, examining the important roles they play in the families whose children they help to raise. Tamara Mose Brown spent three years immersed in these Brooklyn communities: in public parks, public libraries, and living as a fellow resident among their employers, and her intimate tour of the public spaces of gentrified Brooklyn deepens our understanding of how these women use their collective lives to combat the isolation felt during the workday as a domestic worker.Though at first glance these childcare providers appear isolated and exploited - and this is the case for many - Mose Brown shows that their daily interactions in the social spaces they create allow their collective lives and cultural identities to flourish. Raising Brooklyn demonstrates how these daily interactions form a continuous expression of cultural preservation as a weapon against difficult working conditions, examining how this process unfolds through the use of cell phones, food sharing, and informal economic systems. Ultimately, Raising Brooklyn places the organization of domestic workers within the framework of a social justice movement, creating a dialogue between workers who don't believe their exploitative work conditions will change and an organization whose members believe change can come about through public displays of solidarity.
