Geographically, East New York is boxed in, celled off, from the rest of New York City - bordered on the east side by the Belt Parkway and Kennedy Airport and its surrounding swamplands and landfills (long a Mafia and general-criminal dead-body dumping ground). It was equally possible for an East New Yorker to never leave the neighborhood. There was no reason for the average New Yorker to ever see East New York. It was far from the center of either New York or Brooklyn. It lacked cultural, recreational, or commercial facilities that might tempt outsiders to visit. It is a neighborhood away from the major expressways. The image of a brutal island prison captures a piece of the isolation that characterized East New York. This is how East New York was characterized in a 2003 National Research Council journal article about school violence: East New York lives its past alongside its present, with 1902 electric substations still standing and contaminating alongside present day toxic sources, with 1990 crime rates still around in 2015.įor New York City to have a realistic chance of revitalizing East New York, it should know and prepare for what it is up against. The neighborhood went through those crises, but each one accumulated, festered, became a permanent part of the community. While other urban hoods in New York city wax and wane in their dysfunction - through the modern blight history of the ’60s riots era the New York is Burning era the Fort Apache era, the original OG Willie Bosket/fear of the young Super Predator era (New York State’s 1978 Juvenile Offender Law was enacted then, allowing thirteen-year-olds to be tried as adults) the ’80s crack epidemic era the Killing Fields era of the early ’90s - in East New York time stands still. This is a neighborhood that isn’t even afforded the respite of having its own bad old days. Is it possible to renew, rehab, reform an area that for so long has been designated as the city’s wasteland? A designation that resulted in an infrastructure so entrenched in dysfunction and resistant to improvement that East New York has for decades ranked as New York City’s worst neighborhood, statistically, in almost every quality of life measurement? Steven Winter Associates, a consulting service contracted by the city, described just the housing portion of the city’s strategy in a December 2014 in-house publication, calling it “the most comprehensive affordable housing plan in the city’s history” and “the largest municipal housing plan in the nation.” Now there’s a new plan for nation building in East New York, this time on an outsize scale commensurate with how significantly neglected and in need the place is. We want to wage war there (on crime, drugs, poverty) we want to do nation building we want to drain the swamp, clean up the place we want to wash our hands of the place we send in enough troops to occupy we pull enough troops to not be seen as occupying we break the place some more. defense policy: We haphazardly broke it and we haphazardly take ownership of it, cycling through mission objectives. It’s closer to a hundred-year-old failed state, complete with its own NYC version of a Pottery Barn U.S. East New York is sicker, sadder, more dysfunctional, more isolated, harsher, frailer, madder, toxic, broken through and through everywhere. I’ve been hearing about how East New York, Brooklyn is that bad that hard that street since 1983, when I was sixteen years old and heard a NYC felon and dope shooter in a halfway facility playing as if he were in prison, calling out and toasting East New York cross streets (Pitkin and Pine) as if the phrase was a standard thug-life signifier, on par with On the gate On the lock In Don’t reach over my food You better sleep with one eye open.Īnd though East New York’s Wikipedia entry lists “Dodge City” as its nickname, and though one of the most thorough block-by-block ethnographies of a crime zone in song and video that I know of ( I’m From East New York/Fish Grease Jenkins) refers to the place by its older nickname, “The Killing Fields,” nobody is really street proud to be from this tough hood.īecause - and I say this not just as hyped-up journalism rhetoric for the sake of touting an all-or-nothing false narrative, but as someone who’s worked a long time struggling to understand and categorize this place, constantly disbelieving how much worse I find it every time I dig in - when we talk about hoods and bad neighborhoods, crime zones and ghetto areas in NYC and you then compare them to East New York, all those areas that fit those definitions are nothing like East New York.
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