A Tour of Brownsville from Wendell E. Pritchett's Brownsville, Brooklyn

The culmination of a five-year research project, Brownsville, Brooklyn stands as Pritchett's evaluation of the history of a section of eastern Brooklyn. Bordering Canarsie, East Flatbush, Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and East New York, Brownsville has been since its founding in 1880 a working class neighborhood; a section of Brooklyn that has yet to succumb to the mass exodus of young, upwardly-mobile professionals and gentrification. What Pritchett examines is one of the core reasons why Brownsville has yet to house a Starbucks on every corner: Brownsville is a textbook example of urban decline, albeit one that is tempered with numerous-often grassroots-efforts to the contrary.

While complemented by a full cast of upstairs/downstairs characters on both sides of the East River, the central character of Pritchett's study is Brownsville itself. As any other living, breathing character in literature, Pritchett examines the area's childhood, adolescence, and maturity. It is no surprise, then, that Brownsville emerged as an ugly stepsister to Manhattan's Lower East Side. While originally farmlands, the area of Brownsville became a mecca to Jewish immigrants who were drawn to the lower rents and larger spaces as compared to the Lower East Side. It was William Suydam who began the trend in 1858 of subdividing his ample property in what would become Brownsville, and build multi-family houses. However, while there was more space for less money available in Brownsville, this did not hide the fact that the spaces that were available were poorly, shoddily, and often carelessly constructed. Following bankruptcy, Suydam's lots were sold to Charled Brown and Brownsville was born. The attraction that settlers originally felt towards the new area was replaced by a desire to leave it once the working-class residents of Brownsville achieved a greater level of economic stability. Pritchett quotes former Brownsville resident Alfred Kazin, who described Brownsville as "a place that measured all success by our skill in getting away from it" (10).

In the early part of the 20^th Century, Brownsville saw a leap in population thanks to the uprooting of residents in the Lower East Side and Williamsburg and the expansion of the subway lines of New York. While it was undoubtedly a tenement ghetto, many incoming immigrants preferred to move directly to Brownsville as a means of avoiding the difficulties on the Lower East Side. Ghetto or not, Brownsville was seen by many of its residents as a haven.

Pritchett's descriptions of early Brownsville not only portray the shift from empty farmland to teeming ghetto, but also explain how such a shift was possible. While those in the upper echelon of Manhattan communities viewed Brownsville as a slummier version of the Lower East Side; a center for disease and poverty with miserable residents, many Brownsville residents themselves felt a sense of community (particularly encouraged by the shared religious views of many Brownsville residents) that made the neighborhood a lively place. While he seeks to determine which was the more accurate view of the community, Pritchett prefaces this study with the note that there is oftentimes an indiscernible line between reality and nostalgia. We as an audience are given both sides of the story and are reminded to take most first-hand accounts with a grain of salt. Pritchett's love for this project, the area of Brooklyn, and the numerous grey areas of its history, is apparent throughout the entire text, making it easy for us to draw our own conclusions without a perceived author bias.

As Brownsville moved along with the rest of the country out of the Great Depression and into World War II, it entered an adolescence filled with numerous problems that revealed the sense of community that residents had perceived. In the midst of deteriorating housing and schools, teen crime, racial integration, and a susceptibility to disease, Brownsville residents became local activists. Organizations, such as the Brooklyn Jewish Community Council, the Brownsville Neighborhood Council, and, most importantly to Pritchett, the Brownsville Boys Club, were created to combat various community problems. With the steady integration of black and Puerto Rican residents into the predominantly Jewish Brownsville, there was once again a balance of racial tension and community harmony. While this was common for many neighborhoods in New York City, the unique nature of Brownsville was the lack of violent intercultural confrontation. Pritchett notes that the socialist upbringing of many of Brownsville's early residents compelled them to "identify with blacks and other exploited minorities," and the reason that many moved out of their areas due to the violence that did creep up. Juvenile delinquency continued to remain a major problem in the area, and as public housing became predominantly black and Puerto Rican, the few remaining white residents felt it best to move for safety and comfort's sake.

These changes in the neighborhood affected much of the old guard institutions, including the number of religious organizations-especially synagogues-that were formed in Brownsville. With memberships dropping and buildings continuing to decline, many synagogues closed. This shift was especially key in the overall shift in Brownsville from a predominantly Jewish to a predominantly black neighborhood. Moreover, the economic boom of the 1950s left many residents in better economic conditions and able to relocate to better neighborhoods, especially in Canarsie and Flatbush. This internal division, especially as seen in the example of the Beth-El hospital strike, caused a great amount of tension between Brownsville residents and outsiders. As seen in Beth-El (a textbook case of what Pritchett calls "a battle of poor minorities against wealthy professionals"), those on strike felt that they were being repressed economically by those on staff who had been able to "make it" both in the world and out of Brownsville. With the resolution of the Beth-El strike, the unionized workers of the hospital took the first steps towards the war on poverty and racial tension by organizing themselves into a tight-knit group. However, there were few remaining whites in that group to complete a full integration.

With a sharp urban decline in the 1970s and an upturn in the 1980s, modern-day Brownsville remains much as it has been according to Pritchett. There has been improvement in terms of services and restorations, with a crop of new stores and residents, there is a continual relocation from the area once personal conditions have improved. However, the threat of an economic downturn and its sociological implications on the community remain the same. Pritchett's fascination with Brownsville is evident and understandable in the sense that while these problems remain, there is still a vibrancy in this working-class community that gives it some hope and optimism-hope and optimism that were there when the first sets of immigrants came in. Unlike many other slum areas of New York, Brownsville was one of the few to start off as such, and the sharp contrasts that have risen from it are fascinating as told by Pritchett. His chronological history of the neighborhood is punctuated by the personal stories of Brownsville residents-past and present-that accompany each chapter. Yet while there is optimism in this ghetto, Pritchett makes a final compelling argument that it is no excuse for the continuing problems of economic inequality and racial discrimination-problems that Brownsville wholly espouses. For those who have not seen Brownsville or another face of the ghetto, Pritchett's is a detailed account that presents a wide scope and a final call to action.