The Real Brooklyn Neighborhoods:
Inside the Brooklyn Ghetto
New York City’s most praised borough, and the city’s largest borough, has a combination of legendary neighborhoods that leads Brooklyn into being the true mecca for the streets of the NYC.
A borough with upper class neighborhoods, predominantly Asian communities like Sunset Park and predominantly Latino communities like Bushwick, but without a doubt the heart of Brooklyn resides in Bed Stuy (Bedford Stuyvesant), Crown Heights, Flatbush, Brownsville and East New York.
In the very beginning of Brooklyn’s existence the very vast majority of the original Brooklyn neighborhoods were home to families with different ethnicities and cultures, but all from a European background, mostly.
But one specific neighborhood is an exception, Bedford-Stuyvesant (Bed Stuy) as the former home of legends Jay-Z and Notorious BIG was not necessarily a rival to Harlem, but one of the city’s oldest black communities that was well famed back in the neighborhood’s early days for black entertainment, ownership, and success.
By the 1960s, many of the areas within the Brooklyn ghetto, like Brownsville and East New York, started to change as the communities were slowly becoming more of a home to the city’s African American population, due to the fact that many of the white families were leaving for other areas in either Brooklyn, New York City, New Jersey or Long Island.
The movement of African Americans and Latinos into many of the Brooklyn neighborhoods was with the help of blockbusting and redlining. These practices are when banks and real estate companies would try to influence white families to sell their homes and force minority families to move into a specific location while having only a few limited choices on where they could live.
As the process changed the demographics of the neighborhoods, many of the communities began to decline and transform into areas that were often referred as the Brooklyn ghetto, since many in the communities lack access to financial institutions, while the city somewhat turned a blind eye to the conditions of the neighborhoods that minorities were purposely placed in.
With the gentrification of the Brooklyn ghetto there is a shrinking population within the urban community, mainly African Americans and Latinos, as there is relocation or an exodus out of the the traditional urban communities with a large newly arrival of hipsters, millennials, and families from other culture backgrounds.
Feature Image Provided by JonBilous/Pond5.com
Check out more stories on other urban communities.
*Note: All information is provided through people of the community, outside sources, and research. Some information might not be current and/or 100% accurate.
