Brownsville - Brooklyn
From the pickled herring of Little Jerusalem to the ice picks of Murder Inc.
The neighborhood of Brownsville is in East Brooklyn, bordered by East New York to the north and east, Ocean Hill to the west, and East Flatbush and Canarsie to the south.
Combing through my archives, I noticed that in my years photographing the city, I’ve made quite a few visits to the neighborhood. On my long drives back from the Rockaways, if I had a few unexposed sheets of film left, I’d often pull off Atlantic Avenue and wander the surrounding streets with my camera over my shoulder.
On one of those walks, I came upon the once-opulent Lowe’s Pitkin theater, its intricate terracotta Art Deco facade looming incongruously over the bright green and white signage of a Dollar Tree.
Several years ago, I spent too much time making a panorama of one particular street in the neighborhood.
Brownsville was also the neighborhood where I first began to notice the recurring motif of former synagogues turned churches, aluminum crosses juxtaposed with weathered or chipped away Stars of David, a palimpsest of the city’s perpetual reinvention.
These adaptations, structures that get built up, stripped down, and reused, are tangible reminders that cities are constantly morphing into different versions of themselves. Less than a hundred years ago, Brownsville had Brooklyn’s “Fifth Avenue” and the largest Jewish population in the city. A hundred years before that, it was farmland at the edge of nowhere. Whatever comes next won’t resemble the Brownsville of today. The photographs taken now will soon become artifacts of a vanished city, a representation of a place that, to future eyes, looks as strange and improbable as the ones from its past feel to us now.
FROM FARMLAND TO LITTLE JERUSALEM
Dutch colonists settled much of what was then known as New Lots in the late seventeenth century, carving out the farms that would dominate the landscape for nearly two hundred years. In 1858, a farmer named William Suydam decided there was probably more money to be made in real estate than in corn and subdivided his land, betting that working-class New Yorkers would flock to the area's open fields and “fresh air.” He was wrong. The land was marshy and flood-prone, and when the wind shifted, the promised fresh air carried the stench of nearby bone-boiling glue factories. Within a few years, Suydam defaulted on his mortgages.
Real estate speculator Charles Brown swooped in and bought the entire tract for $12,000 in 1861. He built houses and named the area “Brown’s Village,” soon shortened to Brownsville. Brown and other landowners succeeded where Suydam failed by marketing the land to Manhattan’s working-class Jewish population, and gradually, families left the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side for the open space of Brownsville.
The workers came for a little more breathing room, and the factory owners, in an inverse of usual patterns of industrial migration, followed, hoping to escape the meddling of the labor organizers of the Lower East Side. As more families arrived, the conditions that the workers had sought to escape reappeared. Two-family homes became eight-family homes. Tenements rose, with the same overcrowding and poor ventilation as their Manhattan counterparts. At the same time, the factory owners quickly learned that you could take the workers out of the Lower East Side, but you could not take the Lower East Side out of the workers.
Brownsville soon became a hotbed of social and labor activism, what Scott Nearing called “a socialist oasis in a desert of capitalism".
The Knights of Labor and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union claimed strong memberships, and strikers protested everything from wages and working conditions to the price of kosher meat. The Brownsville Labor Lyceum became a hub for the Socialist Party, even hosting Leon Trotsky just a few months before the Bolshevik Revolution. Margaret Sanger opened the country’s first birth-control clinic on 46 Amboy Street in 1916; it lasted a month before the city shut it down.
Within three years of its settlement, Brownsville’s Jewish population reached 10,000. By 1900, it was 25,000. Eight years later, after the Williamsburg Bridge had opened, it had grown to more than 100,000, making it the largest Jewish neighborhood in New York and earning it the nickname “Little Jerusalem.”
The Brooklyn Daily Times in 1910 described the transformation from “farmland, crossed by a few roads; scattered houses; small but thickly shaded copses; towering hills and deep valleys,” to “row upon row of frame and brick buildings, the homes of a thriving, ambitious people; street upon street of handsome shops, well-lighted by night and well kept by day; pretty cottages, towering factories, numerous public and private schools, synagogues, banks, public markets.”
Author Alfred Kazin, who grew up here, was a tad less effusive:
“We were the end of the line. We were the children of the immigrants who had camped at the city’s back door, in New York’s rawest, remotest, cheapest ghetto… ‘New York’ was what we put last on our address, but first in thinking of the others around us. They were New York, the Gentiles, America; we were Brownsville, Brunzvil as the old folks said, the dust of the earth to all Jews with money, and notoriously a place that measured all success by our skill in getting away from it.”
Still, Kazin’s memoir A Walker in the City is filled with nostalgia for his old neighborhood, especially Belmont Avenue’s open-air market, lined with pushcarts selling everything from shoelaces and corsets to beet roots and soup greens. By then, the noxious glue factory effluvium had long been replaced by “the acid smell of half-sour pickles and herrings floating on their briny barrels.”
Pitkin Avenue, Brownsville’s other main thoroughfare, became known as the “Fifth Avenue of Brooklyn.” By 1942, its 372 stores, which included furniture, appliances, and fashion retailers, generated an estimated $90 million in sales, making it the busiest commercial strip in the borough.1
MURDER INC
Brownsville's transformation from farmland into a dense working-class enclave coincided with the rise and diversification of organized crime. In the early 20th century, New York's underworld was ruled by the so-called "Moustache Petes," led by Joe Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano, curiously, neither of whom sported a mustache or went by Pete. Bound to the Sicilian Mafia and their traditions, they trusted only fellow Italians, preferably Sicilians, and, if at all possible, men from their own villages.
By the 1930s, a new generation of mobsters known as the Young Turks was eager to work with the increasingly powerful Jewish and Irish gangs. They considered the old guard's insularity and reluctance to enter the drug trade an impediment to their earning ability.
In 1931, Lucky Luciano invited his boss, Joe Masseria, to lunch at Nuova Villa Tammari, a restaurant in Coney Island. Midway through a friendly game of pinochle, Lucky had the sudden urge to use the bathroom. At that very moment, four gunmen burst through the doors and shot Masseria dead. The former Italian restaurant, where the mob took its first steps toward diversification, is now a smoked fish distributor.
Ensuring nobody would ever hire him again, Luciano had his new boss, Salvatore Maranzano, killed six months later.
Along with his childhood friend, Meyer Lanksy, Luciano formed the National Crime Syndicate, which united Italian-American and Jewish mob families. Its enforcement arm, dubbed Murder Inc., ran out of the back of Midnight Rose’s Candy Store at 779 Saratoga Avenue in Brownsville.
Behind the glistening jars of Sugar Babies, Red Hots, and Tootsie Rolls, a cohort of cold-blooded killers waited by a bank of telephones for their marching orders.
Murder Inc. was believed to be responsible for upwards of 1,000 contract killings. They were single-handedly responsible for revitalizing the ice pick industry, which, as it turned out, was the perfect implement for close-quarter spleen puncturing. Brownsville native, Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, was particularly adept at wielding the outdated household implement and was famous for his skill in driving the pick through his victim's ear into their brain.
When Reles was picked up on a murder charge in 1940 and faced with the choice of a trip to "Old Sparky” at Sing Sing Prison, or inform on his associates, he chose the latter. Reles’s squealing led to the arrest, conviction, and electrocution of the one-time head of Murder Inc., Louis "Lepke" Buchalter. His testimony also sent other Murder Inc. henchmen like “Pittsburgh Phil" Strauss, Martin "Buggsy" Goldstein, and Harry “Happy" Maione to the electric chair.
On November 12, 1941, in a turn of events that even Pam Bondi would have a hard time explaining, Abe Reles plummeted to his death while attempting to “escape” from his room at the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island. At the time, he was under the close supervision of six policemen.
MOSES AGAIN
In the years after World War II, demand for housing for returning soldiers jumpstarted a series of measures that would reshape the city. Hundreds of blocks were razed in the name of "slum clearance," a campaign led by Robert Moses, who used the powers granted by the Housing Act of 1949 with impunity. Title I's eminent domain provisions enabled Moses to declare neighborhoods blighted, demolish them, and hand the land over to private developers.
Families displaced by the wrecking ball needed a new place to live. Moses funneled many to Brownsville, believing its socially progressive Jewish residents “would be less likely to cause upheaval over an influx of Blacks than the Italians of Bushwick or Greenpoint.”2
In 1948, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) completed the Brownsville Houses, the first of what would become a series of large public housing developments in the neighborhood. At its opening, the project, with modern plumbing and heat, was widely praised, by all accounts a significant improvement over the ramshackle wooden tenements it replaced. It was one of the first successfully racially integrated housing developments in the city.
However, as the fallout from Moses’ land clearing continued, pushing more low-income residents to Brownsville, NYCHA responded by building additional projects, each seemingly larger than the previous one. What began as quality integrated housing gradually became a concentration of poverty.
Despite efforts by progressive organizations like the Brownsville Neighborhood Council and the Brownsville Boys Club to build coalitions between Black, white, and Latino residents, larger forces were working against community stability. Redlining practices made it impossible for residents to secure homeowner loans, trapping families in a cycle of rental dependency and making the decision to leave the neighborhood, for those who could afford it, an easy one. The government's heavy investment in housing projects came at the expense of maintaining schools, streets, and recreational facilities.
These systemic disinvestments created the conditions for one of the most contentious education battles in the city's history. Brownsville was ground zero for the 1968 NYC teacher strike that shut down the public school system for nearly 40 days. The city had agreed to test a pilot program that would allow the community to take control of the overcrowded and underperforming J.H.S. 271, the flagship school in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district. When the new board tried to fire 19 union teachers and supervisors, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) went on strike. I go into more detail in my Ocean Hill write-up here:
FUTURE
Today, Brownsville is known for having the highest concentration of public housing in the nation. NYCHA controls more than 10,000 apartments in 18 developments spread across 100 buildings. It also has some of the highest poverty and crime rates in the city. The tide of gentrification that has radically transformed other Brooklyn neighborhoods like Red Hook and Bushwick shows no sign of reaching Brownsville.
In a piece for The National, journalist Ginia Bellafante attributes Brownsville's stasis to the density of its housing developments but finds a silver lining: "The preponderance of public housing in Brownsville leaves it with an unusual kind of promise: it is a place so immune to gentrification that it is also immune to the negative fallout from gentrification, which means it has the capacity to serve as a template for a different model of revitalization."
With the 2018 announcement of the Brownsville Plan, the city appears to be laying the foundation for that change. The plan invests over $1 billion into the neighborhood, including 2,500 new affordable homes on city-owned land. It also earmarks $150 million for park renovations, improvements to open spaces in NYCHA developments, a new teen community center at Brownsville Houses, and a new Neighborhood Health Action Center.
Construction has just begun on the Brownsville Arts Center & Apartments (BACA), featuring affordable rental units, a 28,000-square-foot cultural arts center with a music program run by the Brooklyn Music School, and a media lab and arts center run by BRIC.
SIGHTS AND SOUNDS
This week’s field recording is just some ambient sounds from the neighborhood streets.
FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER
This week, I feature a photographer who is new to me, N. Jay Jafee (1921-1999). The first photograph of his that I came across was this wonderous facade advertising the wares of the Kishke King on Pitkin Ave.
Born in Brownsville in 1921, Jaffee was the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland. His father was a cutter in the garment industry. After returning from the war in 1947, Jaffee picked up a camera to deal with his post-traumatic stress, choosing to photograph the people and markets of his old neighborhood.
Before the rise of supermarkets, people in communities like Brownsville and East New York shopped for their food and other minor conveniences in street markets that retained the ethnic flavor of the “old world.” On one or two blocks, pushcarts filled with produce would line both sides of the streets where cars would ordinarily be parked. The buildings on either side all contained ground floor stores. Among the variety of stores along the street were fresh fish stores, dress shops, “appetizing” stores with barrels of pickles and sauerkraut, men’s new and used clothing, children’s apparel, hardware and shoe stores. These markets had a colorful and festive atmosphere. The air was always filled with the din of men and women hawking their wares, pleading with passersby to look at their nice, fresh tomatoes, announcing a sale of newly arrived potatoes, or urging people to enter the clothing store for superb bargains.
To see more of his work, visit his website
RECOMMENDED READING
I've come to the realization that publishing this newsletter every other week hasn't really given me any extra breathing room - I just spend twice as much time on each one. Even with all that extra time, I still only scratched the surface of this neighborhood's rich history. If you'd like to dig deeper into Brownsville, these three books were invaluable in my research:
Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto by Wendell E. Pritchett
A Walker in the City by Alfred Kazin
Murder Inc. and the Moral Life by Robert Weldon Whalen
Also see this article from the New York Times Magazine On the Brink in Brownsville, which profiles a Brownsville teenager living in the projects.
ODDS AND END
Apparently, killing people with ice picks is still a thing. The article also mentions that, contrary to popular belief, one-time Brownsville visitor Leon Trotsky was killed with an ice axe, not an ice pick. Perhaps part of the confusion stems from the fact that the narrow, pointy part of an ice axe is called a pick, but that's not even the part that was used in the assassination (code-named Operation Duck). I thought an ice axe was a strange implement to have in Mexico City, but it turns out that a glacier once topped the nearby Iztaccíhuatl volcano, so the axe, technically, could have been used for its intended purpose. These days, however, an ice axe in Mexico City would be pretty much useless — The Last Mexican Glaciers.
The Trotsky Ice Axe from the Spy Museum For a place with such rich history, it's only natural that Brownsville would have an illustrious list of former residents—everyone from Larry King to RZA to the Three Stooges spent time in the East Brooklyn neighborhood. The Wikipedia write-up of notable neighborhood people spans 85 names, including Mike Tyson, Howard Zinn, Mayor Eric Adams, and Danny Kaye, among others. Probably the most remarkable thing about the list? Out of 85 "notable people," only one is a woman: Bern Nadette Stanis, better known as Thelma on Good Times. This made me wonder, is Wikipedia sexist? Well, good news. There is a Wikipedia article covering that very topic.
Speaking of Mike Tyson, here is an excerpt from his autobiography, Undisputed Truth.
If you didn’t get your fill of storefront churches, here is my series simply titled 9 Storefront Churches I Thought Were In Brownsville But Are Really In Ocean Hill, Though Some People Call Ocean Hill “Ocean Hill-Brownsville.”
Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto by Wendell E. Pritchett
Bellafante, Ginia. “Resurrecting Brownsville.” Www.thenation.com, 17 Apr. 2013, www.thenation.com/article/archive/resurrecting-brownsville/.
Fastastic post! I work at the Brownsville library and walk these streets every day. To see them captured with such careful attention is a real treat. I actually have a printout of that "Kishke King" photo up in the branch right now as part of a display, but I hadn't looked at Jaffee's website, what a great resource. Nor did I know about the area's labor history! Now I have a subject for the next iteration of our local history display. :)
Great post, Rob – one of your best. My father grew up in Brownsville, and I used to hear the names of those streets – Pitkin Avenue, Saratoga, Sutter – as almost holy incantations. Decades after he moved away, he had the chance to meet Alfred Kazin, whose storytelling prowess almost compensated for his reported lack of interest in anyone else. Visiting my dad’s home on Legion Street was incredibly moving to me.
Brownsville is notable for someone other than Lucky Luciano (and my father!): Margaret Sanger, who, in 1916, opened the nation’s first birth control clinic on Amboy Street. She called women together on flyers printed in English, Yiddish and Italian. The clinic saw 150 women – married women with children who couldn’t afford more - on its first day alone.
The police closed down the Brownsville Clinic after only ten days, and arrested Sanger, invoking the Comstock Act of 1873, which prohibited the “trade in, and circulation of, obscene literature and articles of immoral use.” (The Act has never been fully repealed, and credible threats of its use to stop mail-order contraception are very much alive.)
When I visited the clinic’s location last year, it wasn’t even marked. But that humble block, between Pitkin and East New York Avenues, laid the foundation for pivotal change in women’s reproductive health.
Let’s hope Ginia Bellafante’s insight and the City’s new plan for the neighborhood bear fruit. They said the same thing about Mott Haven and Long Island City’s expansive NYCHA projects.
Keep it up!