Crown Heights 1 Marlon Peterson
[email protected] [email protected] Crown Heights: The Question of Gentrification, Violence, Social Disorganization, and Social Preservation. More questions than answers and the inevitability of neighborhood harms cased by gentrification. How does a community minimize the problems of in-migration? Crown Heights 2 “In [the] beginning God created the heavens and the earth. –Genesis 1:1 (New World Translation) “Crown Heights Brooklyn is my home. From the hallways of P.S. 138 on Prospect Place and Nostrand Avenue to Brower Park to Sonatas Steel Orchestra on Sterling and Troy to the West Indian Day Parade on Eastern Parkway, Crown Heights is my home. I am a true product of this neighborhood. I have received academic accolades in one vein and handcuffs in the other. I have seen Crown Heights grow from the crack-filled, crime- riddled days of the 1980’s to the gentrifying neighborhood it is becoming. Throughout it all, however, there has remained one constant; crime” (Peterson, yosos.org). When I grew up in Crown Heights during the 1980’s and 1990’s Prospect Heights was only the name of a notoriously low performing school with an even more infamous nickname for the way young girls from that school were viewed—Prostitute’ Heights.’ Now this name, Prospect Heights—still with the dubious nickname for the high school according to neighborhood teens—is the chic new name of an expanding co-opted section of Crown Heights. Real estate companies in an effort to sell homes at higher rates constantly increase the boundaries of Prospect Heights into the neighborhood formerly known as Crown Heights.