The Stories of One Brooklyn Block
NEIGHBORS South Elliott Place, in Fort Greene, was once a working-class stretch plagued by drugs. It’s a different place now: homes that sold for $29,000 in the 1970s now go for $2.7 million.
By STACY ABRAMSON
Published: July 23, 2010
EVERY morning on her way to school, 7-year-old Estella Quy walks by a stocky middle-aged man with a pointy salt-and-pepper goatee hanging out on the stoop of 61 South Elliott Place. She walks by him again every afternoon.
Multimedia
Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times
Rafael Medrano and George Yzquierdo of No. 45 South Elliott Place, Apt. 5A.
“Hi, princess,” says the man, who is known as Tony the Greek. “Hi, princess,” Tony the Greek has said to Estella through kindergarten, first and second grades. He’s been there her whole life.
That’s how things are on this block of South Elliott between Lafayette and Dekalb Avenues in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Many of its residents do not know each other’s phone numbers, but they know each other’s lives. In the bad old days, they swept the street together every Sunday. Lately, there have been monthly rummy games; each September, they roast a pig. They mourned together when Frank DeMartini, the construction manager at the World Trade Center, died on 9/11; when President Obama was elected, they swarmed the street for an impromptu party likened to “10 Super Bowls rolled into one.”
Landmarked on the east side, the block is lined with single-family brownstones dating to the 1860s. On the west, Brooklyn Technical High School takes up half the block. There are also a couple of four- or five-story rental buildings, a few skinny wood houses with porches, an industrial garage that houses Spike Lee’s offices, a beauty store and two restaurants. The novelist Jhumpa Lahiri lives at No. 63.
In the 1970s, it was a working-class African-American and Hispanic block plagued by the drug trade, where pioneering gentrifiers like Tom and Sharon Kennedy paid $29,000 for No. 66, an Italianate red-brick with four stories. Census figures show that the 50-block neighborhood that includes South Elliott has grown whiter — 40 percent of the population was white in 2007, up from 24 percent in 1980 — and wealthier: its median income was less than hThe Stories of One Brooklyn Block - NYTimes.com
No comments:
Post a Comment