As the twentieth century progressed, the city expanded its public transportation system. The Fourth Avenue BMT subway was built in the early 1910s and the IND (F) was completed through Park Slope during the 1930s. Subsequently, with the progressive extension of subway lines throughout Park Slope and the rapidly growing of New York City, altered the nature of class demand for housing in the neighborhood. By the 1920’s and 1930’s, working and lower-middle class families were starting to outbid the upper classes for housing in Park Slope’s high rental district. It became profitably to convert one family brownstones into multi-family buildings.
“Some of the area’s wealthier residents saw this as a downward trend, and many relocated. A migration of Irish and Italian families began moving ‘up the hill’ from less desirable sections near the Gowanus and lower Manhattan. This demographic shift caused a swell in the membership of the Slope’s Roman Catholic parishes” (Merlis et al. 1999:11). In the mid-1920s, the recreational YMCA center built up its Prospect Park branch on Ninth Street and Sixth Avenue. In 1928, the United Mazzini Club (regular Democratic), was located on Union Street between Fourth and Fifth Avenues to promote
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Italian candidates against incumbent Irish politicians. James Mangano became the club leader in 1934, controlling the State Assembly district until 1970. At the same time, between 1925 and 1950, luxury apartment buildings replaced a number of mansions in proximity to Prospect Park, attracting many upper- class families.
In fact, World War I was the high point in the development of Park Slope over five decades or more, it also marked the beginning of the Automobile Age, which spawned huge suburbs that could compete successfully with the city for residential populations. It marked also a time of special vulnerability for brownstones middle-aged, but not old enough to have acquired an aura of the past. The era brought an end to the abundant supply of servants necessary to staff them. But, above all, brownstones were becoming unfashionable and, after World War II, a major exodus to the suburbs began.
Between the world wars, the working-class sections of South Slope were home to predominantly Irish and Irish American residents. In addition, wealthier Park Slope residents started moving to the suburbs, and other groups of working-class residents moved into North Slope. Some of the luxurious brownstones were turned into rooming houses and later demolished for new apartment buildings. As I will explain in the next Chapter, the community of Park Slope became a diverse cultural mix as Irish and Italians lived and worked close to the mansions of Dutch, English, and Scandinavian industrialists.
The further arrival of African Americans and Puerto Ricans brought complexity to this multilayered ethnic-scape. In fact, across 1910 and 1930s the three major steamship companies running between New York and Puerto Rico brought an estimated twenty-six thousand Puerto Ricans, who formed in East Harlem their historical enclave. After World War II, this migration considerably rose and begun to spread all around the Brooklyn’s waterfront.
Chapter 3 GIVE ME A BREAK! I’M FROM BROOKLYN, WE’RE NOT FANCY
Moreover, there was either a class and racial difference between Puerto Ricans who lived in upper Manhattan– upwardly mobile people (doctors, lawyers, store-owners) racially connoted as blanquitos, the “whiteys” – and the poorer workers who lived in Park Slope and other Brooklyn’s industrial location – described as the “dark-skinned” Puerto Ricans (Chenault 1938). However this early differences between Harlem and Brooklyn run in the opposite direction for the African Americans, who used to have their historic black Brooklyn community in the Bedford-Stuyvesant’s brownstones (better than the overcrowded slum of upper Manhattan). Looking for industrial jobs, New York City was a destination site of the second great migration of African Americans from the South to the North after World War II. As more African Americans and Puerto Ricans migrated to the city, race began to replace ethnicity as a spatial category by which Brooklynites oriented themselves. Alongside the manufacturing and docks segregated/unskilled workspaces, these impoverished populations spread all over in Brooklyn from their enclave in Bedford-Stuyvesant also westward into Park Slope. Between the 1950s and the 1960s, the strong collective racial identities of the Italians, Irish, Russian Jews and the other groups which formed the neighborhood of Park Slope had to blend together with Puerto Ricans, Caribbeans, as well as Spanish and English speakers. They were all nestled together in the same neighborhood’s territory.
Preceding gentrification and class, by the 1960s race/ethnicity and religion were certainly crucial symbolic categories used by people in Park Slope to build their neighborhood experience. Moreover, in such a huge working-class area, unions and local political clubs were also important institutions in Park Slope. By the 1950s the political machine was an elaborate feudal system of competing smaller neighborhood clubs, as Osman describes (2011), where the most powerful gained control of district leadership. One of them was the Park Slope’s Mazzini Democratic Club, headed by “The Sheriff,” the local Italian
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boss James V. Mangano. Craft and industrial unions also represented a spatial identity which unified workers around their occupational sections. The most powerful organization was the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), which negotiated with shipping companies among the thousands workers along the waterfront. Local clubs and unions were highly personal and grassroots institutions, able to develop a sense of belonging and social ties with voters. However they were often merged with crime organizations, since the waterfront in the 1940s and 1950s was infamous as a place of racketeering, pilfering, narcotics smuggling, and extortion activities. Yet, there was a widespread of teenage street gangs along the streets of Park Slope, especially later on, during the late 1960s and the 1970s, when the rising of the unemployment, racial battles, the coming back of adult men from the Vietnam and eventually the heroin epidemic contributed to the rise of crime and juvenile delinquency.
For much of the 1970s and 1980s, wealthy upper-middle-class Park Slope residents lived only in the North Slope, whereas the South Slope was known as the home of those newer immigrants. However, South Slope residents have been busy beautifying, organizing, and revitalizing their section of the neighborhood, and the division between north and south has become through the time more and more, less distinct. In this particular way Brooklyn has always offered either a rich sense of place and history or a fluid, hybrid, constantly changing scape. However, as Hamill describes, during the 1940s Park Slope provided to its inhabitants a significant feeling of place:
On the streets I learned the limits of the Neighborhood. This was our hamlet, marked by clear boundaries. Sometimes were moved beyond those boundaries: to visit aunts and uncles out in Bay Ridge... but it was to the Neighborhood that we always returned. Other neighborhoods were not simply strange; they were probably unknowable. I was like everybody else. In the Neighborhood I always knew where I was; it provided my center of gravity. And on its streets I learned certain secrets that were shared by the others (Hamill 1994).
Chapter 3 GIVE ME A BREAK! I’M FROM BROOKLYN, WE’RE NOT FANCY
Park Slope, then, grown up as a fluid and complex “network of routes” (Clifford 1997), which found an imprint in people, buildings, institutions and memories that all those immigrant groups left.
When I am referring to ethnicity as a crucial feature I am also introducing a specific diverse landscaped which allowed different ethnic groups to seek their ethnic authenticity in the same urban space. Accordingly to Osman (2011), layered ethnic landscape shaped by demographic waves. Through Italian restaurants, Irish bars, Middle Easterners, Polish or Russian Jews store owners, you could hear an everyday mix of the mother tongue and a roughly- rendered American argot invented just for the occasion! Each group, together with another small population of Scandinavians, has contributed to “a rich array of shops, social and political clubhouse, and religious institutions that gave the area a sense of place” (Ibid:40).
3.3.1 Leave the gun, take the cannolis19
Organized crime in America was, to a great extent, a Brooklyn phenomenon. In the early 1900s, there were water-front gangs and affiliations of criminals by ethnic or national groups. Brooklyn has long figured most prominently as both territory and seat of power for most of the crime families that were the predecessors of today’s organization. Among them stand out Lucky Luciano, Alphonse Capone, Joe Colombo, Vito Genovese, Crazy Joe Gallo, Sammy “the bull” Gravano and John Gotti. As it is evident, Brooklyn probably has more good Italian restaurants per square mile than any city in America. That is to say that the Men of Respect have never needed to go hungry there (Robbins and Palitz 2001). During the 1950s 20 percent of Park Slope was foreign born, and over the half of those people were Italian (Miranda and Rossi 1976).
19 Source: The Godfather, a 1972 film about a Mafia crime family and the outbreak of a New York City
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The clubs and fraternal societies belonging were still important in the 1940s and 1950s. As Krase explains, Italians clustered on a block by block, building by building basis,
More social glue for the community was provided by village and regional mutual aid societies. Local social networks gradually expanded to include markets, businesses, youth gangs, church activities, and religious festivals (1999:157).
At the foot of the slope, in a little part of the “flats” between the inclines of Park Slope and Carroll Garden was once the center of upper Brooklyn’s Mob activity. Several places in the area surrounding Third and Union Street and Nevins Street and Fourth Avenue were favorites of “Colombo family”. Jackie’s Fifth Amendment, located down Fifth Avenue at Seventh Street, was named after the testimony of the most famous stool pigeon in the U.S. history, Genovese underboss Joe Valachi. In 1961, he squealed well for the Kefauver commission. So Jackie felt a statement needed to be made. This is quite a nonsense bar in Park Slope, but still now is a nice place to hold a meeting. Another legendary Mob place is Monte's Venetian Room, an Italian restaurant at 451 Carroll Street, which closed under questionable circumstances back in 2008, and reopened in 2011. The famed eatery, which first opened in 1906, was one of the latest places where a Mob wars took shape in the late 1960s. Racketeer Joey Gallo, and his brother Albert tried to wrest control from the then community-minded Joe Colombo, who founded the Italian-American Anti-Defamation League to dispel the myth that all Italians were mobsters. He was assassinated on Columbus Day by shooters allegedly hired by Joe Gallo. Legend has it that
Sinatra’s “Rat Pack” held a post-Copacabana party at Monte’s, featuring Sammy Davis Jr., in an all-night, doors-locked sing-a-thon (Robbins and Palitz 2001:104).
Chapter 3 GIVE ME A BREAK! I’M FROM BROOKLYN, WE’RE NOT FANCY
Park Slope neighborhood experienced a deterioration of its building stock, abandonment of buildings, and intensifying social problems, including rising unemployment and crime rates as did many other neighborhoods in New York City. Although other neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx experienced similar changes, these occurred earlier in Park Slope. Some of the young white male residents of Park Slope engaged in gang-related violence starting in the 1950s, and as the population of African-Americans and Puerto Ricans increased, gang-related violence occurred between different ethnic groups20. Interracial fighting at John Jay High School (Fifth Street and
Seventh Avenue) in 1964 lead to the arrest of 13 students.21 At the same time
Park Slope was beginning to attract young families who were looking for affordable housing and larger living space. The New York Times reported in 1966 that real estate values east of Seventh Avenue were said to have increased by 25% in the prior three years.22 Several civic and non-profit
organizations were founded in the 1960s to encourage and aid in the revitalization of the neighborhood, especially its row houses, including the Park Slope Civic Council, Park Slope Block-Betterment Committee, and Park Slope North Improvement Corporation. In 1966 the Brooklyn Union Gas Company purchased a vacant brownstone row house at 211 Berkeley Place (J. Dougherty & Son, 1883, within the Park Slope Historic District) as part of its ―Cinderella Project, and converted it to a two-family home to show the possibility of rehabilitation of row houses and to advertise the benefits of all- gas- appliance houses. By 1974 the company had completed four Cinderella Projects and had opened a brownstone information center at 93 Prospect
20 Various New York Times articles: “3 Youth Gangs In Brooklyn Agree To Turn In Their
Weapons,”‖November 17, 1950, 26; “Suspect, 18, Is Seized In Brooklyn Shooting,”‖April 13, 1952, 42; “37 In Three Gangs Seized In Brooklyn,”‖ February 10, 1957, 75; “Gang Fights Hit 2 Brooklyn Areas,”‖February 2, 1968, 10; “50 Park Slope Youths In Battle,” August 11, 1968, 42; “Feud Keeps Park Slope on Guard,”‖June 29, 1973, 39; and “Racial Tensions Simmer In Brooklyn’s Park Slope,” August 10, 1976, 28.
21 “People Keep Watch On Brooklyn School Torn By Race Riots,” New York Times, October 27, 1964,
50.
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Place. Redlining, the refusal of banks to grant mortgages and insurance companies to provide insurance in certain neighborhoods, was a problem for potential new home owners in Park Slope in the 1970s, as it was in many other New York City neighborhoods.