By Alexander Nazaryan

Crown Heights was wracked by riots 15 years ago, and it is virtually impossible to mention the neighborhood without invoking that hideous moment in New York history. The gentrifiers that have been slipping into the neighborhood from adjacent Prospect Heights and Park Slope settle far from the intersection of Utica Ave. and President St., where Gavin Cato died under the wheels of a car in the escort of the Lubavitcher rebbe Menachem Schneerson. It was his death—an accident that some insisted on believing a slaughter—that touched off violence directed toward Jews by blacks. The neighborhood has taken time to recover, though at last things do seem to be turning around, even if the ultimate direction is not fully clear. 

The Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn is probably as good a sign as any of what the future holds for this once-troubled neighborhood. Consisting of four hulking buildings on Classon Ave. and Prospect Pl., it was once what its name suggests, a significant medical facility that serviced a sizeable Jewish population. But Jews fled from the area as blacks moved in after World War II, and the Temple Isaac that stands across from the hospital is now a Baptist church, as a colorful banner hung on the façade proudly proclaims. Nor has the Jewish Hospital been in operation for some time; in the mid-’90s a new, modernized facility was built across the street, christened the Interfaith Hospital. 

After sagging in neglect for some time, the Jewish Hospital was renovated by Alma Realty, a Queens developer responsible for the Taffee Pl. lofts on the border of Clinton Hill and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Last summer, the complex was opened to renters, with some 700 units available, according to the New York Times. Every building in the complex has been renovated for residential use, and Alma is working on a new construction on St. Mark’s Pl., a hideous red rectangle jutting into the sky, whose only salvation will almost certainly be a supermarket that Alma has promised to install on the ground floor of the building. 

Indeed, a supermarket will be welcome in a neighborhood that glaringly lacks a decent watering hole or coffee shop, and where the nearest restaurants are the scattered offerings of Washington Ave., which is one of those strips that is constantly branded “up-and-coming,” though it would be more accurate to say that it ambles along from beauty parlor to religious goods store. After all, the residents of the Jewish Hospital that I see every morning and evening on the elevator, walking their dogs and smoking on the steps, are young and white: They want to drink Brooklyn Lager or sip café au lait at the kinds of restaurants that just might make it into the back pages of Time Out New York, or at the very least the Park Slope Reader. The fried fish and jerk chicken joints that have satisfied locals for years just won’t do anymore. 

I wonder, then, if there is more strife in store for Crown Heights. The purveyors of conflict this time around, I fear, will be marked by their designer jeans and white earbuds that presage what others have deemed—only half-jokingly—Operation Snowflake. It is safe to say that neither the Hasidic nor Afro-Caribbean populations of Crown Heights, which seem to have reached a peaceable coexistence, have encountered the likes of white gentrifiers who are not only spilling over from Prospect Heights into northern Crown Heights, but also deeper into the neighborhood, into the stately row houses and grand free-standing mansions of Brooklyn and New York Aves., where the Hasidic presence is especially strong and non-religious whites have been, until recently, a relative rarity. 

Though I live in the neighborhood, I remain mystified by the Crown Heights migration. From the top floor of the Jewish Hospital, Crown Heights and the rest of eastern Brooklyn stretch out in a panoramic view of squat buildings, punctuated by the occasional church spire or cluster of housing projects, with the Atlantic Ocean twinkling seductively on the horizon. At night, the lights of Brooklyn have the appearance of campfires on a battlefield and the Jewish Hospital, which happens to be the tallest building in the area, looks like a watchtower at the edge of an the untamed terrain, populated by those who would rule over it one day.

To be sure, there have been some snags in the inevitable conquest of Crown Heights—as there always must be. I returned home one evening to finder a cinder block thrown through the window of my apartment, an uninvited member of an ad hoc welcoming committee having helped himself to a laptop and cell phone. Windows have been broken in the lobby of the building; cars have been burglarized. The young men in pneumatic winter jackets who stand in front of the decrepit bodegas with rusted awnings that line Washington and Classon Aves. seem to mutter and glare at the recent appearance of black-rimmed glasses, vintage gabardine coats and the pale, white and youthful flesh these accoutrements usually adorn. These are all minor things, relatively speaking, but they point to a measure of resistance in the neighborhood to the kind of demographic shift that is taking place today.

My favorite posts on DailyHeights.com, however, come from young arrivals to New York, some of whom have obviously never been to the city before, wondering if some specific address in Crown Heights is a “safe place to live.” Many are curious about the Jewish Hospital, especially of rumors concerning poor management, lack of gas and hot water and the absence of promised amenities such as a basement laundry room. (True on all counts.) Almost immediately, several posters reassure the Brooklyn neophytes that Crown Heights is safe and that even the Jewish Hospital is working out its kinks. If so, they’re being worked out slowly—as of this writing, water from a pipe leak is still dripping all over my couch, and at least a couple of the gleaming floorboards (the trademark of a gut renovation) have come loose.

Crown Heights is not an unsafe place to live, just not a sensible one for someone interested in that slippery but instantly recognizable New York experience. It simply lacks the density and variety that spark an energy that can carry through the night with the swiftness of an autumn gust, wherein one suddenly finds oneself in a strange bar, late at night, among strangers whose company proves uncanny and thoroughly delightful. The streets are lonely at night, and people walk by quickly, covering themselves against the wind.

I suppose if we continue to follow the lure of lower rents, the wave of gentrification will one day crash over Coney Island, which—if developers have their way—will become a smooth and glittering entertainment complex, Nathan’s and the Cyclone wiped out like ancient footprints in the sand. There will surely be countless other conversions in line with the Jewish Hospital, and poor people will be pushed out of their homes, forced into a truly insurmountable bastion of poverty like  Brownsville. 

By that point, I am sure that Crown Heights will have adapted the customs of its stylish neighbors, and the history of conflict and reconciliation that mark its brownstone blocks will be forgotten by all but those with a knack for urban history. I am far from certain that this is a negative outcome; only that, looking at the low expanse of lights stretching across Brooklyn to the sea, it will be a strange but predictable conclusion for yet another New York neighborhood.