By Joshua Bernstein

Consider Brooklyn a big pie—perhaps key lime—and Williamsburg will merit a thick wedge, followed by Park Slope, Bay Ridge, Bed-Stuy, Greenpoint and so on, down the dessert line, until all that remains are a couple of crumbs and a gooey knife: that’s Prospect Heights.

Prospect Heights is a handful of brownstone-stuffed blocks sandwiched between car-frantic Eastern Parkway to the south and Atlantic Ave. to the north. The western border offers Flatbush Ave. (across from Park Slope’s Bugaboo-stroller bling-bling). The eastern boundary remains nebulous: Much like Bushwick blossoming into East Williamsburg, Prospect Heights now stretches to Franklin Ave.—otherwise known as Crown Heights, and once known as Crow Hill, as well as a playground for assorted gangsters and thugs.

Now that Fort Greene, Clinton Hill and the Slope are bought and mortgaged, Caribbean-flavored Prospect Heights garners sloppy-seconds attention. It was inevitable, given its access to Prospect Park, the Brooklyn Museum and the Botanic Gardens. Plus, the housing stock—well-preserved brownstones and towering, pre-war apartments—is pretty swell, and prices are millions cheaper than the Slope and Fort Greene, mainly because the ’60s and ’70s saw Prospect Heights nose-dive into despair. Racial strife, bombed-out buildings and negligent landlords led to the neighborhood crumbling like a soup cracker. Only in the last three years has Prospect Heights regained its swagger.

You can thank me.

Nearly 36 months ago to the day, I moved into a three-bedroom floor-through apartment on Park Pl., near Classon Ave., which was really Crown Heights, though I called it Prospect Heights, just like my realtor told me. My first several months were umm, rough. Amenities like double-ply toilet paper and green lettuce were hard to find. As was nightlife.

Back then, the sole drinkery was a suspect sports bar called Utopia. It served eight-dollar chicken wings and menace. “Come on in, we need you in here,” an arms-crossed bartender told me one night as I strolled past. Inside I saw a single man sucking whiskey through a straw like a tit.

I hurried home.

I hurried home a lot back then. Sure, men were mostly safe—provided they didn’t stroll home drunk, like my fifth roommate, Jose, who was mugged. At gunpoint. In front of our house. Girls, conversely, were catcall magnets. “The Caribbean men love my ass,” said my downstairs neighbor Melissa, a girl with a healthy badonk. Estrogen seemed to attract trouble. Case in point: My girlfriend, Adrianne, while walking home one hot summer eve, was pelted by a rainstorm of rocks.

“It did not,” she said, “feel good to get hit in the head.”

Combine this with nightly gunshots, three bikes stolen from our front yard, as well the occasional criminal who scaled my barbed-wire backyard, causing a cop helicopter to bathe search lights across our property, nearly making me wet the bed, and I often rocked myself to sleep, cooing, “I have such cheap rent, I have such cheap rent.”

Then came the turning point. “It’s Operation Snowflake,” said my neighbor Jose, as post-college twenty-somethings increasingly U-Hauled their lives into the brownstones and the block-long Jewish Hospital, which was reborn as overpriced abodes. I felt torn. Sure, more people meant less of a mugging risk, but I also took perverse pride in the peril. Prospect Heights was sketchy, but it felt like my sketchiness.

New residents demanded new services, and both arrived in spades. First came Vanderbilt Ave.’s Soda Bar, where one could munch fat burgers and sip Brooklyn Pilsner. Soda became an anchor, creating foot traffic for an onslaught of restaurants, eateries and chi-chi rabble.

Nearby we find Beast, an organic eatery serving sumptuous brunches and slightly overpriced, yet savory tapas (the short ribs are melt-in-your-mouth good). It’s joined by BYOB pizzeria Amorina, as well as sister Italian restaurant Aliseo, where they slice paper-thin prosciutto. Artisanal cheeses are sold at the inevitable yuppie deli, Delicacies. 

Gentrification has inched east too. Underhill Ave. finds Tavern on Dean (mmm…burgers) and Sepia, a neighborhood saloon drenched in low-lit sexiness. On Washington, Prospect Heights’ official border, there’s Restaurant Gen—a surprisingly decent sushi restaurant amid shuttered storefronts and condo construction—as well as Tom’s, a kitschy, decades-old diner where you’re fed free oranges and cookies. And, rumor has it, an espresso-selling coffee shop will soon open on this once-blighted stretch. Where do you hear such rumors? Dailyheights.com, the lively, one-stop message board for Prospect and Crown Heights gossip.

Add superb subway access—the Q or B both provide a 15-minute ride to Manhattan—and it’s little surprise that the New York Times, in its typical, sixth-months-behind-the-curve fashion, recently announced that my “Neighborhood Comes Into Its Own.” Gag me with a Sunday edition.

Prospect Heights came into its own long ago. There has always been the park and the museum, and a quiet you can’t find in Manhattan. Prospect Heights is family and friends, bucolic living in big, bad New York City. The buildings are low-rise gems. Rental prices remain affordable ($1,800 for a two-bedroom is, sadly, inexpensive in NYC). And now it’s coming into its own? Because you can stuff your belly and get drunk beside upper-middle-class folk? Or perhaps because of Bruce Ratner’s proposed New Jersey Nets arena complex. If constructed, it will carve up northern Prospect Heights, demolishing businesses—like divine dive Freddy’s—and residences like Godzilla. Then a neighborhood will not have come into its own; it will have come and gone.