Brownsville, Brooklyn - Definition and Overview

Brownsville is a neighborhood in central Brooklyn, New York. Brownsville was Jewish from the 1880’s to the 1950’s and is majority Caribbean African-American today.

Brownsville was politically radical during its Jewish days, it elected socialists and American Labor Party candidates to the state assembly throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s.

By the 1960s Brownsville had become one of the worst slums in New York. The unemployment rate was 17 percent and half of all families in the district lived on less than $5,000 a year. A writer said Brownsville reminded him of "Berlin after the war; block after block of burned-out shells of houses, streets littered with decaying automobile hulks." Jimmy Breslin wrote in 1968,

the stores on the avenues are empty and the streets are lined with deserted apartment houses or buildings that have empty apartments on every floor. At night, kids set fires to the empty buildings and apartments. Women on welfare sit up all night to watch for fires which could kill their children.

In 1968 Brownsville was the theater for a protracted teacher and highly contentious teacher strike. The Board of Education had experimented with giving the people of the neighborhood control over the school. The new administration laid off several teachers in violation of union contract rules. The teachers were all white, and mostly Jewish and the resulting strike served to badly divide the whole city. The resulting strike dragged off and on for a half year, becoming known as one of the "Ten Plagues" of John Lindsay.

Conditions in Brownsville have improved since the 1960's. Though there are still weedy lots and abandoned buildings, the neighborhood has seen much new housing built. Many from first developments were built by various non-profit groups, but now for-profit traditional developers are becoming active. Some of the vacant sites have been turned into attractive community gardens.

Brownsville is accessible from the IRT. Its main thoroughfare is Pitkin Avenue.

Famous people from Brownsville include Aaron Copland, Danny Kaye, Mike Tyson, and Riddick Bowe.