The Jewish Hospital, 520 Prospect Place, 191-? (Copyright: Brooklyn Public Library).
Local and community history sits at the point where fact meets folklore and is all the richer for it. Tradition, rumor, and story telling very rarely occur in a vacuum and often provide insights into aspects of history and memory that are never recorded in official histories. In the case of Remembering Crown Heights there are certainly aspects of site description that owe more to word of mouth than concrete evidence. To use one example, it is rumored that Albert Einstein once received a blood transfusion at the Jewish Hospital on Prospect Place in the 1950s. Short of combing through all the medical records for the hospital – which may or may not exist – there is no way to prove or disprove whether this took place. However, regardless of whether or not the story is true it is important in terms of the significance residents and former residents ascribe to the hospital, as well as how they remember Crown Heights in the 1950s.
Folklore enriches the historical record but at the same time it can have dangerous consequences. Traditions often help to preserve reactionary ideas or enable the deliberate spread of falsehoods. I do not believe that any of the information on Remembering Crown Height is likely to have this result but I am sensitive to the distrust anyone may have for the inclusion of rumor amidst evidence. Furthermore, there may also be readers of this website who simply know that a local tale is incorrect and whose individual memory is far more reliable than any collective assumption that has developed. In this case I encourage you to get in contact with me.
The Berean Baptist Church in the mid twentieth century. Berean Baptist was one of the few Weeksville institutions to survive past the end of the nineteenth century (Copyright: Weeksville Heritage Center, Alexander Moore Photograph Collection).
While folklore is responsible for some of the disputed facts in Remembering Crown Heights, others are the result of a lack of sources. For some sites there are multiple addresses given or differing dates of establishment. This does not come from any local tradition but instead poor record keeping or deliberate neglect. In the case of Weeksville it was not until the 1960s that a movement emerged to uncover the history of the community. The work of the Weeksville Society was astounding but they confronted a situation where the majority of archival sources had been buried, thrown away, or otherwise discarded; there was simply no prior political will to preserve the memory a free black community. It may well be that the details of Weeksville institutions on this map are incorrect, but that we will never know in what way or how we might amend them.
Loehmann’s Department Store, 1476 Bedford Avenue, 1962 (Copyright: Brooklyn Public Library).
One final way that Remembering Crown Heights may be described as inaccurate is through the categories used to sort the various sites on the map. Unlike the problems of folklore or of limited sources this one is solely the result of decisions I have taken myself. The categories used on the map are by their nature limited and they leave little room for buildings that have had multiple uses. Take the New Life Tabernacle. While New Life Tabernacle is clearly and currently a church – a religious building – this is only a recent phenomenon. In terms of the history of Crown Heights it may be more significant that this was where Frida Loehmann established the first ever Loehmann’s store. The use of categories leaves no room for this grey area and one use of the building inevitably has to be prioritized over the other. Any categorization system would run into similar problems but I hope that the categories I have chosen provide a means by which to navigate the map and at the same time are expansive enough to incorporate any future additions to the map.