The boundaries of Crown Heights that have been selected for this map –Atlantic Avenue, Empire Boulevard, Washington Avenue, and Ralph Avenue –correspond to the 1968 borders of Community Board 8. The name Crown Heights had been in use since the 1910s but there had never been an official designation of what the name applied to. Through the 1950s and 1960s a growing number of municipal documents began to identify Crown Heights as a distinct neighborhood and this process culminated in 1968. The neighborhood was itself created by bringing together of a number of distinct historical enclaves and communities and in 1959 the Community Council of New York described it as “a somewhat artificial community.”[1] Such a description is not unique to Crown Heights and could be applied to many other New York neighborhoods. Yet in the case of Crown Heights it does provide a useful starting point to ask the question how such this “somewhat artificial community” could come into being in the first place.
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Before official neighborhood borders were implemented in Brooklyn, residents still used names and borders to refer to the areas they lived in. Unlike municipal borders these were flexible and expanded, contracted, and dissolved as populations and time periods changed. Furthermore, they were decided by history, culture, race, and, landmarks, not by decrees.
Even today, both the official and the unofficial borders of Crown Heights are contested. In 1976 Community Board 8 was split along Eastern Parkway and Crown Heights South became part of Community Board 9. Community Board 8 has itself since been expanded west and now includes Prospect Heights. More importantly, how ideas of neighborhood and community play out in everyday life depend far more on how they are understood by individuals and group as opposed to how they are decided on documents. As DW Gibson notes, neighborhood is less a name and more where daily life plays out, “and daily life does not involve lines on a map; it is a spectrum of places: a home, a school, a playground, a diner. And the people who fill those spaces.”[2]
With that in mind this section attempts to describe the history of Crown Heights and the process of neighborhood formation.
[1] Henry Goldschmidt, Race and religion among the chosen people of Crown Heights (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 91.
[2] DW Gibson, The Edge Becomes the Center: An oral history of gentrification in the twenty-first century (New York, NY: Overlook Press, 2015), 16.