Crown Heights is a neighborhood in the central portion of the New York City borough of Brooklyn. Crown Heights is bounded by Washington Avenue to the west, Atlantic Avenue to the north, Ralph Avenue to the east, and Empire Boulevard to the south. It is about wide and long. Neighborhoods bordering Crown Heights include Prospect Heights to the west, Flatbush, Prospect Lefferts Gardens and East Flatbush to the south, Brownsville to the east, and Bedford–Stuyvesant to the north.
The main thoroughfare through this neighborhood is Eastern Parkway, a tree-lined boulevard designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in the late-1800s, extending east–west. Earlier, the area was sometimes known as Crow Hill, with a succession of ridges running east and west from Utica Avenue to Washington Avenue, and south to Empire Boulevard and East New York Avenue."The Eastern District of Brooklyn " by Eugene Armbruster, 1912, updated 1941. When Crown Street was cut through in 1916, the area became known as the heights."Crown Heights " from the 1939 WPA Guide to New York City
The northern half of Crown Heights is part of Brooklyn Community District 8 and is patrolled by the 77th Precinct of the New York City Police Department (NYPD). The southern half is part of Brooklyn Community District 9 and is patrolled by the 71st Precinct of the NYPD. Crown Heights's primary ZIP Codes are 11213, 11216, 11225, 11233, and 11238. Politically, it is represented by the New York City Council's 35th, 36th, and 41st Districts.
History
Early history Although no known physical evidence remains in the Crown Heights vicinity, large portions of what is now called Long Island including present-day Brooklyn were occupied by the Lenape Native Americans. The Lenape lived in communities of bark- or grass-covered wigwams, and in their larger settlements—typically located on high ground adjacent to fresh water, and occupied in the fall, winter, and spring—they fished, harvested shellfish, trapped animals, gathered wild fruits and vegetables, and cultivated corn, tobacco, beans, and other crops.
The first recorded contact between the indigenous people of the New York City region and Europeans was with the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1524 in the service of France when he anchored at the approximate location where the Verrazzano–Narrows Bridge touches down in Brooklyn today. There he was visited by a canoe party of Lenape. The next contact was in 1609 when the explorer Henry Hudson arrived in what is now New York Harbor aboard a Dutch East India Company ship, the Halve Maen (Half Moon) commissioned by the Dutch Republic.
European habitation in the New York City area began in earnest with the founding of a Dutch fur trading settlement, later called "Nieuw Amsterdam" (New Amsterdam), on the southern tip of Manhattan in 1614. By 1630, Dutch and English colonists started moving into the western end of Long Island. In 1637, Joris Jansen de Rapalje"Notes for: Jan Joris Jansen (Rapalje) De_Rapalie" from the Janssen Verheul families in Canada and Holland database purchased about around Wallabout Bay and over the following two years, director Kieft of the Dutch West India Company purchased title to nearly all the land in what is now Kings County and Queens County from the indigenous inhabitants.
Finally, the area around present-day Crown Heights saw its first European settlements starting in about 1661/1662 when several men each received, from Governor Peter Stuyvesant and the directors of the Dutch West India Company what was described as "a parcel of free (unoccupied) woodland there" on the condition that they situate their houses "within one of the other concentration, which would suit them best, but not to make a hamlet.""Crown Heights North Historic District: Designation Report " prepared by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission April 24, 2007 (pdf)"Chapter 3.1: Woodland to City Neighborhood: 300 Years of Change " by Jerome Krase, Brooklyn College Sociology Department "Self and Community in the City", University Press of America 1982
19th century In the 19th century, the area was rural. The Crow Hill penitentiary and various orphanages were located in the area at the time. In 1884, Alexander Jefferson was killed during a prolonged hanging after being convicted of the Crow Hill Murders. Appeals seeking to overturn his death sentence documented the significant poverty in the area at the time.
Early and mid-20th century
Crown Heights had begun as a fashionable residential neighborhood, a place for secondary homes in which Manhattan's growing bourgeois class could reside. The area benefited by having its rapid transit in a subway configuration, the IRT Eastern Parkway Line (), in contrast to many other Brooklyn neighborhoods, which had elevated lines. Conversion to a commuter town also included tearing down the 19th century Kings County Penitentiary at Carroll Street and Nostrand Avenue.Brooklyn Museum open collection Crow Hill Penitentiary gate
Beginning in the early 1900s, many upper-class residences, including characteristic brownstone buildings, were erected along Eastern Parkway. Away from the parkway were a mixture of lower middle-class residences. This development peaked in the 1920s. Before World War II, Crown Heights was among New York City's premier neighborhoods, with tree-lined streets, an array of cultural institutions and parks, and numerous fraternal, social and community organizations.
From the early 1920s through the 1960s, Crown Heights was predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish reflecting the demographics of the city, at the time. In 1950, some 50 to 60 percent, or about 75,000 people, were Jewish. Many of them were Holocaust survivors and recent arrivals from Displaced Persons Camps in the Allied Zones of Occupation of Germany. (During this time period, Jews were not considered white as they are by many today; Jews faced discrimination, such as including being barred from hotels and restaurants and being denied employment in certain professions or companies. They also faced quotas at universities.) New arrivals from the West Indies and the American South created a growing Black presence. By 1957, there were about 25,000 Black people in Crown Heights, making up about one-fourth of the population. Around the same time, suburbanization began to rapidly affect Crown Heights and Brooklyn. Robert Moses expanded the borough's access to eastern Long Island through expressway construction; by way of the G.I. Bill, many families moved east. As the Jewish, Irish and Italian populations of Crown Heights moved out of the neighborhood as the housing stock deteriorated and crime rapidly escalated, black people from the south and immigrants from the Caribbean continued to move there. The 1957 departure of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the destruction of Ebbets Field for public housing for its Black population symbolically served as the end of the old Crown Heights and in the 1960s the neighborhood experienced mass white flight. The demographic change was astounding; by 1970 the neighborhood was 70% Black. The one exception to this pattern were the Lubavitch Hasidic Jewish Community, who remain there today.
There were thirty-four large synagogues in the neighborhood, including the Bobov, Chovevei Torah, and 770 Eastern Parkway, home of the worldwide Lubavitch movement. There were also three prominent Yeshiva elementary schools in the neighborhood, Crown Heights Yeshiva on Crown Street, the Yeshiva of Eastern Parkway, and the Reines Talmud Torah.
Late 20th century The 1960s and 1970s were a time of turbulent race relations in the area: with increasing poverty in the city, racial conflict plagued some of its neighborhoods, including Crown Heights, with its racially and culturally mixed populations. At the request of their leader, the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the neighborhood's mostly white and relatively large population of Lubavitch Hasidim stayed in the community as other whites were leaving."Crown Heights from the 1950s to today" , Remembering Crown Heights. Accessed March 5, 2023. "Following secular Jewish emigration away from Crown Heights in the 1950s and 1960s, the then Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson was faced with the choice or re-locating elsewhere or remaining in a fast changing neighborhood. During Passover in 1969 the Rebbe chose the latter and, citing various religious sources, declared 'the wholesale emigration from Jewish neighborhoods' to be 'a plague.' He deemed it a religious duty to remain in Crown Heights and in the midst of unprecedented white flight, the Lubavitch population increased year on year."Kaplan, Juliana. "The Rebbe’s Passover Declaration Against White Flight" , The Forward, June 20, 2018. Accessed August 27, 2023. "Schneerson’s role in shaping the racial makeup of Crown Heights, which now faces the imminent threat of gentrification, cannot be understated.... But in 1969, as the racial dynamics of the neighborhood were changing, the rebbe spoke out against white flight on the final day of Passover.... As white flight continued from Crown Heights, the Orthodox Jewish population remained strong, only increasing year after year."
In 1964 the Labor Day Carnival celebrating Caribbean culture was moved to the neighborhood when its license to run in Harlem was revoked. It now attracts between one and three million people and is held on the first Monday in September.
During the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, Crown Heights was declared a primary poverty area due to a high unemployment rate, high juvenile and adult crime rate, poor nutrition due to lack of family income, relative absence of job skills and readiness, and a relatively high concentration of elderly residents. Violence broke out several times in the neighborhood during the late 20th century, including during the New York City blackout of 1977: More than 75 area stores were robbed, and thieves used cars to pull up roll-down curtains in front of stores.
In 1991, there was a three-day outbreak known as the Crown Heights riot, which started between the neighborhood's West Indian/African American and Jewish communities. The riots began on August 19, 1991, after Gavin Cato, the son of two Guyanese immigrants, was struck and killed by a car in the motorcade of prominent Hasidic rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. A mob began to attack a Jewish volunteer ambulance, which withdrew. Rumors, which later proved to be unfounded, circulated that the ambulance refused to treat Gavin Cato's injuries while removing members of Schneerson's motorcade instead. Yankel Rosenbaum, a visiting rabbinical student from Australia, was killed in the riot, while Jews were assaulted, and there was property damage amid rock throwing in the ensuing riots. The riot unveiled long-simmering tensions between the neighborhood's Black and Jewish communities, which impacted the 1993 mayoral race and ultimately led to a successful outreach program between Black and Jewish leaders that somewhat helped improve race relations in the city.Edward S. Shapiro, "Interpretations of the Crown Heights riot." American Jewish History (2002) 90#2 pp: 97-122.Edward S. Shapiro, Crown Heights: Blacks, Jews, and the 1991 Brooklyn Riot (U. Press of New England, 2006). Through the 1990s, crime, racial conflict, and violence decreased in the city and urban renewal and gentrification began to take effect including in Crown Heights.
Early 21st century