Crown Heights In Brooklyn, NY Walking Tour

Original Film Date: Friday October 18th, 2024

I walked around Crown Heights in Brooklyn, NY on a Friday afternoon. I toured around trendy spots with cafes, bars, restaurants, the Brooklyn Museum on Eastern Parkway, the Jewish community, the Caribbean community (with ethnic groups like Jamaicans, Trinidadians, some Haitians, some from Grenada, Guyana, Barbados etc.), African Americans, and hipsters. I know Crown Heights as a sketchy place with incredible and socially superficial history on demographics, society, and the communities surrounding the neighborhood.

Crown Heights is a safe neighborhood, but sometimes it gets sketchy with crime, such as robbery/theft, vandalism, shootings, murders, terrible education systems in the local schools, and some other crazy stuff that happened here before. One of the craziest events would be the 1991 Crown Heights riots with Black residents that attacked Orthodox Jews by damaging their homes, discriminating against them as anti-Semites, and looting down their businesses. Another crazy story is the hidden truth of the secret Jewish tunnels built in the Chabad Headquarters synagogue on 770 Eastern Parkway. The Jewish tunnel riots took place on January 8th, 2024 (earlier this year) with police escorting synagogue members out and arresting 10-13 people in the scene after investigating the tunnels that were built for dark secret stuff based on crimes that some members did. The illegal synagogue tunnel mystery went viral throughout the mainstream media with a Jewish guy getting out of the tunnel's sewers in public and running away. Then, the incident started from the tunnel being built under the building on December 20th, 2023 just 3 weeks before the incident took place. What happened during the incident was that a group of Yeshiva students as members were attempting to "protect the tunnels" and the hidden passageways after a truck arrived to fill the tunnel when this was reported. I had searched this information up on Wikipedia. If you asked anyone that had heard about the Jewish tunnels built in Crown Heights' Chabad Lubavitch synagogue, there would be a chance that less people would know anything about the tunnel's existence to expand some space. There were claims of the Jewish tunnel that some people in the media said that illegal activities were involved in this controversy, but who knows if this is true or false. The tunnel was there in the synagogue for hidden reasons. A few other incidents happened in Crown Heights, such as notorious crime in the projects and hoods with gang violence, shootings, robbery, fights in the local schools, and the crime rate that went up sometime around recent years.

Crown Heights is next to Brownsville, another dangerous neighborhood that's known to be the most dangerous neighborhood in all of New York City. I would also say that this makes East New York, Harlem, some Bronx areas, and some Queens areas follow this lead along with other cities in the New York metropolitan area with similarities of high crime. I first went to Crown Heights at a young age as a neighborhood that was sometimes a rough place, and it's still true that it can a rough place with high crime. I remember that the crime wasn't too high at all costs. As of now, things can happen related to crime.

Gentrification started in Crown Heights in the early 2010s. After 2020, Crown Heights gentrify even more and it's going on with new developments, new homes built, cafes, white gentrifiers, some Asian and Black gentrifiers, some more immigrants moved in for affordable rent, and the long-time residents having to leave Crown Heights due to rising rent and sometimes high crime. Crown Heights is bordered with Bedford-Stuyvesant, Prospect Heights, Prospect Lefferts Gardens with Flatbush there, Brownsville, and Clinton Hill. There are two museums located here, such as the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Children's Museum, Jewish Children's Museum between Eastern Parkway and Kingston Avenue, and there's the Weeksville Heritage Center. Crown Heights is like Bedford-Stuyvesant, but more sketchier, background-like, hood-like, and very similar in terms of most common things. Crown Heights is named after the highest point in the area, where crowns were traditionally placed on the heads of royalty in the 18th century. The neighborhood was originally called Crow Hill, a name that referred to the area's hilly location and the crows that once roosted at its highest peak. The name was changed to Crown Heights in 1916 after the extension of Crown Street. For today's era, Crown Heights continues rapid gentrification with rising rent and new wealthy transplants moving in, its cultural heritage unfortunately continues to disappear, Jews continue to thrive as a community similar to what Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant have in common, and safety remains more important in the neighborhood.

The West Indian parade takes place on Labor Day every year on the first Monday of September in Eastern Parkway. I have went to this fun parade as a kid growing up with my parents. I have some Caribbean and Latino ancestry in me, so I'm used to this culture that I'm familiar with. The celebration parade has been around for over 50 years since the 1970s and each Labor Day, it thrives the remaining culture that we know about the community's Caribbean residents. However, crime gets involved in the Labor Day parades, such as stabbings and fights that were under control leaving people injured. This year's Labor Day had 5 people shot by a gunman during the parade. The event planners decide to work on enough or more security to prevent gun violence each year for people to feel 100% safe all the time.

Background song: J. Cole - Middle Child