In My Father’s Footsteps

Bedford was established by the Dutch West India Company in 1662, remaining largely rural until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Dutch farmers began selling land to other settlers. In a matter of decades it became predominantly residential, a desirable town for the rich, white, middle classes.

But free African-American settlements in the area go back almost as far. In 1838 a black stevedore named James Weeks bought land in southern Bedford, selling it on to other African-Americans in what would become Weeksville. Freedom then was of a complicated kind – finding a landlord willing to rent to black tenants was tremendously difficult and it was harder still to buy land. In reality there were few places that the newly freed blacks were actually free to go, and successful black landowners such as Weeks provided a lifeline.

During the 1860s and 1870s, the railways improved access to Manhattan and wealthy white New Yorkers continued to populate the area. Rows of sturdy terraced houses sprang up clad in the fashionable brownstone that is now so characteristic of Brooklyn, considered far more sophisticated than the red brick that it concealed. The buildings of Bedford-Stuyvesant were, without question, constructed for the rich. The affluence of the community during this period has left an extraordinary architectural legacy, with Bedford-Stuyvesant now home to the most brownstones in the City of New York.
The beginnings of Bed-Stuy’s decline began, as with so many other neighbourhoods and institutions, with the Great Depression. As real estate value dropped, working-class immigrant families – Irish, Jewish, black and Italian – began to move in, but the real shift, the transformation of a once privileged enclave into a vast and raging slum, was wrought by a force powerful throughout American history – racism. Blockbusting is the illegal practice of buying homes cheaply from white families nervous of incipient demographic changes, and selling them on to impoverished black families at an extortionate markup, exploiting their desperation to own a home and their limited options elsewhere.

In the early part of the twentieth century, when anti-black prejudice was endemic, white flight from a neighbourhood gathered momentum with great speed. And at the same time there were many black arrivals from the still-troubled South, economic migrants drawn to the area by the historic presence of communities such as Weeksville. For the chance to buy in Bedford, black owners were forced to rent out every square inch of their new property to as many tenants as possible, carving their precious family homes into flophouses simply to keep up mortgage repayments. Most of these black owners struggled along in this manner until the Depression and then, last hired and first fired, the true crisis began. The social consequences of the vast numbers of ensuing foreclosures on these homes, bought with sub-prime mortgages, have particular resonances now.

But during my father’s childhood Bedford-Stuyvesant was not yet an unusual place for a Jewish boy to grow up, although it was certainly not common, unlike the very Jewish Crown Heights or Williamsburg. Few people wanted Jews next door any more than they wanted a black family. But friends of my father’s from later life who grew up in other areas have no memories of fleeing from tough Irish schoolboys for the simple reason, they told me, that they never crossed paths. For my father, on the other hand, to walk home from yeshiva to St Marks Avenue, from Crown Heights to Bedford-Stuyvesant, was to venture into treacherous territory. It was twelve blocks, and each evening he would stuff his yarmulke into his pocket, deciding whether he wanted to risk a beating from the black boys in one direction or the Irish boys at St Gregory’s in the other. In his novel Acts of Faith, my father explored Brooklyn’s Jewish-Irish tensions, although he cast a rather more romantic light on the subject than was there in reality – in his recollection, every encounter he had with the local Catholic boys was suffused with pure terror. Thus self-preservation played a role in the tendency of all Brooklyn’s immigrant communities to stick to their own when they settled, the Jews as much as the blacks.

A few of the houses on my father’s block were still, like his grandparents’, single-family homes, and a few were also Jewish. But if it was a detached home you wanted, better to move with the others to Long Island, where the loss in architectural beauty might be compensated for by a big backyard and the offer of a more homogeneous, less troubled community. The years in which my father lived there were ones of seismic social change for Bedford-Stuyvesant, and so I’ve long been fascinated by the neighbourhood. But it’s only recently that I’ve been able to admit to myself that my curiosity was less about understanding the mechanics of an urban history, and more about understanding my relationship with my father.