Posted on 06/05/2008 7:26:56 PM PDT by Lorianne
A Brooklyn neighborhood finally recovers from decades of misguided urban policies ___ These days, when Morris Todash walks the streets of Bushwick, a two-square-mile neighborhood of 100,000 people in central Brooklyn, he likes what he sees. On the long-abandoned seven-acre site of the former Rheingold Brewery, new two-family homes and condominiums have sprung up. On the side streets along Broadway—not so long ago, pockmarked with desolate lots where stray dogs wandered amid burned-out cars—more new homes arise and old ones get impressive face-lifts. New businesses—an organic grocery store, a fashionable restaurant—seem to be opening on every corner. Todash, whose insurance firm has served the neighborhood for more than 40 years, can hardly believe that this is the same Bushwick that became synonymous with urban chaos during the late 1960s and early 1970s, ravaged by fires, rioting, and looting until it resembled a war zone. “When I first came here to open a business, this was a shopping destination for all of Brooklyn,” Todash says of the neighborhood’s commercial district. “After the looting, no one wanted to come here any more.”
Often described by residents as a forgotten neighborhood, Bushwick was once a solid blue-collar community. starting in the 1960s, a steady barrage of demographic changes and ruinous Great Society policies battered it down. So total was the devastation that even as New York began rebounding in the mid-1990s, Bushwick remained largely untouched by gentrification. Only recently—after years of tireless work by government (especially the police), local groups, and the private sector—has the revitalization of this once-proud neighborhood begun. With Bushwick beginning to thrive again, New York City has finally left behind the disorder and failure that flowed from the misguided liberal reforms of the sixties and seventies. Yet if Bushwick is back, no one should forget what happened to it.
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...
maybe this trend will continue ... but I think it depends on real estate prices staying high.
After we married we left that school, but my wife remained as a teacher in two Bushwick public schools until 94. There were years when at least once a term a dead body would turn up in her school's dumpster. The mother of one of her kids tried to organize against the drug dealers and was killed.
Still she could get cappucino in the bakery on Knickerbocker Ave. and sit safely in the park in the lone area still under the protection, not of the NYPD, but the Bonanno crime family.
As I read this article I must wonder. I'm glad Bushwick is reviving, but where have the residents who created the mayhem that led to its devastation gone? What parts of the city do thy endanger today?
Perhaps the best desription of how destructive the 70s were on Bushwick came from the pen of Pete Hamill. He focused on the Doughboy monument in Knickerbocker Park as it looked out on the wasteland Bushwick had become. If that statue to a long ago war could see, Hamill wrote, it would have had to believe that the war he had fought had been lost and his country destroyed.
Another example of why liberals want to be judged by their good intentions rather than their reprehensible results.
DIE HIPSTER DIE! Go back home to tipping cows and getting beaten up by jocks! ;-)
The Ricans moved back to Puerto Rico, or have moved down to the Orlando, FL area. The underclass is being pushed farther out to the Bronx and outer Brooklyn, or out of the city entirely.
The lower class white Catholic folks who used to inhabit places like Bushwick lacked both the organizational skills, capital, or political sophistication to preserve their neighborhood. Amazing that it took a bunch of hipster kids, largely from middle America, to "reclaim" the neighborhood, while the children of the old timers feared going back. Of course, they couldn't have done it without the help of the NYPD.
The old Noo Yawk of Tony Manero and Ralph Kramden is gone. Replaced by Whole Foods and waifs who shop at Urban Outfitters.
My great grandmother was born and raised in Bushwick area of Brooklyn.
Her father was in Repulican politics, they were part of the large German community there at that time.
Also have Grandparents generations back living in Bushwick in the 1600s
My father worked in the Rheingold brewery for 24 years, right up until the day it closed in 1973.
I have pics of 3 generations of my family in front of my great great grandparents brownstone taken around 1920.
I bet you can still sing the Rheingold Beer jingle , .. I remember some of it , .. very catchy
( “My beer is Rheingold .. la la la .. .. .. think of Rheingold whenever you buy beer , .. . its not bitter not sweet , .. la la la la llllaaaa , .. won’t you try extra dry Rheingold beer!” )
I didn’t google this ,.. really! right off the top’o my head
Two little words?
Urban Renewal...
Yes, Yers Trooly was a victim of it...
In the seventies, I had part ownership in "XXX's oldest and largest furniture company.
We had a five-story, 50,000 square foot warehouse-style brick building on the waterfront here. A hundred years old.
Urban renewal came to town, painted all those pretty pictures of "old, outdated, ugly buildings being replaced by new, clean, modern construction."
We fought relocation for years, but naturally lost to the Federal Gooberment...
Got $100,000 to "relocate..."
Had to pay $380,000 to build a replacement building- and ended up with 22,000 square feet to shoehorn all our inventory in to...
They bulldozed the waterfront, and our old building, then...
( Wait for it! )
They didn't have the funds to build the "new, clean, modern construction."
Gee whillikers! Guess what occupies our old lot?
A really big, flat, sheet metal "warehouse..."
Ours looked better...
Did anybody actually benefit from the event you experienced? All too often, the answers would be "nobody" or "a few politically-connected guys."
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