City Line

When the 2010 Census information comes out there's going to be a lot of interesting stories, one of which is the growth of the South Asian community in Ozone Park, which has been spilling over the border into Brooklyn lately. As I've written before, the land border between Brooklyn and Queens is growing increasingly irrelevant. A few blocks into East New York and you'll still see statues of Ganesha, red and yellow flags, and saris in the windows of the clothing shops on Liberty Avenue. In 2000, the neighborhood was about 15% Asian, and I'm sure that's at least doubled in the last decade.

There's a lot of linguistic, religious, ethnic diversity among the South Asian community in Ozone Park/Richmond Hill (although only some of which you can determine from the census), with small pockets of different communities. From what I can tell form the 2000 census and my walk, the community in City Line is mostly Hindu and Indo-Caribbean.

Neighborhoods: City Line, East New York
Tracts Walked: B1182.01, B1182.02, B1184, B1186, B1188, B1202

Highland Park

A recent walk through East Brooklyn saw me pass the 2/3 mark of Census Tracts walked. The specific one that took me over the mark was Brookyn Tract 1142.01 - which along with its sister (Tract 1142.02) make up a lovely hillside area nestled up in an out-of-the-way corner of the Borough between Jamaica Avenue, Highland Park, and the Jackie Robinson Expressway. Hillside neighborhoods are in short supply in Brooklyn, but while the almost San Francisco-like steepness initially piqued my interest it also turned out to be a great walk in general, full of old homes of various architectural styles, unexpected views, and of course kids taking advantage of the inclined streets on various wheeled devices. Much of East New York, and East Brooklyn in general, tends to get painted with the same brush in the media. People who can name a dozen distinct neighborhoods and their characteristics in West Brooklyn don't know any two blocks are different from Utica Avenue to the City Line. This area - along with many others - serves as a reminder that East Brooklyn contains the same diversity of architecture, geography, and community as the other parts of the borough.

With most areas, I'm content to walk through them, take in the area, and check the tracts off the map. When it comes to revisiting - well, I'll see them if I see them. I've always had the goal of having a broad knowledge of the city, not a deep knowledge - I'm happier to know 10 neighborhoods a little bit rather than one neighborhood well. While there's certainly many neighborhoods that I do know well, it's generally more by circumstance than design.

Once in a while though, a tract or two will capture my imagination, and I'll put it on my list to revisit. I'll definitely be returning to that neighborhood up the hill.

For an in-depth look at Highland Park, see Brian Berger's guest page on the neighborhood at Forgotten-NY

Neighborhoods: Highland Park, Cypress Hills, East New York
Tracts Walked: B1142.01, B1142.02

In-between

I've always loved the areas that legally belong to one borough, but geographically to another. The most famous of these is Marble Hill - once part of Manhattan Island, the small neighborhood was cut off from it by the Harlem River Ship Canal in 1885, forming an island for the next 22 years until the creek separating it from the Bronx was filled in in 1917. Today it's got a 718 area code, but votes for Manhattan Borough President.

Another of these are the waterfront piers of Downtown Brooklyn and Red Hook. New York County has jurisdiction over the East River up to the bulkhead line of Brooklyn ("low water mark of the shore of Long Island" according to the New York consolidated law), leaving the piers technically governed by Manhattan.

A third I discovered after this walk through Ozone Park and Woodhaven. On the way to meet up with the Burn Some Dust crew for walk # 32 I headed across Conduit - a major road that cuts the street grid which can only be crossed about every 6 blocks or so - by way of Sutter Avenue to East New York. The difference was stark - neat rows of manicured lawns gave way to dilapidated houses and streets without drainage.

The thing was, I wasn't in East New York - I was still in Queens. The line between Brooklyn and Queens running from Howard Beach to East Williamsburg is the only major land border between two boroughs. While once fairly distinct demographically, the two boroughs have been sort of slowly bleeding into one another over this imaginary line during the last decade or two. Whereas in 1980, your average layperson would have been able to pinpoint where Bushwick becomes Ridgewood, or Cypress Hills becomes Woodhaven, today it's next to impossible if you don't know beforehand.

Where I happened to be, the demograhic and mental border between the two boroughs was definitely Conduit - if I'm a parent, I tell my kids not to cross Conduit Avenue. But the geographic and political border was a few blocks west, running down Ruby Street, and then across a few blocks to Sapphire. This led to a strange little area of no-man's land - Queens Census Tract 44:02.

The real interesting thing was that there was also a slight, but noticable difference between the Brooklyn and Queens sides of the line. On the Brooklyn side, stuff was a little better, and there was even a little bit of New Construction. The Queens side, however, looked like it had been completely neglected since about 1972. I can imagine what happened - Brooklyn thinks it's part of Queens, Queens thinks it's part of Brooklyn, and both boroughs completely neglect it. The result is definitely the absolute shoddiest area of town I've ever been to - if any location scouts out there are looking for a stereotypical 1970s, post-apocolyptic area to film in, head out to the triangle between Conduit, Linden, and Ruby.

Neighborhoods Walked: Lindenwood, East New York. Tracts Walked: Q44.02