Crown Heights, Brooklyn

Social History and Geography

The geographic boundaries of Crown Heights are not entirely clear, as Black and Jewish neighborhood residents tend to define their community in rather different ways. The neighborhood is semiofficially defined, however, to include a large swath of north-central Brooklyn—some 200 square blocks, bordered by the neighborhoods of Bedford-Stuyvesant to the north, East Flatbush to the south, Brownsville to the east, and Prospect Heights to the west. This area is home to approximately 200,000 residents (according to 2000 census data), roughly 65% of whom are Afro-Caribbean immigrants and their families, while about 15% are African American, about 9% are Hispanic, and about 9% are White—a White minority made up largely of Hasidic Jews.

The neighborhood took its present-day geographic and architectural form in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Prior to this time, the area known as “Crow Hill” was a sparsely populated tract of farms and forests. Its only substantial settlements were the neighboring Black villages of Weeksville and Carrville, founded in the 1830s on land developed by African American entrepreneurs. These independent towns were largely destroyed, however, by the urbanization of the area, and the newly developed “Crown Heights” was soon home to an upwardly mobile, rapidly assimilating elite of Eastern European Jews and other White European immigrants. In the 1940s and 1950s, these established residents were joined by the communities that have come to make up today's Crown Heights: Hasidic Jews, arriving in New York as Holocaust refugees, and Black migrants, both African American and Afro-Caribbean, drawn in part by the city's booming wartime economy. In 1940, the Lubavitch Hasidic community established its global headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway, on the same major thoroughfare that has been home, since 1969, to the annual West Indian American Day Parade, or Labor Day Carnival.

As the Black population of Crown Heights grew in the 1960s and 1970s, the vast majority of White neighborhood residents followed the nationwide trend of “White flight” from city to suburbs. The Lubavitch Hasidim was the only substantial Jewish community that chose to stay in Crown Heights, and they did so at the insistence of their spiritual leader—the [Page 351]Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson—who gave a public address in April 1969 declaring his unequivocal opposition to any exodus from the neighborhood. Over the decades that followed, the Lubavitch community of Crown Heights grew substantially, from a few thousand members in the 1960s to some 12,000 or 13,000 today, but the neighborhood continued to change around them, becoming a center of Afro-Caribbean settlement in the New York area.

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