As we stand on Eastern Parkway in front of the Brooklyn Museum one September day, Julia describes when this street was new. “There was a concept, ‘Brooklyn is the world’—you don't need to go anyplace else,” she says. She then imagines what it was like in 1915 for the subways to connect the newly joined cities of Brooklyn and New York: “The day that the subways opened up, people came to far reaches of Brooklyn that they had never been to, and they walked back . . . and they said, I'm going to live here, I'm going to live here. And the next year, half of the population of Manhattan moved out and moved to Brooklyn.” 1
Brooklyn, incorporated as its own city in 1834, always thought of itself as a grand city, grander even than that one across the East River, so it's not surprising that in 1859 it was decided that Brooklyn needed an impressive public park to rival the “central park” being built in New York City.2 Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux—famous designers of that New York park—would have to wait until 1866, after the Civil War and Olmstead's return from designing Oakland's Mountain View cemetery, to make a proposal for a Brooklyn park intended to give visitors “a sense of enlarged freedom.” 3 While the Canarsie had created one of the borders of Prospect Heights—the road that would come to be called the “road to Flatbush,” and eventually Flatbush Avenue—the Prospect Park development project would create the second boundary, Eastern Parkway. Planned for “pleasure-riding and driving,” the parkway would connect the new Prospect Park with other places of leisure throughout the cities of Brooklyn and New York. The first stretch, from Grand Army Plaza to Washington Avenue, opened in March 1874; by the end of that year, it stretched to Ralph Avenue (now Brownsville, then considered Prospect Heights), thereby sparking the construction of one whole side of Prospect Heights and Crown Heights when hundreds of lots along the new “parkway” went up for sale.
The area abutting this new street had been far removed from the village of Brooklyn until the mid-nineteenth century; around 1825, it was a horticultural garden way out in the country.4 Although the garden was broken up into streets and lots by the 1840s, there was little built development of the area until the 1860s. By the next decade, the area along the new Eastern Parkway as well as the area down one side of Prospect Park (the area now known as Park Slope) would all be known as Prospect Heights, though the name was up for debate. An irate 1889 letter to the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, signed by “Residents of Prospect Hill,” explained, “You will hear such remarks as this: ‘When I moved to this hill,’ or ‘they are building some fine houses on this hill,’ or ‘This hill is growing rapidly,’ but they never say ‘When I moved to these heights.’ . . . Yet some people are trying to fasten upon it the name of Prospect Heights, a name which is never used in common conversation, and which smacks a little of affectation.” 5 But ten years later, newspapers like the Brooklyn Times were often writing about the “little society on Prospect Heights” in reference to the whole larger area.6
The papers would be filled with references to men's civic groups—such as the Prospect Heights Board of Trade, which had been meeting for several years in the Crib-bage Cafe on Franklin Avenue and Sterling Place and which advocated for new firehouses and subway and elevated train expansions (while also opposing a new playground).7 Another influential group of men called the Prospect Heights Citizens Association, whose membership included mayors, politicians, and other elites, would wield considerable power in the shaping of the areas we now consider Park Slope, Prospect Heights, and parts of Crown Heights, weighing in on traffic islands and the expansion of the subway in Brooklyn, and opposing plans that included a new police headquarters on Sterling and Flatbush, new shops on Underhill Avenue, and the development of apartment buildings.8 Whatever the elites of these civic groups thought, by the 1920s, large apartment buildings in keeping with the grandeur of Eastern Parkway and beyond would demolish the small buildings built forty years earlier. And around the same time, the name Prospect Heights was regularly in use by everyone from local bowling clubs to Boy Scout troops.9
Imagining a cultural, recreational, and educational district around their Prospect Park, another group of elites, the Brooklyn Park Commission, set aside a location for a central library in 1889, and the following year planned a museum. The museum opened within the decade, but the library only broke ground in 1912, after Brooklyn and all its neighborhoods, and its grand civic pride, were incorporated into the city of New York in 1898. Library construction was halted by World War I and the Great Depression, its delays much complained about by the powerful folk of Prospect Heights, and finally opened to the public in 1941 more than fifty years after its initial planning.10
While the Brooklyn Park Commission's whole nineteenth-century development had lofty, even elitist goals, the work its monuments now do might not always be the work their boosters intended; they build belonging and support people's becoming themselves in sometimes surprising ways. As we're looking at my stack of neighborhood photographs together, with great enthusiasm Tanya picks out an image of the library's front entrance, with kids waiting outside. “Now this!” she exclaims “You walk across and you see this and it's just gorgeous. ‘BROOKLYN PUBLIC LIBRARY.’ I look at this, and think, wow, there used to be creativity in this country.” Tanya makes me laugh.
She pauses a moment, and as she goes on, I realize that it isn't just home places that do the placework of helping us belong:
I mean, it's a public library, but you have all these magnificent carvings and sculptures and things up here, you know, and all the sayings about the “longing noble things”; I don't know what the whole thing says . . . but, this is written in stone, this is what we really believe, this is for everyone. You can't miss this. There isn't a little sign saying this is for the public; this is huge, this is bigger than anybody. . . . You see people standing outside, waiting for the place to open, even on freezing cold days . . . it's a mecca, it's a place that people like to go to. I mean, you see all kinds of people in there. And it's for everybody, you know? It may be this big place, but it's not a place that you can't go into. It's very accessible. The public library at Forty-Second Street isn't. Yes, you can look at the lions, but do you go in?
Julia too loves the Brooklyn Public Library, and indeed, cares very much about everyone who goes in. As she and I look through the stack of photos on another day, she pulls out a different image showing the entrance that goes straight into the children's room, on the side of the building where the art deco library nestles up to the trees of Mount Prospect Park, a hill that had been an American stronghold in the Revolutionary War's Battle of Brooklyn.11 Julia points to the photograph and begins to explain her pride in her neighborhood and her hope for the neighborhood's children. “This is the children's entrance to the public library. It's just a gem that belongs to us. How am I so lucky? And the sweet little children that go in there—they come out with their little books, and they're like . . .” She trails off, imitating the kids’ sounds of proud, deep breathing. She sees how this place does the work of not only providing books to kids, but that doing so in this special place does the work of making all those kids—and Julia herself—feel lucky, feel like they have values, they are valued, they belong.
Another day in early September, after Julia and I have breakfast together at what she calls “the boys’ place”—Mike and John's diner, George's—she explains, “I'm going to take you up to Grand Army Plaza first and I'll tell you why that's important.” Yet as we walk, smaller monuments also show up. At the corner Julia says, “Oh! Let me show you the front of this building. [It] was just horrible . . . but . . . now, it's called the Prospect and it has Corinthian columns and this beautiful cupola on top of it and it just really saved the block. And the guy who did this development was a young African American man, so we're also very proud of him.” We make it to the maze of crosswalks, rushing traffic, and circular roads of Grand Army Plaza at the start of Eastern Parkway and the entrance to Prospect Park. We brave the traffic to reach the island in the center, where stands a massive triumphal arch, built in 1892 to honor those who fought for the Union in the Civil War, officially called the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch. There we stop, and Julia shows me another monument that for her as an African American woman stands for national belonging and accomplishment: “Grand Army Plaza, the statue is a phenomenon—I'll tell you why. Ok, you stand on the right-hand side, facing the arch, lower bottom is an African American with a gun. That's phenomenal. That says we trust. That says America. It blew me away when I figured it out. And it's just a casual little thing. You wouldn't catch it. It says we fought. We were there. He put his life on the line! Because running away could have seriously been an option.” In the midst of this bewildering intersection, and in the guise of a military arch, the idea that this place can do the work of fostering belonging takes my breath away.
Places like the library, the museum, and the Grand Army Plaza arch are the kind of capital-letter Important Places we might read about in a guidebook—and we expect things of them. But it turns out that a simple, one-story building with aluminum siding might be even more powerful. In every neighborhood, there are places like the Met Food supermarket in Prospect Heights that have obvious practical uses—a supermarket sells food—but that may also do a much more complex placework cementing belonging in the neighborhood.
This first became clear when Tanya pulled out a picture of the street in front of Met Food from the pile of photographs we were perusing in our second interview and explained to that she liked this one, saying she knew the man in the photo and it made her think, “The original guys, I look at them now, and I'm going, ooh, they're getting older, and then I'm like, well, so am I.” For her, this black and white photograph I'd made of an unassuming supermarket opened up questions about mortality and the passage of time. When I asked her what was missing from the picture of Met Food, she replied, “Maybe the cashiers . . . ’Cause they're always, ‘Hi, how're you doing? Oh the baby's getting big . . .’” Thinking about Tanya's relationships with the cashiers, and that the supermarket really required a color photograph, I made some more photos for her, and also later showed them to David W.
Although David had only given the aluminum-sided supermarket a cursory glance on our walk, when I asked him later to pull out the photographs that most felt like his neighborhood, he pulled out the ones of Met and began to explicate the surprising placework it did, saying:
If there were one thing that talks more about this community than anything else, it's probably the supermarket. Because of the people that are there and what they try to do. They do it to make money, granted, but they seem happy to be here in this neighborhood, concerned about people, concerned about delivering service to the whole neighborhood. It's not that they came in and decided, “Oh, we're getting rid of the Goya stuff here, you know? We're going upscale.” No. Still got ham hocks there. Still got pig's ears.
It's what made this neighborhood for us. I mean, we got very lucky on the house—but it's the fact that it's a comfortably mixed neighborhood. Now, I can't pull down my veil of ignorance, I'm part of the dominant society, but it just feels to me like a comfortably mixed neighborhood.
For David W., while he says you'd never put this supermarket in a guidebook to the neighborhood, it is terribly important to him. This place supports David's sense of belonging and the kind of place in which he wants to live. Although it is a supermarket, not a home, this can still be a place that houses his sense of self; it could even be a place to dwell, in that Heideggerian definition of dwelling as a place that “shelters . . . men's lives.” 12 This supermarket helps define what kind of neighborhood this is that makes him feel at home. There, David, an older white man, experiences people who value the diversity of his community, who do things (like delivering to the homebound) that are part of the kind of community in which he wants to live. The physical building itself reminds him of all this, and when he walks by, he waves at Frank and Abdul, who own the store.13 In short, he sees in the supermarket a place that supports his values. It is easy to identify the practical use of places like supermarkets, but the emotional work a place may do isn't always so obvious.
Met Food supermarket also helps the other David, the teenage David K., build his sense of values, which he makes clear when he tells me about work, honesty, and care. As David K. and I walk on Washington Avenue, past the barbershop where he gets his hair cut, we pass a different supermarket. He dismisses this other store because he says they just allow kids to come in and ask for change for bagging people's groceries, whereas he has a proper afterschool job at Met Food that he's proud of. He points out a kid leaving the supermarket, William, and tells me not to be fooled: “He look nice, but he's not. He's bad.” Carrying on, he tells a story that begins on a day when he heard a big boom outside his window. William's brother had “a three-forty firecracker, and he was playing with it, and he lit it, and it didn't go off. So he used the hose and outed it . . . and he picked it up, and it blew up in his hand. And blew his finger off. He's still got this part, but it's a stub on his hand. Now he know not to play with fire.”
Consequences and the struggle to live one's own values system are not far from Mike's mind either. When we looked at photographs of a small white house on Saint Marks Avenue that he had only noted in passing when we walked, he told a story I could never have predicted. On our tour, Mike had said: “These friends of mine used to live in this little white house here.”
So, as I was going back to photograph all the places Mike's tour had touched on, I took a picture of the house, more interested in its architectural uniqueness in the neighborhood than in Mike's brief mention of it. I was interested in the contrast of the clapboard with the empty lot next door, as well as in trying to make a photograph imagining how it might feel to walk through that gate as a familiar place. But when I showed it to Mike, the photos offered a second chance to tell me the important story that was embedded within the house:
These two guys lived here. We used to have wild parties there. The first year I was here, we'd go to their house and, you know, girls and guys, all kinds of people used to be over there, and I'd get sloshed. When I used to come back, I used to be so alone.
When you're drunk the day before, I don't know how drunk you've gotten, but you don't feel like doing nothing the next day. And me, I get mad at the world. Her fault. That bitch made me do it—she gave me that first drink. Or, that son of a bitch, if it wasn't for him coming by with two bottles I would've never drank.
Then, at the end of the day, I look in the mirror and say, nobody's fault but mine. I could have said no. Finally, I said, my god, enough is enough, now I'm gonna see, because everyone tells me that these people from AA can help me. Let me see what these people can do for me. I'll give it a shot, for heaven's sakes. Then, when these people used to come by, I'd tell them, “Not today.” Maybe tomorrow, but today, I can't.
The photograph served as a jumping-off point for both a memory of the site itself and a story that Mike needed to tell of his struggle-and-rebirth identity that undergirds his personal code of values. When I put this story and the image of the house into one of the Intersection | Prospect Heights guidebooks years later, Mike collected copies of that guidebook to give to the people he sponsored in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). The house was a monument to the ability to say no, and having the story printed was proof that it had happened, that he had, indeed, said no; that other people could say no, too.
We read this story on the public walking tours of Intersection | Prospect Heights in 2015, by which time the small white house had been torn down and a new condo building built in its place. Participants would begin by laughing, giggling at the language, at “I don't know how drunk you've gotten”—but as it wore on, as one of them read the story aloud on the street, the giggles died away, and the impact of this place, the way that people's struggles are just below the surface, that we all carry so much, some of us carrying things that are very heavy, began to sink in.
While an unusual house helped Mike stay on the straight and narrow, and both Davids dwelled at the supermarket, Tanya dwelled at the diner. When I asked her to pick a photograph that felt most important to her from the large stack I had made, she picked one of the inside of George's—the diner run by siblings Mike, John, and Mary. The picture shows the diner's counter, with John behind it and Mary in her flowered skirt standing at the end of the counter, her head at the same height as a customer sitting on a vinyl-covered stool, eating breakfast and reading the paper:
I really like this place. Besides the fact that you see different people, you just hear people talking, joshing around. . . . It's a very mixed crowd in here, race, sex, age. You see people from all different backgrounds. You see cops come in here, you see Sanitation, you see park police, plumbers, accountants, politicians, and you hear people talking trash . . . it's funny! Mike gives the place its life, ’cause he'll talk to anybody and he'll talk crap with anybody!
Here in New York . . . America . . . you have this whole thing about being somebody and being somebody of a certain level, the doctor, the lawyer, the Wall Street whatever. . . . And you have people here who have a life, they run a luncheonette, and they make people happy, and they know they make people happy. They like it? They come back. They don't like it? They don't come back. It appeals to me very viscerally.
It makes me realize, yeah, you need some money, but you don't need to be chasing, just chasing a dollar to the exemption of everything else. And it doesn't have to be a big thing that you do. . . . I feel that they love it, and that makes me like it also.
Tanya's stories about George's are not about the diner as a restaurant but rather about a place that reinforces her own values—for example, relating to people from many different walks of life. Perhaps surprisingly, it's in a business space that she finds reassurance that there is more to life than the bottom line. This diner appeals to her “very viscerally,” giving us a sense of how crucial its work is in fostering Tanya's values of family and care.
And Mike would echo these values many years later, and their loss, at one of our Intersection | Prospect Heights events at Brooklyn Public Library, after he and John had closed their diner, which they had renamed since Tanya had frequented it.14 “The Usual was a place that was exceptionally friendly—you'd hear me and my brother screaming all day—Gaby would come in and we'd say, ‘Gaby! What's happening?!’ . . . The neighborhood in twenty-three years that I've been here has changed very very much. When I was here, it was nothing about money. Everybody does need money in the world, but what I see right now is its become cutthroat—it's beautiful still—but if you don't have money, you're not welcomed and be gone! There's no such thing as ‘I'll pay you tomorrow,’ not that I know of.”
If these monuments and supermarkets, libraries and diners do the powerful work of building belonging, other factors can create the opposite—what Roberto Bedoya has called disbelonging.15 Places change, stores close, things get more expensive, neighbors move, by choice or by displacement; loss of community creates enormous personal stress.16 Yet people's connection to place continues even as the place changes around them. For my tour guides, still connected to their disrupted neighborhoods, loss of belonging was as dramatic a player in their senses of self as the feeling of belonging itself had originally been. In Mosswood, Marty, Lois, and their friends and families lost partial neighborhoods to urban renewal yet lived on in a physical neighborhood persistently scarred. This and the later disinvestment of West Oakland from the 1960s to the early 2000s had made the neighborhood feel foreign to Lois. But looking at a picture of the corner of Market Street and Thirty-Fourth Street, which now houses a dilapidated corner store but which in earlier times had housed a local market owned by a Chinese family, Lois enthuses, “Oh! Teddy's! This was Teddy's Market when I was a kid. We loved it there. You know, this guy, an Asian guy, came into the store [where I work] the other day, and he said he'd lived in the neighborhood growing up. And I said, ‘Oh did you know Teddy's Market?’ And he said, ‘Yes!’ And we just laughed and talked about how great it was—you know it was always better then—before was so much better. I love meeting people from the old neighborhood. It makes me so happy.”
Influential Oakland dancer Ruth Beckford was also born in the neighborhood, in 1925. She lived on Thirty-Eighth Street before it was turned into MacArthur Boulevard, and like Lois and Marty (and Huey Newton) went to Oakland Tech, albeit two decades earlier. Beckford's memory of her walk to high school echoes both Lois's love of the neighborhood and her loss of people who made the place, a loss directly caused by government violence:
Our neighborhood (which was called North Oakland then, now it is called West Oakland) was very integrated. There were a lot of Japanese and we were all friends. The war started on my sixteenth birthday, December 7, 1941. That was a Sunday. When we went to school the next day, everyone was crying and carrying on. People had scrawled on the sidewalk, “Go home Japs!” We cried. They were our friends. After a half-day, they sent everyone home. We lost all our Japanese friends. From one day to the next they were gone, and they never came back after the evacuation. We were very depressed. It was almost like science fiction. They were just gone.17
Although paling in comparison to this wholesale internment of a group of innocent people, across Oakland and Brooklyn people mourned many smaller losses too. They mourned how those lost experiences had made them feel—reminding me of a man anthropologist Setha Low interviewed in a Costa Rican park who was devastated by the cutting down of a palm tree because he missed “how it felt to sit in the shade of that tree.” 18
Sometimes the loss was physically visible—a favorite store gone; and at other times it was felt—a loss of shared values. Sometimes it was both. This was particularly noticeable in the ways that people talked about how gentrification was making their neighborhoods feel unfamiliar, how they sometimes felt like unwelcome strangers in their own places. In 2015, at an Intersection | Prospect Heights event, Rocky reflected on this experience more eloquently than I ever could: “It's sad for those of us who have been here a very long time and know that the people coming in won't have similar values. They'll come in and they won't want you to sit on their stoop. . . . They'll look around and wonder how they can change everything they loved about this space in the first place.” She continued by explaining one way that recent arrivals had suggested she did not belong, recounting an event that happened in the park that had made teenage David K. feel so free thirteen years earlier: “This has been a mixed community for a very long time. . . . I am an African American woman. A lot of my friends aren't. Occasionally I will take my friend's kid to the playground. And people say to me, “Um, do you take care of children around here?” It's enraging. There are a lot of women of color who are caregivers. Not all of us. I say, “This is my best friend's child, and we have a day in the park together. Just like you have a day in the park with your kids. This is my godson.” 19
Just as Marty had said his childhood in Oakland was shaped by seeing “Black men going to work every day,” Tanya and Paulette in Prospect Heights talked about how gentrification had changed what Prospect Heights could now model for them and for their kids. As we walked, Tanya talked about how one of the things she had always liked about Prospect Heights was seeing a lot of Black faces like hers in a “nice neighborhood”; she loved that it was a “mixed-up” place. Yet, she continued, she was concerned about seeing so many new white faces, so many more people that perhaps didn't see the place the way she did. Fifteen years later, Paulette would also mourn the loss of places that had done that important work for her child, and could do so no longer for other Black children. In 2019 she contributed a story to Intersection | Prospect Heights, in response to the earlier tour guides’ stories, writing on one of the story cards: “All the Black-owned businesses are gone. Even the restaurants. Nothing but bars, bars, bars. My son grew up seeing Black-owned businesses. This is necessary for our children to see that we also can own businesses.”
In 2019, thirty-eight-year resident of the neighborhood Cleone—a neighborhood elder—had told me how much she loved her neighborhood, its scale, its trees, “the landmark homes. I didn't appreciate that at first but now I understand—all the high rises are just horrible. People who come to visit appreciate the block and the tree-lined parts; I'm so happy the landmarking protected that.” But then she went on to explain that while the familiar physical forms were protected, the feeling of the place had changed, especially as real estate prices rose astronomically: “Some of the neighbors are not as nice—they see you're a person of color and assume you don't belong here. But I've had really great conversations with people who don't look like me, too—who treat people based not on the color of their skin but the content of their character.”
Just after I talked with Cleone, local business owner Myriam told me her story. She too had experienced being a long-term resident of color who had had her right to be at home in Prospect Heights challenged by new white residents: “I have been harassed from a new neighbor about my/our patrons because we have a safe space for POC and LGBTQ people and unfortunately this may sometimes create discomfort in a particular population. We are there! And will always be a piece of the neighborhood's fiber.” 20 At this, I'm brought right back to Julia's story of Prospect Heights as a place to run and to land someplace safe, and how much that's changed. While no one is legally excluded from the park, or from owning a bar, for example, the casual racism of gentrification excludes and undermines the possibilities for creating coherent social life in excruciating ways. The experiences of Paulette, Tanya, Cleone, Rocky, and Myriam—and the places that they've lost that once fostered their belonging—make visible the true violence of urban renewal, gentrification, and so many other things so often passed off as progress.