Breuckleen!

From New York Amsterdam News

By Debbie A. Officer and Karen Juanita Carrillo

06/29/2000

The word Breuckleen (Brooklyn) means "a place of many streams," and today Brooklyn is known as a place of many cultures, languages and peoples. On a warm summer afternoon, a walk down several streets here will yield the diversity of the nation's third largest city. There is Senegalese and Cambodian food near Fort Greene and Clinton Hill; Jamaican bakeries on Flatbush Avenue; kosher pizza in Mid- wood; Mexican, Puerto Rican and Dominican restaurants in East New York and Cobble Hill; won ton soup in Sunset Park; Southern soul food in Bedford-Stuyvesant; Italian food in Bensonhurst; and Islamic and Middle Eastern spice shops along Atlantic Avenue. But Brooklyn's' rich and colorful history, like that of most places in the United States, was also marked by a history of bondage.

Slavery began in New Amsterdam, as New York (named for the Duke of York) was then called, in 1626. Many Africans lived their lives as chattel, but one of those who bought his freedom was Francisco de Negar, the founder of Boswyck (which is current-day Bushwick). The six settlements in Brooklyn in 1652 were Flatbush, Bushwick, Flatlands, New Utrecht, Breuckleen and Gravesend. By the 1790s, a third of the population of the city of Brooklyn were enslaved women and men.

The Long Island Courier was Brooklyn's first newspaper (1799). Bridge Street Church, in 1818, served as a sort of Underground Railroad. James Weeks, an African-American man, bought land from the Lefferts family in 1838. The liberal social poet, Walt Whitman, who was born on Long Island, was editor of the Brooklyn Eagle in 1846.

Slavery as an institution was officially abolished in 1863. Susan Smith McKinney, the first Black woman physician in New York state, began her medical practice in Brooklyn in 1870. In 1892, Moses P: Cobb was the borough's first Black policeman, the same year the Smith Street trolley began service from DeKalb Avenue to Coney Island.

Many years before Jackie Robinson pitched for the Brooklyn Dodgers (1945), Dr. Emily Charlton (1930s) was the first Black woman to graduate with honors from the First Podlarry Institute. She lived in Fort Greene. Shirley Chisolm of Brooklyn was the first Black woman legislator elected to the New York State Assembly in 1964

For generations, many who lived in Brooklyn were farmers. Sheepshead Bay was mostly a farming and fishing community until the advent of the subway system. Today, places like Gravesend, although far from homogenous, are still home to a large Italian population. Bedford-Stuyvesant, on the other hand, saw many transitions and migrations. It was home to many Jewish, Norwegian and Italian families before they moved out of the area. With migration and immigration, Bed-Stuy, as it is commonly called, is now home to thousands of Black people from around the world.

Rockaway Parkway and Rosh Ha'ayin

by Rochelle Mass

I live in a place where we are building fences
to determine who lives where.
I'm ordinary: just want to go to the store
the market
the movies and
pick up cosmetics now and then in the nearby
pharmacy
without being afraid a suicide bomber will
suddenly pull the switch.
Two years ago an army camp
was set up where I live because
the Intifada turned into a war.
Young soldier boys have come to our village.
I think of Brooklyn sometimes
when I'm at my kitchen window soaping up dinner
plates
takes my mind away from the bulk of Jenin
spreading over the hills
visible from where I stand
my hands protected by gloves
but my life open to harm.
Even with the horror of 9/11—
I always feel that Brooklyn is a peaceful place
with the great bridge
the library
the brewery
and the Dodgers playing ball.
This morning I heard about a wild shooting spree
near Rockaway Parkway. A cyclist returning from a
basketball game
shot at a group because somebody made a remark
about a girl.
Six wounded. Then I heard about six wounded
in Rosh Ha'ayin near Tel Aviv
like Brooklyn is to New York City;
a suicide bomber suddenly pulled the switch
in a shopping mall.
Standing by the kitchen sink, looking over
my neighbor's roof to the hills of Jenin
I'd never have imagined that
Brooklyn and Rosh Ha'ayin
on different sides of the world
on a summer's day in August
would be rushing six ordinary people
into ambulances
with sirens blaring.

Call Me Brooklyn

I read a transcript of an interview by Carlos Rodríguez (of Críticas) with Eduardo Lago, author of Llámame Brooklyn. The interview wasn’t very informative, but it made me want to read his book. Lago talked to Rodríguez about the art of writing, being a foreigner in New York, and his nostalgia for a long-gone Brooklyn.

Here’s an abstract:

Eduardo Lago (Madrid, 1954) surprised Spain's literary world when he won the prestigious Premio Nadal 2006 with his first novel, Llámame Brooklyn (Call Me Brooklyn). In an atmosphere of distrust towards literary prizes, particularly the Premio Planeta, critics and the public have embraced, with enthusiasm, a literary work that makes no commercial concessions.

Through an ingenious structure that jumps from narrator to narrator and spans several decades, Llámame Brooklyn follows the life of Gal Ackerman, a Spanish orphan adopted by a brigadier during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and raised in Brooklyn, NY. When Ackerman dies, his close friend, Néstor Oliver-Chapman, rescues the manuscript of a novel Ackerman was working on and finishes it with the help of Frank Otero, a Galician who owns the Oakland bar in Brooklyn.

A series of unusual and unforgettable characters parade through the pages, from the clients of the Oakland who are trapped in a rather fatal destiny to Russian music student Nadia Orlov, the object of Ackerman's obsession and the only reader he wants for his novel. Llámame Brooklyn also pays homage to real-life artists like painter Mark Rothko and writers Felipe Alfau and Thomas Pynchon.

Letter to the Editor

A letter to the editor of the New York Amsterdam News on the renaming of Brooklyn Streets (4/26/2007)

Dear Editor:

On Friday, April 20, 2007, legal representatives of the Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, community went into court under an Article 78, seeking and being granted a stay of action by the City Council on "Introduction 556-A," which seeks to name approximately 53 streets in the five boroughs, until New York City Council Speaker, Christine Quinn, and Council Members Alan Gerson, Dennis Gallagher and Joseph Addabbo of the Parks and Recreation Committee show cause for their unprecedented action that removed the properly and legally presented request of Brooklyn's Community Board 3 for the re-naming of Gates Ave. (between Classon Ave. and Marcy Ave.) to Sonny Abubadika Carson Avenue. This legal action challenges the aforementioned council members' actions as arbitrary, capricious and without precedent.

It is the view of the December 12th Movement that the actions of the City Council members named above were fundamentally racist and an attempt to deny the Black Community equal protection under the law on the one hand and our right to community control on the other.

Exactly 150 years ago (1857) Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Roger B. Tawney in the Dred Scott decision issued these infamous words, "Blacks have no rights that whites are bound to respect," and it is clear 150 years later that four white members of the New York City Council reaffirmed that Chief Justice Tawney's words are still true.

The council members' "capricious" cover of Mr. Carson being a "controversial" person, and Councilmember Gerson's statement that "we own all the streets," cannot hide that there continues to be two New Yorks: one Black, one white.

A Black community without rights, a community where over 50 percent of Black men are unemployed, over 50 percent of young Blacks drop out of high school and a young, unarmed Black man can get shot 50 times the night before his wedding, A community, where (this week) we find that the Imus racist rant was carried on by white police in the police precincts against Black women. A Black community where we are being priced out of existence, under the unwritten New York City housing policy that Blacks live where whites don't want to live, until they decide to live there again — witness Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. And on the other hand: a white community of privilege that lives above the law and can change or discard the law when it suits them.

Black Nationalist activist Sonny Abubadika Carson was a product of this condition and rose above it, not his people. Sonny was before anything else a "Black Man," an object targeted for extinction today. Therefore, the attack on the re-naming of Gates Ave. to Sonny Abubadika Carson Avenue is more than attack on person thereof, but the example of community control, racial pride and stiff resistance offered to any disrespect of our people.

It was Sonny who led the fight to rename Reid Ave. to Malcolm X, Sumner Ave. to Marcus Garvey, Fulton Street to Harriet Tubman Blvd. and Elementary School P.S. 262 to El Haqq Malik Shabazz School. It was Sonny who recognized that we lived in a community with many streets and cultural institutions named after slave owners and criminals who passed white approval. We do not plan on letting this racist action of these white City Council members and mayor override the wishes and will of our community. We will not stand for two cities, two rules of law and two City Councils which violate our fundamental Human Rights.

Thank you.

Omowale Clay,

December 12th Movement

A Couple Images

These paintings retell a couple classic tales. I particularly like the little pod-like things- which, to me, suggest different stops along the way throughout a journey. I like how literal it is.

Daniel's Proposal

I was born in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn in 1984. As I grew up, the neighborhood changed quite dramatically. My parents were the first crop of young professionals that began to move there in the 70s, turning what used to be fairly straightforward old world neighborhood into a yuppie wonderland. The area in which the change is most visibly apparent now- 30 years later- is near Atlantic Avenue and Court St. What used to be a string of porno theatres is now the UA movie theatre and a Barnes and Noble. What used to house the neighborhood nursery school is now a three story Duane Reade. What used to be an enormous and variously sketchy parking garage is now a sleek and expensive apartment complex, called Court House. However a block away from Court House, the other Brooklyn remains. Down the street, quite literally in its shadow, there still stands an enormous prison: The Brooklyn House of Detention. The two buildings are arranged so that the top penthouse apartment of the Court House looks down on the exercise yard of The Brooklyn House of Detention. This is the setting for my play The Heartless Giant of Atlantic Avenue- the penthouse apartment of Court House and the exercise yard of the Brooklyn House of Detention.

The play would be very loosely based on the Grimm fairy tale, “The Heartless Giant”, and would follow the story of Leo, the awkward child of two young professionals who have only recently moved into their new penthouse in Court House in Cobble Hill. While left alone one Sunday afternoon, Leo goes out onto the terrace- the terrace that is always locked and that Leo has been expressly told never to go out on- and sees the prisoners exercising in the exercise yard. There he befriends an old prisoner, a child murderer, who tore his own heart out his chest and buried it far away in order to be able to endure the hardship of life. Leo refuses to believe that any life can be so horrible as to not want to feel, and vows to get back the prisoner’s heart. Every day he goes to the prisoner, and asks him to him where in Brooklyn he has hid his stolen heart, and every day the prisoner tells Leo. But every day that Leo looks for the place that the prisoner has told him, he finds that the place the prisoner’s told him of is gone- redeveloped, redone, remodeled. Through his travels, he meets people from all across Brooklyn who help him find the heart- Hassidic Jews, French-speaking Columbian immigrants, The Mafia’s mothers they keep in Carroll Gardens, and even the President of Brooklyn himself. The play would be a mythic fable about the gentrification of Brooklyn and about Brooklyn itself- the myriad cultures present within it, the marginalization of said cultures, the nature of belonging to a community and the tendency to idealize the past.

This project would be ideally developed in conjunction with an ensemble with a passionate interest in the themes and topics covered within the piece- whether it be gentrification, Brooklyn and/or fairy tales and contemporary mythology. I feel strongly that an ensemble with their own experiences and aesthetic in any/all of these areas would be a vital part of shaping the nature of this piece.