Building Brooklyn: We've Been Here Before

Episode Transcript

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Let’s imagine, for a moment, that it’s a brisk morning in November of 1995, and on your way to Canarsie’s famed Rockaway Parkway shopping strip for some last minute holiday gifts, you notice something out your car window that makes you do a double take. The Belt Parkway is dotted with big public housing buildings against the skyline, but the structures you think you’ve just seen are less familiar to you. You maybe have only seen them in textbooks. You make a mental note: stop by the Seaview Diner on your way back home. Did you just see some teepees right next to it?

Adwoa Adusei According to articles published in the Canarsie Courier, a local paper that is in our Brooklyn Newsstand archives at the Library, for three months in late 1995, members of the Mohawk community in Canarsie and interested members of the public erected a teepee and a wweat lodge on a neglected plot of land along the Belt Parkway. The aim of the "Teepee village" was to educate Canarsie residents about various Native American cultures and traditions.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras The City’s Parks Department granted The Native American Longhouse Society of New York a two-month permit to hold these events, before the land was to be returned to the City. But the organizers envisioned the future of the space as a museum and community center to enlighten Brooklynites about its Native occupants and their history. 

Adwoa Adusei Once the permit deadline had passed, many organizers hoped that the teepee village would remain and grow, but the City removed the structures. A few residents and organizers voiced their concern about the manner in which all of this took place, and likened it to the history of forced removal of Native people by European colonizers. Mr. Crosstherivers was one such person. He was raised between Canarsie and Mohawk land in Canada and was the group’s medicine man. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras In a January 1996 New York Times article, he said, “They took away my church … It was a General Custer type thing. That's the way I took it. Had I lived back then, they would have had no mercy on my people. Two hundred years ago, they would have killed everyone in sight."

Adwoa Adusei Crosstheriver’s history is a journey our listeners will be familiar with, as we explored the Mohawk ties between Brooklyn and Canada’s Kahnawake reservation in the first episode of "Building Brooklyn." For our final episode of our Borrowed miniseries, we’re returning to Brooklyn’s Native roots and inhabitants as a way to reframe our conversations about how communities are literally built. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Throughout Brooklyn’s history, there have been conflicts and compromises about who belongs in a certain area, who owns the land, whose stories get to be told. Those narratives are present in Canarsie, too. 

Adwoa Adusei Today on Borrowed, we’ll look at the stories of Canarsie from the Native Lenape people, who gave the neighborhood its name, to the community of Canarsie's Black residents in the 19th century, up to the racial unrest in the 1990s, around the time the teepees and sweat lodge went up next to the Belt parkway. I’m Adwoa Adusei.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras And I’m Krissa Corbett Cavouras. This is our final episode of “Building Brooklyn,” a mini-series brought to you by Borrowed, at Brooklyn Public Library.

[Music]

Virginia Marshall Hi there, Virginia again. I’m the producer and co-writer of Borrowed, and I’m joining once more as we finish off our mini-series. 

Adwoa Adusei Hey Virginia, glad to have you back on the mic!

Virginia Marshall Thanks, Adwoa. So, I wanted to give a bit of context to the Canarsie teepees that we started this episode with, because the teepee village that went up in 1995 is a bit of a confusing cultural moment, and we wanted to be clear about that story, and why we’re telling it. So, this was a project from the Native American Longhouse Society, a group whose members belonged mostly to the Haudnesone Nation, whose ancestral homeland is in northern New York State and Canada. The teepee village project was meant to increase the visibility of Native American culture and history, and to educate Canarsie residents about the environment at large. And we just want to mention that teepees are not a traditional dwelling for the Mohawk or the Lenape. Actually, the Plains Indians used them in the midwest. But they’re a recognizable symbol of Native American lore, which is why the group erected them. 

Adwoa Adusei Right, and we wanted to tell this story because it’s about a group of people trying to re-write the dominant history of Brooklyn, to bring a different story to the foreground. And, we also want to be clear that the Lenape, rather than the Mohawk, are the linguistic and cultural group that first called Brooklyn and the surrounding area home. 

Virginia Marshall In our first episode of this miniseries, we spoke to the co-founders of the Lenape Center, an organization committed to continuing Lenape presence through arts, culture, and community. Today, many Lenape people live in five federally-recognized nations in Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Ontario, but Lenape place names remain here in Brooklyn, on our streets and our neighborhoods, and Canarsie is one of those names. Here’s Hadiren Coumans, Lenape Center co-founder.

Hadrien Coumans So within this region, this Lenapehoking territory, one see many place names that are still found today, that reference Lenape communities, villages and really are a testament to how populated this region once was. Many of the place names are not subtribes, as it's often thought about, or subgroups, but really Lenape communities that were referenced by a specific geographic trait. 

Virginia Marshall The name “Canarsie” may translate to “fenced in place” in the Lenape language. But starting in the early 1600s, the Dutch and other European colonists began to occupy the land, and killed Native Lenape people through combat and disease—forcing most of the remaining Lenape off of their ancestral homeland. Here’s Joe Baker, the executive director of the Lenape Center and another co-founder.

Joe Baker We, as a result of this genocide and forced removal, have found ourselves continuously moving for hundreds of years through forced removals into the western reaches of this country, as the "American Dream" became visualized here on the East Coast. I think for the American people, starting with the past and the truth of the past is problematic. It's problematic in that it tells a story that is violent, that is corrupt, that forced people and families, young and old, to leave their their homeland and, you know, that's not an easy thing for people to want to hear or really want to embrace. So, if we can begin with that difficult history and accept the truth of it and then begin to move into a better understanding of the place that supports life for us today, then I think we can make great progress. Because then we can heal and move forward.

Adwoa Adusei Through this series, we’ve highlighted the people that have made up a neighborhood, shining lights on the human aspects of community building: from the multi-generational bonds that make up family life in Gowanus and Sunset Park, to the multicultural ties created in the mid-century Navy Yard’s female workforce, and finally the many stories of Canarsie and the different communities of people who have called this place home.

Adwoa Adusei Something that keeps coming up are notions of ownership in terms of a neighborhood’s identity. When we talk about these things, inherently we are also talking about land, and usually in terms of land as real estate. But there is a distinction to be made. Real estate is a commodity, something to be owned and traded and contested. Land, on the other hand, can be viewed as a resource, a part of nature that sustains life on earth, and something that isn’t owned persay, but harmoniously occupied. That’s how the Lenape understood our relationship to land: as something beyond commodity. Here’s Joe Baker again.

Joe Baker We do not have dominion over this land. We are intricately connected, genetically connected to the living earth. So, we're not just walking upon the earth. We are in and of the earth. And we really have to remember that and we have to honor that. And with that remembrance and honor comes a certain responsibility for all of us to care for Mother Earth. And that's how we see it. And that's how we hope all people can be better connected to this beautiful living earth that we're a part of. 

[Cricket sounds fade into music]

Adwoa Adusei Now we’re going to move forward in time to Canarsie in the late 1980s and early 90s, when Olga Rose Jones emigrated from Jamaica to Brooklyn in pursuit of new opportunities.

Olga Rose Jones One of the things I was very surprised at was Canarsie back then struck me to be quite like where I was coming from. 

Adwoa Adusei Olga recorded her memories of Brooklyn at Canarsie Library in 2017. Her oral history is part of the library’s Our Streets, Our Stories archive.

Olga Rose Jones I noticed in the nighttime, when it got dark, I used to see these lights blinking, you know. And I think you maybe call them, is it fireflies? But in in my own country, Jamaica, we call them peenie wallies. [Laughs] Anyway, over the years, I haven't seen that many peenie wallies. Things have changed, maybe to that extent. And another surprising thing is that you could I think we used to see the stars, actually, at night. You could look up and see the stars. 

[Cricket sounds]

Adwoa Adusei When Olga moved to Canarsie in the 80s, it was in the midst of a demographic shift. In the 1970s, Canarsie had been 98 percent white. It was a working class and middle class neighborhood of predominantly Jewish and Italian residents. And then, two decades later, between 1990 and 2000, the neighborhood’s proportion of Black residents increased from 10 percent to 60 percent. 

Olga Rose Jones Back then, you had more Caucasians living in the neighborhood. And that is one thing you would be reminded of, like when it came to the Fourth of July. Because when whenever you had, you know, the firecrackers and so, you could hardly breathe by the time they'd finish. 

[Fiirework sounds]

Adwoa Adusei Olga had a very specific goal when she came to the United States. She was looking to buy a house.

Olga Rose Jones I was very, very stubborn about the fact that I wasn't going to keep living in a rented place. I had to say to my husband then, I kept saying to him, "Look at this house! This is all the way up there, like in a real good neighborhood. It's only selling for $29,000." Of course, $29,000 back then was a whole lot of money. But to me, it never sounded like a lot of money. So, I kept pointing out this and he said, "We can't afford to buy our own house," is what he kept saying. So when we came here, I kind of said to him, I said, "Listen, if we're going to be living the same way as we used to live back home, why don't we just pack up and go back home?" [Laughs]

Adwoa Adusei Olga was determined. At the time, she worked at a milk factory in East New York, and she saved her weekly salary. Then, she started selling makeup with Avon and saved her income from that job, too.

Olga Rose Jones I never ever saw what it looked like changed. It was deposited in the bank. And when I got my other job at the college? The same thing. Whatever I was getting every two weeks went into the savings account. And that is how stubborn I was about the fact that I was not going to keep on living in a rented place, yes...

Adwoa Adusei And her persistence paid off, and Olga and her husband managed to buy property in Canarsie. The neighborhood became their permanent home, and they began to see others like them — immigrants and people of color, become their neighbors, too.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras And that change didn’t come without its share of conflict. In 1991, “racial bias incidents,” as they were called at the time, started increasing in frequency. These were acts of violence and intimidation between whites and non-whites. And, real estate agencies became particular targets.

Adwoa Adusei The Fillmore Real Estate company in Canarsie was put under a court order to show homes to African Americans as well as white people who were interested in moving into the neighborhood. In July of 1991, that agency was firebombed twice, and received threats related to agents showing homes to Black and brown people. Another real estate agency in the neighborhood received similar threats. Luckily, no one was hurt during the bombings.

[Music]

Adwoa Adusei But, the neighborhood felt unsafe to non-white people. Around the same time Olga and her husband finally bought their home, Carlyle Price, a Black fifth-grader at the time, started attending school in Canarise. In the early 1990s, Carlyle was one of the only Black kids in his school. He recorded his oral history with our Center for Brooklyn History back in 2017.

Carlyle Price When I got to school there, I think I was a month or two in when someone told me that a Black family had tried to move into Canarsie and had gotten burned out the year or two before. And it wasn't said to me, I don't think, in a -- I don't remember it being said to me in a threatening way, I don't remember how I heard about it. But for me it was like, "OK. Watch yourself out here." I didn't want to be out there after dark. I didn't like that. There were times when I would actually walk the bus route home if I didn't have bus money and nobody had remembered to pick me up. I would just walk all the way, because I knew, once I got around Church Avenue, Kings Highway, I knew where I was; I was familiar with that area, I was going to be OK. But I didn't want to be caught out there at night.

Adwoa Adusei Canarsie has its own history of anti-integration protests and boycotts. During the 1972 - 1973 school year, after about thirty Black students from Brownsville were enrolled in Canarsie’s public schools, white parents took their children out of school in protest. For a total of seven weeks over the course of that school year, attendance was low enough to shut down many of the schools in the district. So, it’s not surprising that Carlyle felt unsafe attending schools there just a few decades later, when issues of belonging and race were coming to the surface again.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras The series of racist incidents and the bombing of the real estate company in 1991 sparked anti-racism marches in Canarsie, one of which was led by the Reverend Al Sharpton, a prominent and controversial Civil Rights activist. Channel 11 News captured sound and interviews from another of the marches. Here’s one protester, a Black woman who did not give her name.

Canarsie Protester We came out because we think this is a free country and you’re entitled to live wherever you want to live.

Adwoa Adusei Meanwhile, Paul Canna, a long-time white resident of Canarsie, told Channel 11 News that he didn’t think there was a racial problem in the neighborhood at all.

Paul Canna We have Chinese, Italians, Blacks, Spanish, we have everybody here, and we get along fine.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Also captured on tape was a group of young white people chanting “Canarsie” and holding a banner that read “Stop Racism, Kill Rev. Al Sharpton.”

[People chanting "Canarsie," fading into music]

Adwoa Adusei You know, Krissa, this snapshot of a protest thirty years ago demonstrates the differing ideas people have always had about who owns a place, and who belongs.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Right — these white teens chanting “Canarsie,” I think are trying to say, pretty aggressively, that Canarsie belonged to them. 

Adwoa Adusei Which is so strange to think about, because neighborhoods (and especially neighborhoods in New York City) are constantly in flux. You know, maybe in the 1990s, when these protests were taking place, Canarsie was going through a kind of identity shift. There were teepees going up alongside the belt parkway, and the neighborhood was in the middle of a turnover from being almost entirely white in the 1970s to a neighborhood that is today over 80 percent Black. But, just go back just a few decades before then, you would find a strong African American community owning homes and running churches and businesses in Canarsie that had been there since the middle of the 1800s. At that point in time, Canarsie belonged to its Black residents, too.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Right, that community — at the time called “The Colored Colony” was located around the area that BPL’s Canarsie branch and Canarsie High School now occupy. In the mid-1800s, the area was a refuge for free Black people trying to establish a foothold in New York State. Canarsie was not yet a part of Brooklyn. It was a rural suburb of the city, and it was also a place that many Black residents of New York City came to escape violence from the New York City draft riots of the 1860s, when Black people were being attacked by white people out of anger over the Civil War draft.

Adwoa Adusei The Colored Colony was a smaller version of Weeksville, which was a more well-known free black community that began to establish itself around the same time in what is today Crown Heights. There was even a road connecting Weeksville with  Canarsie’s colored colony : Hunterfly Road. According to Brooklyn’s Last Village, a local history book about Canarsie, “Residents of Weeksville would walk Hunterfly Road to Canarsie to visit their relatives on Sundays after attending church.” We have a whole other Borrowed episode about Weeksville called "Free Brooklyn," which you should listen to if you want to learn more!

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Yes, I definitely recommend that episode. And, actually, one of our librarians, Peter Otis, wrote a very comprehensive blog post about Canarsie’s Black history — it’s on our Library website, and we’ll put a link to it in our shownotes, as well as that other Borrowed episode.

Adwoa Adusei To return to Canarsie in the 1990s, in the midst of this demographic shift — we can actually look back on that time with a bit of perspective. While researching for this episode, we came across a 2011 sociological study about Canarsie and how it has changed over the past few decades. Researchers actually found that though the racial makeup of the neighborhood changed completely, things like politics, neighborhood values and economic conditions — things that white residents might have said they were worried about changing … really didn’t. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras The researchers concluded: “Comparing former white, Italian and Jewish residents to predominantly Black Caribbean residents of today, many of the more recent residents held the same kinds of jobs, shared the same views on family and homeownership, and even shopped at the same kinds of stores. Contrary to the expectations of white residents, the neighborhood is notable for how similar it is after integration to its earlier demographic profile, community life, and patterns of ethically identified small businesses.” 

Adwoa Adusei We were listening to other Canarsie oral histories that are in our Library archive, and we came across Miguel Mora’s story. He moved to Canarsie in 2000 and recorded an oral history back in 2018 at Paerdegat Library. He talked about just that — how the neighborhood changed so much and not at all in the time he’s been a resident.

Miguel Mora Canarsie went through what's called a white flight scenario. Actually, it's a terminology that real estate people use in where they churn and turn over the housing in a neighborhood based on race. 

Adwoa Adusei Miguel is referring to something that we might also call "red-lining" today — a broad set of racist and discriminatory practices on the part of banks, real estate companies, and the government in order to make it harder for people of color to buy homes in certain neighborhoods. Instead, people of color are most likely going to find properties only in disinvested neighborhoods. Miguel is speaking specifically about racial steering by real estate agents.

Miguel Mora And they go around speaking to homeowners, “People of color are moving into your neighborhood. People of color are moving into the neighborhood.” Fear of property values going down, they're going to bring in elements, they're going to do this in property values and crime, and all these things ... propaganda. It's propaganda that the real estate people do, and the turnover begins. So it goes from 10 percent people of color Canarsie now is about 90 percent people of color. Okay, and that happened within ten years.

Adwoa Adusei All that fear-mongering Miguel referenced? It didn’t play out at all, he said.

Miguel Mora Today, property values in Canarsie have increased more than anything else. The owners, the people of color, have taken on the responsibility of improving their properties, improving their neighborhoods with businesses and other interests into the community. You have more people coming into neighborhoods, more affordable housing and some less affordable housing. But the improvement is there, is visible. You walk the neighborhood, you ride the neighborhood, whatever way you want to do it: You can see the improvements.

[Music]

Adwoa Adusei Krissa, I’m just re-thinking about that “Canarsie” chant that those teens in the Channel 11 News clip were saying — and how it was sort of a marker that they had more of a right to Canarsie than other people who wanted to move in and own homes. And it strikes met that the name “Canarsie” is a Lenape name. We’ve arrived where we started IN this episode and this miniseries, with the original inhabitants of Brooklyn.

[Cricket sounds]

Adwoa Adusei It’s hard to talk about a neighborhood without mentioning many stories at once. We’ve been circling Canarsie this whole episode, going back and forth in time, but I think that’s okay. Sometimes, you have to tell the story in circles to get a picture of the whole. Walking around Canarsie today, maybe listening to this episode, you might get the idea that we’ve been here before. The layers of stories of this neighborhood are not so different from the layers of stories you’ll find throughout Brooklyn. 

[Street sounds]

Krissa Corbett Cavouras I think so! it’s a good thing to remember — for neighborhoods across the city. Ideas of ownership and who gets to belong are constantly being redefined by the newest residents of a place. But it is important to look back and see all the many stories that have come before. It’s humbling, and maybe more important than we realize: that we’ve all had a hand in Building Brooklyn. 

[Music]

Adwoa Adusei "Building Brooklyn" is a mini-series from Brooklyn Public library’s Borrowed podcast. It’s produced by Virginia Marshall, with help from Fritzi Bodenheimer, Jennifer Proffitt, Meryl Friedman, and Robin Lester Kenton. This episode was written by me, Adwoa Adusei, and Virginia Marshall. Our music composer is Billy Libby. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Borrowed is brought to you by Brooklyn Public Library and is hosted by me, Krissa Corbett Cavouras, and Adwoa Adusei. You can find a transcript of this episode at our website.

Adwoa Adusei Oral histories on this episode came from our Center for Brooklyn History’s Voices of Crown Heights collection, and our Our Streets, Our Stories archive. Our beta listeners on this episode were Melissa Morrone and LaCresha Neal.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras That’s it for this episode, and that's also it for our mini-series, "Building Brooklyn." We’ll release new episodes soon on the Borrowed feed. Until then, keep building your communities.