Introduction

My experience of New York City has been unique in that except for a brief period when I first came to the city in 2001 and a brief, unsuccessful, three-month flirtation with Bushwick in mid-2004, I have never lived more than two blocks from my current apartment in Brooklyn's Prospect Heights neighborhood.

Fig. B. View from the fourth floor of 112 St. Marks Avenue in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, September 2007.  Photo: Joe Schulz

In the past fourteen years, I've watched a neighborhood I love blossom around me, changing from an outpost on the edge of well-heeled Park Slope, an enclave of low-income African-Americans to a neighborhood amidst startling changes with the beginning of the Atlantic Yards mega-project.

American cities are constantly evolving, never standing still.  They grow or contract, their fortunes rise or fall, but they never stop moving.

My current studies have led me to ask interesting questions about the place that I love.  Who lived here before me?  What were they like?  Were their lives considerably different from my own? What was the character of the place where I live? And, perhaps most interestingly, what is its future?  What is my part to play in that future?

This project is an attempt to put my experience of one neighborhood in perspective; to see if an examination of its evolution—starting from a time before my birth—can yield lessons for its future.

The project examines the neighborhood's evolution through three lenses.  First, it examines how the demographics of the neighborhood have changed, using decennial census data to chart the character of the neighborhood's racial make-up.  This examination is limited to  charting the shifting ratios of the neighborhood's two largest racial groups: Those self-reporting as non-Hispanic Caucasians and African-American (or, in the parlance of the U.S. Census, "white" or "black").

Second, this project examines the changing fortunes of the neighborhood by tracking changes to median household or family income, again using self-reported census data.

Finally, the project looks at the affects on Prospect Heights of the ongoing  Atlantic Yards mega-project, a fifteen-building, mixed commercial and residential building project that also includes the Barclay Center multi-use arena (Greenland Forest City Partners).

For context, the project also includes a brief introduction to the neighborhood and the history of its development up to the point at which this analysis begins.

Fig. 1. Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.  Source: Google Maps.

Finally, while I discuss developments the Prospect Heights neighborhood generally, I focus my discussion of these developments on a single Census tract: the tract in which my current apartment sits.  Sitting at the approximate center of the Prospect Heights, it is composed of seven blocks offering a representative sample of what's currently an ethnically and economically diverse community.