Where is your Prospect Heights?
Exposing change through individual stories. Take a new look at the present through experiences of the not-too-distant past.
In the last decade, development pressure in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn has resulted in the displacement of people, and changes to the neighborhood’s built environment; similar forces are converging on other New York City communities. Intersection | Prospect Heights presents a series of popup exhibitions, public conversations, creative walks, and “guidebooks” showing neighborhood places through the eyes of residents in the early 2000s. Exposing change through individual stories, we seek to foster conversations on development, displacement and sustainability in this critical moment for the city.
It’s too pretty
Prospect Park
You would think this is the perfect place to fly kites. Every year they have a kite fly out here. Only, true kite fliers go ughhh!
It’s the trees. First, you could get in ‘em, but even if you didn’t—trees make wind that’s crazy. And so, you can never get your kite up.
It’s a famous thing, not to fly your kite there. Like, I’ll say, I’m from Brooklyn—I’m a big kite flier—and they go, don’t you fly in Prospect
Park? And I’m like, where are you from?
I fly at Coney Island.
But it’s gorgeous. It is just gorgeous. I used to think that I wanted to run. So I would try, but —it’s too pretty! I would be like, looking around…. not running…. And this is ten minutes away from my house! How bucolic! You think Ratner wants to build on top of that?
It just smells good. No matter how crowded the neighborhood is, it’s hardly ever crowded in here—it’s so big.
Although, I have to say, on a random Sunday, if it’s really really nice, you could get a crowd. Then you get a crowd.
- Julia, 2003
“Since the 60′s, okay, I would go over here to the park, over here where the water is, and we would watch the weddings. Every single Saturday.”
Rhoda told us her story - contact us to tell your own!
A place that talks most about this community
Met Food Supermarket
632 Vanderbilt Avenue
Talk about capturing the sense of the neighborhood, Met Foods. “You’re homebound, don’t worry, call us and we’ll get you what you need.” I haven’t heard of that since I first came to New York to visit my aunt in 1958.
I just wish she could be here to enjoy it. She died with a Bloody Mary in her hand. Mixed it, sat down, boom.
If one thing talks most about this community, it’s probably the supermarket. Because of the people there and what they try to do. They do it to make money, granted, but they seem happy to be here, concerned about people, 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.
It’s what made this neighborhood for us. 25 years ago we got very lucky on the house, but really 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.
- David, 2003
It doesn’t have to be a big thing that you do
Georges / The Usual
637 Vanderbilt Avenue
I really like this place. You hear people talking, joshing around… It’s a very mixed crowd in here, race, sex, age. You see people from all different backgrounds. Cops come in here, Sanitation, park police, plumbers, accountants, politicians, and you hear people talking trash… it’s funny!
Here in New York… America… you have this thing about 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. It appeals to me very viscerally.
It makes me realize, yeah, you need some money, but you don’t need to be just chasing a dollar, to the exemption of everything else. 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. If I’m in a bad mood and I come in here, I walk out in a better mood. It’s just the place. It’s comfortable, you know?
- Tanya, 2002
The store hasn’t been touched
641 Vanderbilt Avenue
The man who owned this place was one of my best friends—he was in the electronics business like me—but he died a few years ago. Before he died, all his friends—he was a cricketer in the West Indies, and his friends were his old cricketers—we used to get together on Thursday afternoons in the back of the shop, and have a big party, food, drinking, eating. Even now, although the store is boarded up, it’s still the same inside, all the screws, nuts and bolts on the shelves, untouched. Every Thursday, like today, we still
have the party.
He went to the hospital for a check-up and they found something. When they operated, he died. The store hasn’t been touched.
If I need anything, I’m short of anything, instead of buying it, I get it from him.
- Neville, 2001
“For a long time, on the inside, what it had was storage for the Bread and Puppet Theater’s puppets that they used, mostly in anti-war actions and marches here in the city so they didn’t have to transport them from Vermont, where their base of operations is. There’s a little tiny door in the foot of one of the archways…”
Paula told us her story - contact us to tell yours!
“It used to be possible in New York City in the summer and Brooklyn in the summer when it was 95 degrees and it was so hot, to go to any bodega and get a $1 popsicle.”
Christy + Stuart told us their story - contact us to tell your own!
“In our store…if you didn’t have money, Gabby would come in, anybody that I knew from the hood, one time ‘Oh Mike, I forgot my wallet,’ no problem, tomorrow’s another day.”
Mike told us his story - contact us to tell your own.
“I knew the Crown Heights/Prospect Heights area as this place where my aunts lived, this was a place to get my hair braided, this was a place to go to the parade, all those things. So when we were looking for apartments, it was really, really strange to be looking at these spaces that used to be homes, my elders’ homes…”
Samantha’s story comes from our partnership with @bklyninfocommons and @ourstreetsourstories at Brooklyn Public Library. Contact us to tell your own!
“So I said, you know somebody should do something for these people, and like bring them some hot drinks at least…so I went to the food co-op and bought a bunch of, you know, bags of tea…my plan was just like alright, so tonight I’ll gather my supplies, in the morning wake up early and start making some tea and then just spend the morning and afternoon handing them out to all these people who were in the freezing cold.”
Carey’s story comes from our partnership with @bklyninfocommons and @ourstreetsourstories at Brooklyn Public Library. Contact us to tell your own story!
“I gotta tell you, nothing beats the Brooklyn stoop. Absolutely nothing.”
Denise’s story comes from our partnership with @bklyninfocommons and @ourstreetsourstories at Brooklyn Public Library. Contact us to tell your own!
Intersection | Prospect Heights featured in Brooklyn Magazine, December 7, 2015. “Before Brooklyn’s ‘Newest Neighborhood’ Pacific Park Arrives, a Reflection on How Things Were”
“On Prospect Place between Vanderbilt and Carlton…there are these flowering trees that line the street, and in the spring, you know they bloom, and then of course, the blossoms fall to the ground…and it is a beautiful feeling to walk on this carpet, this carpet of flowers.”