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| Re: The South Bronx of the 1980's (1152396) | |||
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Re: The South Bronx of the 1980's |
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Posted by JayZeeBMT on Sat Apr 21 20:16:48 2012, in response to Re: The South Bronx of the 1980's, posted by SelkirkTMO on Sat Apr 21 19:36:57 2012. If you really want to see an even more stark example of demographic shifts, talke a look at what Far Rockaway--specifically the area east of Beach 32 Street south of the (A) train went through in the late Sixties/early Seventies when I was a kid there. In the Sixties, the block of New Haven Avenue where I lived was heavily Jewish, with a few Irish/Italian families, and the occasional black family here and there. Most black families living in Rockaway then lived almost exclusively in the Arverne/Almeda Houses, or in the 41 Projects. Ocean Village was still over a decade in the future.Then, a funny thing happened. Black families, taking advantage of growing job opportunities at places like the TA and the nearby, growing JFK Airport, started moving into Far Rock, renting two-family homes that started to appear around 1968 or so. Predictably, the Jewish and Irish families rapidly moved out, selling their houses for whatever they could get--"blockbusting" in the Rockaways was a real-estate specialty--so that by the time I entered junior high in the mid-Seventies, my entire neighborhood's demos had changed radically. The retail corridor on Beach 20th Street changed, too, as businesses closed and moved away, and even the ambitious little "shopping center" across from the Mott Avenue (A) station fell into disuse and disrepair. Although the lights stayed on in Far Rock during the 1977 blackout (we got our electricity from LILCO, not Con Ed), that event cleared the die-hards off the north end of the Peninsula for good. Of the businesses that were there when I was a child, only the Bell Boy Cleaners and Gino's Pizzeria remain there today. The library, FDNY's "Big House" on Central avenue, the police station and Post Office on Mott also survive. Today, the Rockaways are getting a revival. But it's taken four decades to undo what fear and prejudice--unfounded, at that--the crime rate, IIRC, never went up during my entire childhood, right up until I left for college in the early '80s, on my block--had wrought... |
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