Site Analysis

Bayyinah C. Pierre

Prof. Sacha Frey

Intro Lit/Crit Arch I     

December 6^th 2012.

From a Dot on a Map to a Milieu: The parks in Clinton Hill.

Underwood Park, Clayson Playground, and Lafayette Gardens Playground are all parks located in and around Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. Without their locations on a NYC map, the parks are not very similar in terms of the people who visit the park daily. The racial battle and division going on in and around the parks in Clinton Hill altered them into Christmas presents left to be unwrapped. The Parks are not just a dot, a tree or the symbolic green color on a map; they are inhabited by people, people of different races. They embody the people who live or lived nearby. They voice the stories of the people who visit them. A sense of community, the faces of the people who live in pass by Clinton Hill were missing from the maps found on Google. Information was lost in the bigger plan, the bigger area, and the division of Brooklyn. The loss in the translation arrived with a bigger problem, confusion. A present racial battle left a freshman college student curious and confused about the things that are happening in 11205.

Clinton Hill like every other neighborhood as boundaries, but do those boundaries define the people who visit its parks? Its boundaries form trapezoid shape along the streets of Atlantic, Flushing, Vanderbilt, and Classon Ave. It is relatively a historic district founded by a Dutch family. It was first developed to be a suburban community for middle-class, but it went on to be the neighborhood where the rich settled. Clinton Hill became the site where mansions were built.  With new mansions and new townhouses Clinton Hill became and still is a beautiful flourishing neighborhood.  Until the 1920s, Clinton Hill was populated with people of great wealth, but soon after the recession, after WW1, Middle class made its way back to the community.  Most of the people with the high status and great wealth left the area to Manhattan. Mansions were no longer built and they decided to destroy some to accommodate the new habitants.

Underwood Park opened a can of warms; it wasn't the cold weather that day or the noisy cars that were speeding on Lafayette but the color of one’s skin. The people who were at the park that evening divided themselves into three different race and ethnicity, however one category was missing. Without even knowing what information would be found or would have to be written about, a cold bench was suddenly occupied. What was noticed was fascinating. For the amount of kids seen, one race was missing. Kids of color were nonexistent along the perimeter and area of the closed gated park. The babies playing in the cold weather where either black with kinky curls (meaning bi-racial) or Caucasian with little blonde curls.

That may not be surprising or fascinating to most, but, when you live in almost the center of a state that is known to be a “melting pot”. You began to wonder why it is the way it is. Even though bi-racial kids were playing in the park, no moms or dads of color were spotted per say. The black woman was taking care of little blonde kids. It was pretty apparent that she was their nanny by the way she was talked to the kids and cared for those kids, a boy and a girl. The boy was running away from her, he almost reached the street, when his sister joined him. She called them a couple times but she’s wasn’t firm enough. A mother would have been firmed, it’s almost like she did not want to upset them.  

Straight down Lafayette, two blocks away from Higgins Hall, there was another park. Along my stroll, the scenery changed there were more graffiti on the walls, but the area was still very nice. One more block, and it was in a different world. Suddenly, the quiet of the neighborhood had been in was overpowered by reggae music, a group of teenagers where playing. The traffic, the sudden yells here and there, all changed the vibe of the neighborhood.

At the corner, where the music was playing there was a park, Clayson Playground, not a lot of people were there, only three to be exact, a boy eating hot chicken wings sitting on a bench, his brother shooting hoops next to him, and a women eating chips at the right of the opened gate when I walked in. No kids on the swings, No biracial kids, No blonde babies, and the people who were there we’re all black. I looked at the navigation on my phone, as I typed in the word park, and there was one two blocks away from Clayson.

When I got to Lafayette Gardens Playground not much was different from the previous park, but this time older kids were playing together, they were probably around the ages of eight to eleven, I don’t know they didn't look that old and I didn't look to young either. So, I’m guessing around there since I didn't ask, all I asked them was to get their permission to film them riding a battery-powered small toy car down the swing set. It looked cool but they could have hurt themselves.

            As soon as I turned my back, I heard a little boy: “Who is she, she sound mad white”. This is not the first time someone has said that about my voice. It doesn’t happen too often but it happened before. Coming from Haiti, learning English through television and friends, you began to sound a way black people would describe as white or stuck-up.         I suppose when you talk properly like a normal person should and you do not shorten your words, you sound “mad” white. I don’t know what it means, my friend once tried to explain it to me ,but all I got from the conversation  was him saying Haitian are not exactly black, they’re fake blacks. This at the end might be true. I was raised in a traveling family were it wasn’t a whole until Christmas or Summer Vacations. My father and brother lived in New York, while my mother, sister and I lived in Haiti; where we learned to put education, respect, and authority above all things. I thought him saying I was mad white funny though, but the others went on to say: “who are you, bitch?” and that was inappropriate, they were kids.  As I walked out of the gate, they kept cursing still, but I realized that there was no sign on the gate reminding people to close the gate because of children just like there was in first park I went to. That added more pieces to the puzzle, suddenly; the puzzle was too crazy to finish in time and properly. What puzzle you may ask? Well, the one where I figured out why small children and babies have their own little park, why the black boys were cursing at the park, why they are so many bi-racial and blonde babies in one neighborhood, and why the places are significantly different when they are in the same area and have the same zip code? 

            With research come up with a reason, it maybe the blacks that moved in after the1920s are now leaving the new real estate hotspot. A one bedroom apartment in Clinton Hill is now on average 3,300.00$ a month. “At this point, the majority of the population is upper-middle-class,” said a woman interviewed on the street by New York Times. “Many of the residents who have lived in the neighborhood are moving out, as the rents are crazy.” A man was also interviewed and he had a similar answer: “I think, well, blacks are declining, but whether a specific neighborhood declines or increases has a lot of other things going on,” said Mr. Beveridge. Though he said he does not know the specifics of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill’s demographic shifts, he said, “It could be that the yuppies are moving in, you know, poor people are moving out.”

The black population in the 18 census tracts that make up the geographic boundaries of those neighborhoods dropped by 31.4 percent. Census tract 185.01 had the biggest increase in Asians, 1,150 percent. This is the area that includes Whitman Houses. Census tract 33 had the biggest decrease in blacks, 50 percent. This is the area between DeKalb and Lafayette Avenues, east of Flatbush Avenue. Census tract 227 had one of the biggest increases in whites, 480 percent or almost 600 people. This area straddles Clinton Hill and Bed-Stuy, north of Atlantic Avenue between Grand and Bedford Avenues. The 2010 census count shows that Fort Greene and Clinton Hill’s black population has declined by a third since 2000.

11205.