Brownsville,
Brooklyn, New York
Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto is a 2002 history by Wendell E. Pritchett (University of Pennsylvania), published by the University of Chicago Press. It traces how one Brooklyn neighborhood went from a crowded but lively Jewish immigrant community to one of New York’s poorest Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods. Pritchett argues that this change was not simply the result of “white flight” or individual prejudice. Public policy and the limits of postwar liberalism did much of the work.
The Jewish Brownsville (about 1880s–1940s). Eastern European Jews settled Brownsville in large numbers in the early 1900s. It was poor and densely built, but it had strong institutions: unions, socialist and communist politics, synagogues, settlement houses, and a deep commitment to education and upward mobility. Even then, outsiders saw it as a slum. A small Black community also lived there, and the two groups coexisted with relatively little open conflict.
Postwar transition (1940s–1950s). The Great Migration and Puerto Rican migration brought new residents. Meanwhile, government decisions shaped who moved and where:
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Public housing: New York concentrated large housing projects in Brownsville, starting with the Brownsville Houses in 1948. They mostly housed low-income Black families.
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Redlining and disinvestment: Banks and federal housing policy steered capital away from the neighborhood.
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Suburbanization: Federally backed mortgages and highways helped upwardly mobile Jewish families move to Queens, Long Island, and elsewhere.
Some Jewish liberals and activists, such as those in the Brownsville Neighborhood Council, worked for interracial cooperation and better services. But their efforts could not offset the structural forces driving segregation and decline.
The 1960s: community action and conflict. As Brownsville became majority Black and Puerto Rican, residents organized through civil rights groups and War on Poverty community-action programs to demand jobs, housing, and political power. The book’s central episode is the 1968 Ocean Hill–Brownsville school crisis. A community-controlled school board, backed by Black residents, clashed with the largely Jewish United Federation of Teachers over the transfer of teachers. The resulting citywide strikes badly damaged Black–Jewish relations in New York and exposed the tension between Jewish liberalism and Black demands for self-determination.
Decline and partial renewal (1970s–1980s). The fiscal crisis, deindustrialization, arson, and housing abandonment devastated the neighborhood in the 1970s. Pritchett ends on a note of cautious hope with grassroots rebuilding efforts, especially the church-led Nehemiah Homes project by East Brooklyn Congregations, which built affordable owner-occupied houses in the 1980s.
Main arguments.
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Ghettos are made by housing, lending, planning, and urban renewal policy, not just by who moves in or out.
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Liberal institutions and individuals often supported racial equality in principle but did not follow through in practice.
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Black–Jewish relations were shaped by competition over real resources like schools, jobs, and housing, not only by abstract attitudes.
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Residents of poor neighborhoods were active political agents, not passive victims.
Historians often pair the book with works like Thomas Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis and Arnold Hirsch’s Making the Second Ghetto as a case study of how postwar policy produced the “urban crisis.”
Pritchett’s book doesn’t mention the Logan Triangle. It’s entirely about Brooklyn. But it’s a useful lens for Logan, because both places show how government decisions, not just residents’ choices, produce a neighborhood’s decline. There’s also a local tie: Pritchett is a longtime University of Pennsylvania law professor who has worked in Philadelphia city government, so his framework comes up often in Philly housing and planning discussions.
Where the stories line up
The Logan Triangle’s disaster was built in by early planning and engineering choices. Logan sits on coal ash, in some places more than 40 feet deep, used to fill a deep valley formed by Wingohocking Creek, which was diverted into a large sewer in the early 20th century. The infrastructure also lagged: a relief sewer under Wingohocking Street was planned in 1930, but wasn’t built until the ’50s. This is Pritchett’s central point. The “ghetto” is a product of public choices about land, infrastructure, and investment, and later residents inherited those choices.
The cost of decline fell on the people who could least escape it. In the 1980s, as one longtime resident recalled, families kept living in homes that were visibly sinking, “because who’s able to jump up and just move?” That matches Pritchett’s account of Brownsville. Families with resources left. Those without them stayed while the neighborhood deteriorated around them.
Government response was slow and uneven. After a gas explosion in February 1986 that damaged four homes and destroyed two, the city began acquiring land and demolishing the 957 homes of the Triangle’s 5,000 residents. Relocating most of them took more than 10 years. City politics got in the way too: the Rendell and Street administrations were wrapped up in a personal rivalry with Councilwoman Marion Tasco, who represents Logan. Pritchett shows the same pattern in Brownsville, where neighborhood needs became bargaining chips in city politics.
Community organizations filled the gap, and were fragile. Logan CDC, then known as Logan Assistance Corporation, was borne from the crisis to help relocate displaced residents. Later, a civic vacuum took hold of the neighborhood after Logan CDC abruptly shut down because of funding issues. Brownsville’s community councils and anti-poverty groups rose and fell in similar ways, depending on outside money and political support.
Both stories also run through redevelopment that keeps stalling. Brownsville eventually got the church-led Nehemiah homes. The Logan Triangle is still waiting. When the Redevelopment Authority issued a request for proposals, it received just one response, and only about half of the site is suitable for redevelopment. More recently, the city moved to transfer the southwest corner to the Goldenberg Group for a $25 million Philadelphia Youth Basketball facility. Mayor Parker has also proposed bringing a modular home factory to the Triangle as part of her $2 billion plan to preserve and create 30,000 housing units.
Where they differ
Brownsville declined through slow disinvestment, public housing concentration, and racial transition. Logan’s Triangle collapsed literally, from an environmental and engineering failure. The physical ground itself is the obstacle, which makes redevelopment far more expensive. Logan also has no single defining flashpoint like the 1968 Ocean Hill–Brownsville school strike, though residents frame the Triangle in similar terms of inequity. Reporting notes that community members see in Logan Triangle an opportunity to address one of the many systemic inequities perpetrated by segregation.
What it might mean for Logan Triangle.
A few of Pritchett’s lessons seem directly useful for next steps in the Logan Treiangle.:
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Pair advocacy with ownership. Nehemiah worked because a broad, organized coalition built and controlled housing itself instead of waiting on the city.
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Plan for organizational durability. Logan CDC’s shutdown shows how much depends on steady funding and leadership succession. That should be built into future bylaws and governance language.
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Document the history. Pritchett’s book shows that a clear account of how a neighborhood was failed by policy is itself a tool for demanding accountability and resources.