The history of gentrification and white flight in Crown Heights has a surprising figure at its center: the Chabad-Lubavitch rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson. As the leader of one of the most influential Jewish groups in New York, Schneerson had an outsized influence on the politics and population of Crown Heights, which contains the headquarters of…
The intensity of the unrest that rocked Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood in 1991 is often surprising to those who learn about it. With streets dotted with small businesses and stately architecture, Crown Heights does not look like the site of one of New York’s most significant race riots. However, the legacy of the three-day riot…
Crown Heights was predominantly Jewish from the 1920s through the 1960s, but the neighborhood was more secular than we know it to be today. In 1959, in a humorous column for the Forverts, Joseph Simon Goldstein noted the dramatic shift in observance as the Lubavitch movement began to take more prominence. In his piece, he…
A developer’s plan to erect two luxury buildings in a low-slung residential part of Brooklyn with large Hasidic and black communities sparked the latest wave of concern over skyrocketing rents in the neighborhood, which threatens the two groups who had a history of tension, culminating in the Crown Heights riots of the earl ’90s. Cornell…
New development projects in New York City, like the proposed 16-story residential buildings in a Crown Heights area zoned for smaller buildings, have to provide certain percentages of below-market units due to the city’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing policy. Mayor Bill de Blasio pushed through the new MIH guidelines in 2016, making it compulsory for developers…
(JTA) — The man accused of attacking an identifiably Jewish man walking home from Shabbat services in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn was indicted on several charges including committing a hate crime. James Vincent, 40, was arraigned on Wednesday in Brooklyn Supreme Court on a 17-count indictment. He is charged among other things, with…
A string of violent incidents in an Orthodox neighborhood in Brooklyn has left some Jewish locals on edge, but communal officials say there’s no apparent connection among the attacks. At least three members of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic community have been attacked in or around Crown Heights, Brooklyn, since mid-April. Police have charged a man with…
(JTA) — For the third time in three weeks, a person affiliated with the Chabad-Lubavitch movement was assaulted in Crown Heights. The victim, a 22-year-old yeshiva student, was walking home from the Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights when he was attacked at around midnight on Tuesday night. The Crown Heights Info…
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