Lenox Road and Civil Rights History

This post and slideshow on the New York Times’ Lens blog introduced me to a facet of Civil Rights history involving Downstate Medical Center and people living in Flatbush—almost certainly including people on Lenox Road.

If you look at pictures 13 and (I think) 15 on that slideshow, you'll see protesters from CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) trying to persuade the builders of Downstate to employ workers who better represent their neighborhood. According to this garbled abstract of an article:

For over three weeks, Brooklyn CORE, along with a coalition of over 14 black ministers, staged dramatic demonstrations at the construction site and demanded an immediate 25% increase of black and Puerto Rican workers in the all-white work force on the site, which was a neighborhood that was fast becoming all black. Demonstrators blocked trucks and were arrested by the hundreds.

(Note: I've silently corrected a few obvious errors in the transcription.)

Perhaps at a future Lenox Road Block Association Alliance meeting we can discuss creating an educational program around this important event in the history of our community—and, it seems, our country.

Old Brochures from Lenox Road Buildings

Want to see records of your building in all its early splendor? How, for instance, every single apartment has a refrigerator the way 130 Lenox Road did? Then search the records of Columbia University Library's Real Estate Brochure Collection.

This link should take you to a list of all the brochures available for buildings on Lenox Road.

Land use geeks take note: one feature of these buildings that comes up in some of these brochures is how far the building sits back from the stret. More evidence that setbacks have to be taken into account in any future rezoning of Community Board 17!

Hat tip to the invaluable Hawthorne Street blog.

Robberies in East Flatbush

According to this report on YourNabe.com, police from the 67th Precinct have issued a warning about two patterns of robberies in our area.

In one pattern, eight women (some of them seniors) have been robbed at gunpoint after leaving the subway station at Nostrand and Newkirk between 4 and 5 am. In the other pattern, criminals hail taxis near New York and Foster Avenues and rob the driver at gunpoint.

These incidents form part of the rising wave of major felonies in East Flatbush over the last year.