Brownsville: A Neighborhood in Trouble

In Brownsville, a section of Brooklyn once almost entirely Jewish but now radically changed, the War on Poverty is a misnomer. The wars that occur in Brownsville are mostly wars of the poor against the Economic Opportunity Board and the poor against one another. The Brownsville population of 125,000 Negroes, Puerto Ricans, and aging Jews presents to the rare visitor a microcosm of all the city’s social ills. It is a community of unrelieved poverty, dirt, decay, drunkenness, and despair. Its condition is the result of forty years of neglect. In A Walker in the City, a reminiscence of his youth in Brownsville, Alfred Kazin says that his one prevailing desire was to escape. This continues to be the obsession of the average Brownsville resident. Most despair of life ever getting any better while they stay here. The turnover of population is alarming. In one public school, from September to January of last year, there was a 100 percent turnover of school population, 1,500 ...