Since I have lived in Bay Ridge for about eighteen years, I decided to research this neighborhood for the project. The group I am in has four people, and three out of the four of us (including me) have grown up in this neighborhood. Our project was influenced by that since most of us knew Bay Ridge very well already. The group member who does not live in Bay Ridge provided a valuable perspective of Bay Ridge, since she was seeing it for the first time and had no prior biases.
Growing up in Bay Ridge, I felt like I knew all about it in terms of its divisions. My groupmates who live there thought they did as well. When we first planned out the project, however, we started to divide Bay Ridge by ethnicity, looking at the different types of restaurants and stores as references, since that was part of how we viewed Bay Ridge. I researched my neighborhood to see what I could learn about the demographics of Bay Ridge. I found that while Bay Ridge has had a population of people of Italians and Irish descent, there are now Arabic, Greek, Russian, and Chinese residents (Kripke 1). I was surprised to see that Hispanics were not mentioned at all, since I had originally thought they made up a significant part of the neighborhood. I was pleased to find that Bay Ridge is as diverse as I had originally thought.
We quickly realized that the method we had chosen would not work since the boundaries between ethnicities were very blurred. While we could definitely say a lot of Arabic and Chinese people lived in the beginning of Bay Ridge (streets 60 – 70), we could see them in the middle of Bay Ridge as well, even if those groups of people were not as plentiful. We looked at the restaurants in the neighborhood as well to try to determine where certain ethnicities started and ended, but that didn’t help.
Because it was difficult to separate Bay Ridge into sections based on ethnicity, we decided to split it into three sections based on wealth. Since we knew that Bay Ridge’s homes went from being small apartments to expensive mansions and apartments (from 60th Street to 100th Street), we broke it up into three sections. The first section was from 60th Street to 72nd Street, the second from 73rd Street to 86th Street, and the third from 87th Street to 100th Street.
Our thesis was that Bay Ridge becomes wealthier as the street numbers increase. We examined the real estate listings to help prove this thesis, and found that we were correct. The demographic also changes, and more people of Italian and Irish descent can be found in the third section. The first section contains mostly people of Arabic and Chinese descent, and the middle section is a gradual mix of both the first and the third sections. The reason for this could be that the Irish and Italian populations have been around Bay Ridge a lot longer and are already established in the neighborhood, while the other demographics are made up of mostly recent immigrants who are still struggling to make enough money to leave their small apartments.
My perspective on Bay Ridge has remained largely unchanged by this project. It’s the same town-like neighborhood as I grew up in; since I’ve been living in this neighborhood for eighteen years, my feelings and thoughts on Bay Ridge are based on a lot of experience in it. I grew up visiting the parks, restaurants, and the shops in this neighborhood. My first home was on 68th Street and 3rd Avenue, and my family moved in my sophomore year of high school to 76th Street. While the areas had a different vibe, I had expected that because I knew Bay Ridge well. Since I have lived in two different parts of the neighborhood, I have an even better grasp of the area.
To me, Bay Ridge has always had a home-like feel, probably because of the people and the shops. While I don’t know a lot of the people I pass on the street, I see people I know or recognize often enough to feel like I am in a smaller community. Sixty percent of Bay Ridge is made up of family households, which can contribute to the close domestic feeling it gives off (“Bay Ridge Demographics…” 1). There are also a lot of Arabic and Islamic stores in Bay Ridge that I visit often. There is a large Muslim population in Bay Ridge, so these stores represent a group of people there. This does not only apply to this demographic—most of the groups in Bay Ridge are represented by the types of stores you see. There are a lot of Asian restaurants in Bay Ridge to represent that population. Italian restaurants are abundant in the more areas where they live.
The one thing that I learned when researching for this project is that Bay Ridge was not as gentrified as I had originally thought. Gentrification is the process of middle class moving into a lower class neighborhood, causing rent and home prices to increase and forcing out lower class residents (Yee 1). Growing up, I had seen a few old family-run businesses in my area fail and get replaced with a newer, more modern looking shop. At the time, I had thought that that meant there was gentrification in Bay Ridge, but I realized during this project that Bay Ridge was actually fairly well preserved compared to a lot of other neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Some neighborhoods lost up to 14 percent of their black population (Yee 1). Since Bay Ridge is not losing large percentages of certain populations, it is safe to say that gentrification is not affecting it as much as it could. I also compared the restaurant prices and compared them by area. While there was a very slight increase in price, I didn’t see the prices increasing as much as I thought they would as the streets got higher. This project made me realize that I had overestimated the effect of gentrification on Bay Ridge, especially compared to other neighborhoods.
This project made me explore my neighborhood more thoroughly than I had ever done before. I discovered new restaurants and stores, and learned a lot about the populations of Bay Ridge. While my perspective did not change, I have a renewed appreciation for the neighborhood I grew up in.
