• It’s cold
• Like I don’t wanna be outside cold
• Blah

Those are the first three entries in my stream-of-conscious note I kept on Thursday as I discovered Crown Heights. I rode in on a Q train around 5:30, figuring that rush-hour was a good a time as any to see what the populace looked like; I did not figure in how long it would actually take me to walk from the 7av stop (firmly in Prospect Heights, because I wanted to see some gradient of gentrification that seemed not to actually exist) to Crown Heights—a time extended because I was a good few blocks into the neighborhood before I even realized I was there. I only realized I was there after I exited from Eastern Parkway, walking a block of gentrification (health food store, yoga, juice bar) then being hit by Caribbean-American cuisine and people who weren’t white. It was magic. One side of the block: organic mart; other side: Thank You Jesus Church, Inc. floating gospel music into the street.

After that, I walked around the residential streets, mostly composed (from what I saw, anyway) of tiny brownstone-like buildings with an apartment on each floor, which all looked very nice, though not filled with all the gentry like I might’ve expected. I met fellow group-mate Isobela Suster at a Connecticut Muffin (“Their coffee is terrible but I bought it so I could sit here.”) who staked out the gentrish place with me. By this point it was well past rush hour and I lamented my latency. The area outside was still abuzz, though, dominated by a West-Indian presence, with a minor presence of white and latin@ groups, though most of the people in the coffee shop were white. On the walk to the community meeting we were to attend that night (birds and stones), we passed a low-income housing block which I observed for a little while as we walked by; it seemed that this area, with its industrial buildings just across the street and a park on the corner, was absent of the gentry. True to that, I saw no more cute & kitsch little places as we walked farther into the neighborhood. The meeting itself was attended mostly by longtime minority residents of Crown Heights, though a few people that looked like me were sitting there too, awaiting their reapproval of beer & wine licenses for their storefronts. It seems like gentrification is the real issue coming to plague the neighborhood, though when I asked a community board member’s opinion on how the neighborhood was changing, she had this to say:

“It’s changed for the better. I’ve been here for four years and was recently told by my neighbors that ten years ago, two women would not have been able to own a bar and restaurant. Just three years ago a murder took place next door to me. But there’s more police presence as it improves. It’s the sad truth that once there is gentrification, services improve. Of course there are drawbacks: people get pushed out and can’t afford it. But there are trade offs with everything; that’s the reality.”