I took the 3 train to commute to Crown Heights. I got off on Crown Heights/Utica Avenue and as I began to find the exit to the street, it became much easier to simply follow the crowd. From that first moment I could sense the kind of neighborhood I’d be in. EXTREMELY BUSY/HECTIC. I arrived there on Monday February 23 around 3 o’clock in the afternoon. I imagined it would be the time for kids to get out of school, time for either parents to pick up their kids or yellow school buses to inundate the streets and create traffic while stopping. And that is how it all turned out to be.
What a neighborhood, diverse in every sense—the different cultures living in it, the types of stores right next to each other, the kinds of advertisements you find attached to every other tree, the varying levels of noise in different places (not too far from each other), the different kinds of schools found in almost every block…
My first stop was right in the intersection of Eastern Parkway and Utica Avenue for two reasons. Number one, my train station was nearby and it definitely seemed like an interesting spot to observe for a few minutes. So instead of staying in a single place—because the cold did not allow me to—I walked back and forth between the same few blocks. As I walked up and down Utica Avenue you could see the typical old corner stores that you can tell have been around for centuries. I was surprised at one block in particular; there was a fish market, a Caribbean restaurant and a clothing store right next to each other. Now that I think about it, it’s not so absurd to find those kinds of block in NYC. But I guess what I found interesting about it were the people inside each one of them. Although the workers from the fish market were Asian, there were a lot of clients of the colored race inside. For the Caribbean restaurant, there was a clear mix of cultures ranging from Hispanic, to Asian, to African Americans. The clothing store, however, was somewhat empty; it had intimate clothing for women.
As I began to head east on the Eastern Parkway for a couple of blocks, two men startled me. One of them seemed to be in a rush and in charge of a store nearby. It seemed like something had happened as if it had been a robbery, but I never heard the details about it.
Two blocks to the East I looked on the map and saw that I was actually walking away from my assigned neighborhood, so I decided to start walking in the opposite direction. During this walk I made my second “stop” to do some observations.
As I was walking passed and away from the hectic Utica Avenue and Eastern Parkway intersection, I was able to feel the quiet residential area also along the Eastern Parkway. I found a number of education-related facilities. One of them was an early child development center, then a block down I found a Jewish school, and in the next block you’d the public school kids getting out of the building. Definitely a conglomeration of mainly an Orthodox Jewish and, just as dense, an African American and Caribbean population with people of all ages walking around the streets of Crown Heights!
