A panel discussion at the Library for Arts & Culture kicked off the release of a new self-guided walking tour of Fort Greene. (Photo: Jack Delaney)
By Jack Delaney | jdelaney@queensledger.com
FORT GREENE — Last Wednesday, as rain fell in heavy sheets on Ashland Plaza, several dozen people shuffled into the glass structure of the Library for Arts & Culture — not for shelter, although it was blessedly dry, but to hear from the creators of “Places We Gather,” a new audio walking tour of Fort Greene.
This was not a good day to try it, given that the wind was blowing umbrellas inside out. But on a sunnier afternoon, the eight-part series by the Brooklyn Public Library and Interference Archive offers something that conventional tour guides often miss: a glimpse at the neighborhood that eschews the ritzy restaurants on Dekalb Ave for the voices of longtime residents.
On St. Edwards, where the tour begins, listeners meet Julie Sharpton, who heads the tenant association at the nearby Whitman Houses.
“My grandmother used to have a restaurant,” she recalls. “It was called Janet and Daryl Soul Food. She named it after two of her children. She had an icy stand. She had a frank truck. And the thing I remember most about her in those roles in the community is, she would feed anybody. If you didn’t have the money and you were hungry, she would feed you.”
The next stop is the library, also named after Walt Whitman — when he was the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in the 1840s, he successfully lobbied the city to create Fort Greene Park. Inside, librarians Margaret Day and Alex Mouyios preside over a quiet scene, before school has let out.
“The area is really changing, very quickly,” acknowledges Day. “So there’s a bit of a tension there, on who the library is for and what kinds of collections and programming we’re offering.”
But it has always been a rock for Fort Greeners, and especially so for those in Whitman Houses while its community center is closed for repairs.
“That library has been a lifesaver. Not just for me, I’m sure I speak for many residents and young adults even to this day,” says Sharpton. “I would get the entire Hobbit trilogy, I read it as a kid at that library. I read Langston Hughes, going [there]. I read Maya Angelou, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” I love fantasy books to this day because of where they allowed me to go as a child, escaping those uncomfortable days and moments in my life.”
These early reminiscences set the tone for the rest of the audio tour, which is particularly interested in the structures and systems that enable neighbors to care for one another. On a bench overlooking Fort Greene Park, community activist Denise Evans describes her daily routine, which usually involves teaching art to kids, and stresses the importance of casual conversations. (“We always need encouragement — always, always. We need somebody to remind us that… I didn’t just get up this morning, that I got up with a purpose, and what I’m doing matters to others.”)
Each of the episodes, most of which are about five minutes long, foregrounds a different component of a caring community. The third installment focuses on the choir, for instance, using the case of Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church (LAPC) to delve into local history. We hear from Edward Moran, the first openly gay elder at LAPC, about how it became one of the first churches in the country to support lesbian and gay ordination in 1978, and get the lowdown from Janis Russell about the on-site gospel ensemble she directs.
“Places We Gather” covers a lot of ground, considering its relatively short runtime, and features a broad cast of characters. There’s Asemeret Berhe-Lumax, who founded a community fridge during the pandemic that has since shut down. There’s Delmy Lendof and her heroic crew at Hall Street Shelter Volunteers. And there’s Ms. Denise Evans, who prays over the tables at Commodore Barry Park before the annual bash of Old Timer’s Day.
But at the launch event on Wednesday, the subtext for the panel discussion was the subject of the final episode: gentrification, and how community organizing can confront its impacts.
It won’t surprise any Brooklynite to hear that Fort Greene, sandwiched as it is between Williamsburg and Park Slope and right on Downtown’s doorstep, has gentrified rapidly. In 2023, it was voted the “coolest” neighborhood in NYC by Time Out; the next year, it was a finalist to be the “nicest” place in America.
Yet according to data from NYU’s Furman Center, those honors have followed a clear demographic shift. Like much of North Brooklyn, the area is now whiter and wealthier than ever before — developers built 20,000 apartments in the past two decades, but the share of residents identifying as Black dropped from 42% to 18%, and the average rent doubled.
Displacement doesn’t have to be a given, said resident S. Kesha Morse, who was also featured in the audio tour. Morse helms the Federation of Black Cowboys — a group dedicated to “keeping alive the traditions of African-American cowboys from the Old West” — and is the president of the Navy Yard Housing Development Fund Corporation, which she sees as a model for other neighborhoods to follow.
When the Brooklyn Navy Yard shuttered in 1966, the city planned to transfer two former barracks to NYCHA. Instead, officials were swayed by the campaigning of Mrs. Olivette Thomson, who wanted to form a co-op composed of public housing residents who had been forced to leave because their incomes had risen.
As the series notes, this was the first housing cooperative of its kind nationwide, made even more of a rarity by the fact that the residents own the land — typically, the city leases public property out for extremely long terms, but does not sell outright. (Out of four similar projects that were eventually created, Morse’s co-op is the only one still surviving.)
“We’ve been showing our muscles, and we’re sitting at the table with the developers that are coming in now,” Morse told the crowd. “We’re holding them accountable, they’re asking for our input, they’re listening to us. So we’re actively involved in what’s going on in the community now.”
That’s important, she added, “because some people look at the changes that are going on in the community as gentrification and other people look at it as revitalization. Two different things, felt differently by maybe two different groups, and not just Black and white.”
“Places We Gather” is the continuation of a push to collect oral histories that started in 2013, when the BPL launched “Our Streets, Our Stories.” The format is simple: library staff or volunteers interview an older resident, and then post the result online for anyone to access via a borough-wide, interactive map. Those efforts build on the longer-standing catalogue of the Center for Brooklyn History, which launched an oral history program in 1973 that now holds over 1,200 conversations, including narrators born as early as 1880.
Other oral history initiatives have gone deep with a specific angle, such as the Brooklyn Jewish History Project, the Greenpoint Environmental History Project, or the Brooklyn COVID-19 Stories Project.
But at a time when Fort Greene is experiencing an influx of both tourists and investment, “Places We Gather” feels like it’s doing something more than oral history. It fills a niche halfway between a historical walking tour and a glossy guidebook, inviting New Yorkers out onto the streets to appreciate the daily labors of love of thousands of residents — past, present, and future — that keep this neighborhood’s heart beating.
