Two Fort Greenes: Spaces in a Changing Community

Fort Greene resident, artist and community activist Roberta Kyle, 73, first talked about a demographic shift in Fort Greene in 1984, when, in an interview with The New York Times, she presciently observed there were “two Fort Greenes.”

“There was upscale-renovation Fort Greene and there was poor, on-welfare Fort Greene,” Kyle recently recalled. “Fort Greene was kind of everybody’s neighborhood. There were interracial couples, gay couples, artists – there was also a very disadvantaged, downtrodden, drug-selling segment. It was a very unique and yeasty mix of people.”

The 2010 census revealed that Fort Greene had lost a third of its black population since the turn of the century, with the neighborhood getting whiter and wealthier as the grinding wheels of gentrification sped up. The four-story Carlton Avenue brownstone Kyle and her family bought for $32,000 in 1970 is now worth about $1.5 million. Census data not only revealed a population shift in recent decades, but a striking economic fault line: The census tract that includes the Walt Whitman and Ingersoll Houses, a short walk from the multimillion dollar brownstone belt, was identified as one of the city’s poorest, with a median income just over $9,000 and an unemployment rate around 25 percent.

Our reporters set out to examine the evolving neighborhood, going beyond obvious signs of gentrification, and discovered new bellwethers in the changing spaces of Fort Greene. They found a deli that’s become a defacto community center for longtime residents. They gave voice to players on both sides of the Fort Greene Park “dust bowl” dispute. And they reported on a labor controversy unfolding under the roof of the area’s newest major space: The Barclays Center. Check out our multimedia special report here to see all the stories.