One of the reasons I was initially attracted to living in The Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, aka Bed-Stuy, was the ethnic and religious diversity of the neighborhood’s residents. My 3 unit building alone represents several of the major groups that are leaving their cultural mark on the place. I have a Bangladeshi landlord with his family living below me, a West Indian family above, and my roommates and I, a group of first and second generation American Africans in the middle. When I saw the “ethnic diversity” map of New York recently published in the New York Times, I saw it as problematic in many ways, but not least of which was that it didn’t really reflect the lived experience of my neighborhood. So I went ahead and decided to try show what an actual map of my neighborhood’s diversity would look like.
In thinking about what my mapping of restaurants on Fulton Street should entail, I didn’t just want to go into places and make assumptions about who was or wasn’t in there based on stereotypes. Since the stores themselves advertised it on their awnings, I realized I didn’t have to. I decided to focus my data collection on the ways an establishment uses it’s awning as a marketing tool to reach out to the diverse population of the community.
What I’ve noticed about all the restaurants between Clinton Hill and Bed-Stuy is that businesses use specific words to draw different customers in. Different ethnic groups and classes use the signs differently, and different words correspond to areas with higher concentrations of different ethnic or economic groups. The inside of the establishments vary widely ranging from restaurants retaining specific cultural and religious cues and food, to enterprising businesses just trying cast the widest net for potential customers.
I feel that the signs also do a service to the neighborhood to diffuse potential ethnic tensions. I’ve heard that in other communities like in The Bronx, and Staten Island, with a high concentration of African immigrants, a tension between Black Americans and African immigrants has developed. I haven’t seen that so much in Bed-Stuy (at least on the surface), and I believe that the welcoming nature of the signs, and the diversity of the community plays a roll. There’s also an interesting diversity within the Muslim community centered around the several Masjids in the area. As I noted before, the biggest one, Masjid At-Taqwa is a definite central node for the community where Sufi Muslim Senegalese mix with Sunni Muslims from places as diverse as Eastern Europe, Bangladesh, and Yemen. The neighborhood focused blog, the Bed-Stuy Patch has an interesting 3 part series detailing the experiences of the Senegalese in Bed-Stuy. The first one is on their businesses, the second is on the youth, and the last is on the greater Muslim community. Again, a potentially explosive and controversial subject in other parts of the city, such as an Islamic center, has fostered harmonious living between groups in Bed-Stuy.
Some other trends I’ve notice include a socioeconomic divide accentuated by a “transitional” residential area on Fulton between Clinton-Hill and Bed-Stuy. Clinton Hill is a neighborhood that is widely known as going through a process of gentrification, and Bed-Stuy has been pegged by some as the next front in that stuggle. It was telling that there was an installation addressing food and gentrification done by MoCADA on an abandoned building in this section of Fulton, symbolically marking the gentrification dividing line.
Gentrification an almost universal trend across much of the United States, and especially in the post-industrial cities of the Rust Belt, is the perfect example of how Capitalism cycles through areas of production, creating booms and bust across both urban and rural landscapes. Less publicized (but perhaps more focused on in the past) is the roll of immigrant communities in changing the face and make up of a community. Some questions for future research beyond the scope of this project include: Is a burgeoning Senegalese population more inviting to middle class and wealthy clientele that may have avoided a neighborhood nicknamed “Do or Die” before? (There was a similar trend in Harlem with Little Senegal preceding that neighborhood’s gentrification. My roommate and I jokingly call Bed-Stuy Young Harlem.) How do ideas of African identity play a roll in the relationships between the three major African diaspora communities? How does the relationship between class, race, and nation of origin play out in the various neighborhood meeting spots?
In trying to address many of the questions that I came up with when pondering Fulton street, I decided to focus categories that weren’t based on appearance of people or assumptions based on stereotypes like skin color, dress, and accent. The categories I focused on gave me a sense of religion, nation of origin, and class without having to make judgments on individuals. These are:
- Marketing: I am looking at words in the awning advertising, signifying ethnicity or cultural dietary needs. Dominant words include: American, African, Bangladeshi, West Indian or Caribbean, Spanish or Latin, Halal, Healthy, and Organic each corresponding to assumptions about the ethnicity of the groups in the area.
- Service: The style of service whether sit-down, deli, or buffet to signify targeted economic class. Most of the restaurants in Clinton Hill use are “fancier” sit-down restaurants, and while their clientele may be diverse ethnically, they tend to be wealthier, and dishes more expensive.
- Language: I will also look at language in a selection of establishments to try and come to conclusions on whether or not certain places serve as a cultural anchor in the area, or is just a store trying to cast a wide net. Since presumably all the stores are trying to cast wide nets, I will use language spoken between workers and clientele and the language of media (TV and radio) being broadcast to gauge if people are going there for cultural reasons beyond food consumption.