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3
Living conditions improved after 1920, and rapid transit to Manhattan was completed in 1922.
Brownsville prospered from the 1920s to the 1940s but remained a center of labor radicalism - the early
home of the Socialist Labor Movement, the site of Margaret Sanger's first birth control clinic and the
Location of Murder, Inc. [3]
After WWII, many residents left for Canarsie, Long Island and the suburbs of New Jersey. African-
Americans, most migrants who from the South seeking better jobs, moved in. They found dwindling
factory jobs and exclusion. Old housing stock, mostly poorly built working-class homes, could not
withstand the strain of rapid decay and soon deteriorated. High-rise public housing projects built during
the 1950s did little to alleviate these problems. Later housing renewal efforts were more successful;
notably those sponsored by the Council of East Brooklyn Churches to provide affordable one-family
houses. Racial tensions (and the diminishing economic situation) contributed to a mass exodus of other
ethnic groups until, by the early 1960s, Brownsville was predominately African-American. The
heavyweight boxing champions Mike Tyson and Riddick Bowe both grew up in the neighborhood,
which attracted many immigrants from the Caribbean during the 1980s, primarily Jamaica (accounting
for 30% of all immigrants), Guyana and Haiti (each about 15%), Grenada, Barbados, and Trinidad &
Tobago. [3]
UHF NEIGHBORHOODS The NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) reports
statistics for AIDS using 42 United Hospital Fund (UHF) zip code clusters, 11 of which are in Brooklyn.
Central Brooklyn is generally called Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights by UHF though it includes
zip codes representing the following communities 11212 - 4/5 Brownsville-CD (Brooklyn Community
Comparison of HIV/AIDS Cases with Population in Brooklyn at
the End of 2004
3.8%
4.5%
25.2%
16.1%
10.3%
3.9%
12.3%
2.1%
4.5%
3.1%
14.1%
13.2%
8.0%
12.9%
12.8%
7.0%
5.0%
8.7%
7.9%
11.6%
4.9%
7.9%
0.0%
5.0%
10.0%
15.0%
20.0%
25.0%
30.0%
Borough Park
Canarsie/Flatlands
Central Brooklyn
East/Flatbush
East NY
Greenpoint
NW Brooklyn
SW Brooklyn
Southern Brooklyn
Sunset Park
Williamsburg/ Bushwick
Figure 1: NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) [1 Tables 3.8.1-11, & 4.2]