Crown Heights

Crown Heights is a neighborhood in the borough of Brooklyn in New York City, located to the east of Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. One of the best preserved neighborhoods of New York City, it is home to hundreds of stately neoclassical townhomes. Eastern Parkway, the main street of Crown Heights, is a copy of the Champs-Élysées in Paris.

Crown Heights is the worldwide headquarters of the Chabad sect of Hasidic Jews. A large African-American (mostly West Indian) population coexists with Hasidic Jews in Crown Heights, not always easily.

On August 19, 1991, a car in the entourage of the Rebbe of Chabad (Menachem Mendel Schneerson) ran a red light and ran over a seven-year-old African-American child, Gavin Cato. A private Hasidic ambulance came to the scene and removed the Hasidic driver, who had been assaulted by angry bystanders, on the orders of a police officer; a city ambulance arrived minutes later to treat Cato, who died of his injuries a few hours later. African-American residents of the neighborhood then rioted for four consecutive days, presumably because of unequal treatment of the victims, and attacked a total of 188 Hasidim, including killing a visiting rabbinical student from Australia by the name of Yankel Rosenbaum, 29 years old, who had come to continue study on the Holocaust. The person charged with killing Rosenbaum, an African-American named Lemrick Nelson, was acquitted. Claims that he admitted to having stabbed Rosenbaum were dismissed by the jury.

In addition, during the same rioting, a 67-year-old non-Jewish motorist who had apparently gotten lost in the neighborhood, Anthony Graziosi, was dragged out of his car and brutally beaten and stabbed to death, presumably because his full beard and dark clothing had caused his killers to mistake him for a Hasidic Jew. No suspects have ever been apprehended in his murder.

The turmoil proved to be a key issue in the next New York City mayoral election, contested in 1993 as a rematch between incumbent David Dinkins and Rudolph Giuliani, whom Dinkins had narrowly defeated four years earlier. On June 16, 1993, a huge rally was held outside City Hall in downtown Manhattan, the primary focus of which was out-of-control criminal violence in general (which the Dinkins administration was viewed by the rally's attendees as being indifferent towards) and continued bitterness over the events in Crown Heights from two years earlier in particular; and several speakers at the rally, including mayoral candidate Giuliani and a Brooklyn-based African-American community activist, Roy Innis, even went so far as to label the Crown Heights episode a pogrom. Giuliani won the election, and subsequent polls showed that a significant shift in the Jewish vote from 1989 was a major contributing factor in his victory.

Accomplished performance artist and actress Anna Deavere Smith wrote a one-woman play "Fires in the Mirror" about the racial tensions in Crown Heights after the riots. In an interwoven series of brief monologues, Ms. Smith presents 29 characters based on verbatim excerpts from interviews conducted with her subjects. The play seeks to facilitate intercultural exchange and public discussion about sexual and racial politics, ethnic identity, and multiculturalism. The piece premiered at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in New York City and was later adapted for film by American Playhouse for public television in order to meet international demand for the piece.

External Links

Harvard Research Publication on the Crown Heights Riots and background (http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/presspol/Research_Publications/Papers/Research_Papers/R16.pdf)