In Bed-Stuy, where I used to live, Tompkins Avenue has flyers with this question emblazoned in a striking black font: What if Bed-Stuy was a Black Utopia? I’ve always been struck by the wistfulness of the question, notable on a street that was home to a number of Black-owned businesses that have shuttered in the past year or so — from Bed-Vyne Brew, where throngs of good-looking Black people would eat jerk chicken and shoot the shit on warm summer evenings, to Lovers Rock, where the rum drinks were incredibly strong and the soca music permanently at ear-splitting volume.
The novelist Naomi Jackson, who was born in Crown Heights and now lives in Bed-Stuy, has clocked these changes too. “Over two decades, from 2000 to 2020, New York City lost nearly 200,000 Black folks, or about 9 percent of its Black residents,” she writes in this elegant essay about Black Brooklyn’s changing fortunes. She’s nostalgic while also acknowledging the ambivalence she feels as New York transforms: “The city can still be a sanctuary for Black creative folks and queer people who find building community, making a living, and feeling safe difficult, if not impossible, elsewhere.”
—Tomi Obaro, culture editor, New York
