How Crown Heights Came to Eat the Way It Does

Why Crown Heights eats the way it does

Crown Heights eats the way it does because at least four separate migrations landed on the same Brooklyn ridge and none of them displaced the last one completely. A free Black settlement predating the Civil War, waves of European immigration in the early twentieth century, the Great Migration bringing Southern Black families north, and Caribbean arrival at scale after immigration law changed in the middle of the 1960s. West African arrival is the newest layer and it is still thickening. Every one of those groups brought a way of cooking and every one of them left it in the neighborhood.

The result is a place where a kosher bakery, a roti shop, a soul food kitchen and a Senegalese restaurant can sit inside a short walk of each other, and where none of that reads as unusual to anyone who lives there.

Crow Hill, Weeksville and the ground itself

The ridge running through the neighborhood is a terminal moraine, the pile of rock and gravel a glacier left behind, and it is the reason the place is called Heights at all. For much of the nineteenth century the area was known as Crow Hill and was farmland and market gardens supplying a growing Brooklyn.

The important settlement here was Weeksville, founded in 1838 when a Black longshoreman named James Weeks bought land in what is now the eastern edge of Crown Heights. It became one of the largest free Black communities in the pre-Civil War United States, with its own school, churches, orphanage, benevolent societies and a newspaper called the Freedman's Torchlight. Residents grew food, kept livestock and voted, property ownership being the qualification at the time. Weeksville was mostly built over and forgotten until a handful of its houses on the old Hunterfly Road were spotted from the air in the late 1960s and preserved.

Weeksville matters to the food history because it establishes something people often get wrong about this neighborhood. Black Brooklyn is not a twentieth-century arrival here. It is the older layer.

Eastern Parkway, the subway, and the shape of the streets

Eastern Parkway was laid out in the 1870s by the designers of Prospect Park as the first road of its type anywhere, a broad boulevard with landscaped malls and service roads. It gave the area a spine. When the subway opened underneath it in 1920 the farmland went quickly, replaced by the apartment houses and rowhouses that still line the side streets, Park Place among them.

That building boom is what turned Crown Heights into a place where large numbers of people could arrive at once, which is precisely what happened next.

Kosher Crown Heights

Jewish, Italian and Irish families moved in through the first decades of the twentieth century, and the Jewish presence in particular left permanent food infrastructure: kosher butchers, bakeries, appetizing stores and delicatessens, concentrated over time around Kingston Avenue. In 1940 the Lubavitch Hasidic movement established its headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway, and the community around it has anchored that stretch ever since. Kosher supervision shapes a food economy in a way casual visitors underestimate. It determines which butchers exist, which bakeries stay open on which days, and what a corner store stocks.

The Great Migration brings Southern cooking north

Between roughly the First World War and the 1970s, millions of Black Americans left the South for northern and western cities. Brooklyn drew heavily from the Carolinas, Georgia, Virginia and Alabama, and Crown Heights and neighboring Bedford-Stuyvesant absorbed a large share of that movement.

The food came with the people. Collard and mustard greens cooked down slowly with smoked pork or smoked turkey. Black-eyed peas. Candied sweet potatoes, macaroni and cheese baked until the top sets, fried chicken, fried whiting, cornbread. Just as important, the institutions came too. The church supper, the repast after a funeral, the anniversary dinner and the block cookout are Southern social forms, and they are the reason catering by the tray is such an established habit in this neighborhood. Soul food in Brooklyn was never only restaurant food. It was food cooked in volume for a room full of people who knew each other.

Caribbean Crown Heights

The Caribbean presence here is old, going back to early twentieth-century arrivals from the British West Indies, but the scale changed after the 1965 immigration act removed national-origin quotas. Jamaican, Trinidadian, Guyanese, Barbadian, Grenadian, Haitian and Panamanian families arrived in large numbers through the following decades, and by the 1980s central Brooklyn held one of the largest Caribbean populations of any place outside the region itself.

Nostrand Avenue and Utica Avenue became the commercial spine of that community. Bakeries selling hard dough bread and currant rolls, patty counters, roti shops, fish markets, produce stores stocking yam, dasheen and green banana, and jerk cooked over charcoal in cut oil drums on the sidewalk. Sorrel at Christmas. Bun and cheese at Easter. And from 1969 onward, the West Indian American Day Carnival ran along Eastern Parkway on Labor Day, bringing the neighborhood's biggest annual concentration of cooking to the street. That story has its own history, told in the food of West Indian Day Carnival on Eastern Parkway.

The newer West African layer

The most recent layer is West African. Senegalese, Malian, Guinean, Ivorian, Nigerian and Ghanaian communities have grown across New York from the 1990s onward, concentrated in Harlem and the Bronx but with a real and increasing presence in Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights. Senegalese and Nigerian kitchens along Bedford Avenue and Fulton Street brought thieboudienne, mafe, jollof rice and suya into the neighborhood's ordinary vocabulary.

Sierra Leonean New York is smaller and mostly sits elsewhere in the city, in Staten Island, the Bronx and Queens rather than here, which makes Sierra Leonean cooking in Crown Heights a genuinely uncommon thing. The city itself, and what it eats, is covered in where Freetown, Sierra Leone is and what it was founded as.

One kitchen on Park Place

FreeTown African & American Cuisine is at 1172 Park Place, a block off the pattern described above and not outside it. The kitchen cooks West African, Jamaican, Southern and soul food, which is less a concept than a description of who has lived on these streets. A full pan of Pan Collard Greens is $60, Mac and Cheese is $90, and Pan Jollof Rice is $85, all priced by the full pan for the kind of gathering this neighborhood has been holding since Weeksville.

We are not going to tell you this kitchen is a landmark or claim a place in the history above. It is one address among many on a long list. What is worth saying is that the combination on the menu, West African cooking and Southern cooking from the same stove, is unusual even here, and that argument is made properly in West African and soul food from one Crown Heights kitchen. If you are feeding a room in this neighborhood, catering in Crown Heights, Brooklyn is the practical page, or call 718-799-7160.