The newspaper AM New York did a writeup on Sunset Park yesterday. You can find the entire paper in PDF format here and the article starts on page 18. Only one problem with the article is that the reporter didn't research the borders of Sunset Park. Sunset Park goes North to the Prospect Expressway and the Eastern border goes to 9th Avenue not 8th. The borders were meant to coincide with the zip codes and 11232, for example goes to 9th Avenue. Other than that, it makes for interesting reading..
[where: 11232]
[where: 11220]
[where: 11215]
[where: 11218]
[where: 11219]
[where: 11228]
[where: 11214]
[where: 11204]
2 comments:
Hey Frank, I think I'm gonna have to take issue with you (99.9% of the time I find you dead on right). Sunset Park's eastern border is for the most part the center of 8th Avenue. It isn't very bright, and I submitted testimony to a commission a decade ago to change it to 9th Avenue and thus logically embrace both sides of the busy 8th Avenue - but it was rejected.
Historically sunset park has always gone to the middle of 8th Avenue and the reasoning is - if you need something done you have to go to your community board.
Right now there is a lot of angst over the sunset park rezoning that did not include the other side of 8th avenue - because of the community board lines. Also zip codes are fairly arbitrary, years ago we moved to get most of our city agencies to draw their lines - like police boundaries to match community board lines.
Personally, after 40 years of defending the prospect expressway to the long island railroad cut, from the waterfront to 8th Avenue as being sunset park, i am a realist and willing to give up. I accept that if enough people in an area think they are a different neighborhood, maybe it should be recognized - like greenwood heights. Also, I found it hard to get folks on the north end to work with us in the "bulk" area of the community - 40's & 50's, when greenwood cemetary and industry eliminated all residential existance from 25th to 36th (with the exception of several solid, strong-willed residential blocks).Oh, also, on the north, for some reason cb7 goes past the sunset park border to 15th street and while it goes against my logic stated above, i have never considered those blocks sunset park because of their very strong park slope ties (and the physical separation caused by the Prospect Expressway) in my opinion over-ruled the importance of knowing they are in cb7.
thanks to your hotlink to the article, i just read it and have one more issue - this time with them - the nabe was strongly scandinavian - with the biggest single group the Norwegians, but we can't leave out the strong Finnish presence - they built the first co-ops in the United States here in Sunset Park - and these buildings still provide great housing around the park. Also, the article left out the Italians. While the Scandinavians came with the Irish early on, they were quickly followed by the Italians. The Poles were a very small presence with a surprising surge in the mid-80's. As a kid, in the 60's, the big three were Irish, Italian & Norwegians, and then an overwhelming migration of Puerto Ricans began.
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