Chris grew up in the Brownsville Houses. The playgrounds of his youth had been all around where he now stood. Those playgrounds had helped shape him into one of Brownsville’s legendary athletes. But they were gone now. The courtyard where he played stickball, now covered with scaffolding. The yard where he played touch football, now fenced in. Public School 125 and the blacktop where he played basketball, boarded up for more than three decades.
He turned up a pathway that snaked through the buildings and led back out to the street. Just then, a young man in green shorts sprinted by, looking back every few steps. Five seconds later, two police officers ran past in pursuit. Eight more uniformed officers followed at a jog. Sirens whooped in the distance. Suddenly dozens of youngsters, from first graders to college-age, filled the courtyard, popping out of doors and alleys, hustling toward the commotion.
“Yo, what are you running to?” Chris shouted at one of the packs. “You ain’t got no business here! Why y’all run to it? For what?”
He shook his head. They hadn’t learned to run away from trouble.
THE WRITER ALFRED Kazin described his native Brownsville as “a place that measured all success by our skill in getting away from it.” The neighborhood was born into poverty. Geography stunted its development: it was landlocked, filled with marshes, vulnerable to flooding, and far from Manhattan. For most of the nineteenth century, the area was sparsely populated, dotted with Dutch farms and small cottages, many of which were built by developer Charles S. Brown, the neighborhood’s namesake. Near the end of the century, manufacturers settled in—producing steel, syrup, garments, processed food, staples, paper boxes. They built factories and then tenements to house the workers. Thousands of families poured in from lower Manhattan’s slums: working class and poor, Italian and Irish and Russian, but mostly immigrants and mostly Jewish. The construction of two bridges, the Williamsburg in 1903 and the Manhattan in 1909, accelerated the migration into Brooklyn. From 1905 to 1920, Brownsville’s population soared from around 38,000 to 101,000.
There was a bit more space in Brownsville, and more jobs. It was a better situation than the Manhattan slums, but that was a low bar to meet. This was incremental progress. Smokestacks dotted the skyline and stretches of open land became garbage dumps. More than 90 percent of residents lived in tenements. Writer Jacob Riis called Brownsville “that nasty little slum.” Murder Incorporated, a gang of enforcers who carried out hundreds of hits for the Mafia during the Great Depression, based its headquarters inside a candy shop a block from Betsy Head Park. The neighborhood earned a reputation for violence and struggle. “Every New York Jew could feel certain about one thing,” writer William Poster said. “He was superior to anybody living in Brownsville.”
Chris Legree’s grandfather, Fred Evans, came up with his family from Georgia in the mid-1930s. His parents had been sharecroppers and had heard that New York City offered a better life. They rented a big, cheap house near Betsy Head Park. The neighborhood was more than 85 percent white then. They were the only black family on their block for some years, but after World War II, many more arrived. Those families found that they faced the same oppressive forces in Brownsville as anywhere else in America.
Most restaurants on Pitkin Avenue were for whites only. Landlords often charged black tenants double the average rent, and police officers regularly harassed and beat black residents. In one high-profile incident in 1948, officers approached two black couples packing things into a car for a trip and accused them of stealing the items. The officers argued with the four locals. They knocked one of the men unconscious and shoved his pregnant wife to the ground. Outraged by this incident and a string of similar ones, Brownsville’s black residents held a rally to protest police brutality. “Respect cannot be demanded if it is not practiced,” a New York Amsterdam News editorial declared to the police department.
Though the neighborhood’s blocks were mostly segregated, everybody hung out at Betsy Head Park, which looked bright and new in those days after a 1936 renovation financed by the New Deal and organized by New York City parks commissioner Robert Moses. An Olympic-size swimming pool and a brick bathhouse with glass block windows were constructed on the eastern half of the park. On the western side, soft grass stretched from fence to fence, interrupted only by a freshly laid baseball diamond on the far corner. Because there was only one diamond, Evans and his friends had to wait for the white people to finish before they could start a game.
Neither Evans nor his brothers had completed grade school, but they all found solid employment. Evans got a job with the city, in water sanitation. One brother worked at the post office, another in the parks department, and two at the lumberyards. Evans rented a house on Bristol Street, and he took good care of it. Years later, when the landlord decided to sell it, he offered it first to Evans, who accepted. It was a timely opportunity because private property was getting harder to come by in Brownsville.
In the 1940s, Moses chose Brownsville for a grand experiment in public housing. To make room for new highways, new bridges, new apartment buildings, and other “urban renewal” projects, he was knocking down homes across the city, mostly in black and Latino neighborhoods, and he needed places for all those displaced people to go. The city also needed more places to house the growing population of black families migrating north. Options were limited—landlords in most white neighborhoods refused to rent to black tenants, developers refused to sell to black buyers, and much of the city remained segregated. To Moses, Brownsville seemed a promising answer: the neighborhood’s population was mostly poor and working-class Jewish people who were relatively progressive on race and had little political power to push back; it was filled with dilapidated, cheaply constructed buildings; and it sat beside Bedford-Stuyvesant, a mostly black neighborhood that was becoming increasingly crowded. “Moses and his staff viewed places like Brownsville as the most likely location for future expansion of the black ghetto,” historian Wendell Pritchett wrote in Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto.
Moses’s interests happened to align with the interests of Brownsville’s most powerful residents, a small but vocal group. This subsidized housing plan was a progressive idea. Advocates for the poor had for years called on the government to build housing for low-income families to replace the grimy and cramped tenements that for decades had symbolized the horrors of America’s urban poverty. The Brownsville Neighborhood Council, a coalition of community leaders and business owners, led the campaign in 1940, releasing a pamphlet called Brownsville Must Have Public Housing. Many in the coalition envisioned these government-funded buildings serving as models for interracial living in a neighborhood filled with both poor white and poor black people. “Neither the white people nor the Negroes dwelling in the housing zone can afford to pay for adequate private housing,” the pamphlet stated, declaring that it was “the duty of our democratic society to help provide housing for those in the lowest income brackets.” The powerful parks commissioner sold his proposals to these well-meaning advocates.
Moses and other officials selected sites across the city for a wave of new public housing projects, with the biggest share of them in Brownsville. Advocates for the poor, in Brownsville and elsewhere, had envisioned the buildings surrounded by blocks of working-class or middle-income households—singular additions to be absorbed into the community in place. They objected to Moses’s plan to build sprawling, multibuilding facilities within a few blocks of one another, creating dense, isolated pockets of poverty. Many of these advocates, including leaders of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, lobbied for the city to build middle-income public housing in Brownsville to ensure “a wide range of incomes among tenants in the various projects in the area,” the Brooklyn Eagle reported at the time. These objections would continue over the coming years. In a 1965 New York Recorder column, Bill Marley, a Brownsville Community Council board member, said, “Low-income housing is needed, yes, but there is only so much that one communit
y can reasonably absorb.”
But in a memo to the New York City Housing Authority, Moses countered that he saw “no other way” to improve conditions in Brownsville. City officials backed him. They argued that the neighborhood was too dilapidated to draw middle-income people and that local residents were too poor to afford middle-income housing. “Great care has been taken in the selection of the sites,” Mayor Fiorello La Guardia said in a radio announcement. “All are in undesirable areas where there is not the slightest possibility of rehabilitation through private enterprise.”
The city bought and demolished private properties and then began construction. The Brownsville Houses went up first, in 1948, standing as one of the city’s few racially integrated projects: around half of its residents were white and half were black. Glenmore opened two years later. Then Howard and Van Dyke I in 1955, Tilden in 1960, Van Dyke II in 1964, Seth Low in 1967, Hughes in 1968, Woodson in 1970, Tapscott in 1972, and Prospect Plaza in 1974. To make room for Marcus Garvey Village, which opened in 1975, the city tore down the house on Bristol Street that had once belonged to Fred Evans. Eight more complexes went up over the next two decades, and by the turn of the twenty-first century, around 20,000 people lived in Brownsville subsidized housing, more than a third of the neighborhood’s households.
After the projects started going up and black people, with few places to go, started moving into them, white people fled. The neighborhood’s population shrank by 30,000 in the two decades following World War II. The low-income Jewish families that had occupied Brownsville for many years headed off to Canarsie and East Flatbush. Baptist churches replaced old synagogues. Public and private funding dried up for Brownsville’s biggest community groups, in part because their support for integration had become too politically contentious; white people were migrating away from brown people, not mixing with them. And as the neighborhood became less white, residents suspected that housing officials began ignoring the maintenance problems piling up in the projects, which were already showing “marked deterioration,” according to Rae Glauber’s 1963 survey of Brownsville.
The only people who moved to the neighborhood were those unable to land anywhere else. According to historian Pritchett, the way most white people and wealthier black people saw it, “Why would they choose Brownsville, an area that the city had so clearly directed toward decay?” By 1970, following decades of citywide redlining—the practice of giving preference to white rental or mortgage applicants, famously practiced by Donald Trump, among others—the neighborhood was 70 percent black and 25 percent Puerto Rican.
This was Chris Legree’s Brownsville. It was a tight-knit community, he would often tell people decades later. But it was also a community convulsed by the changes of the era and convinced that its city’s institutions cared little about the neighborhood. In 1967, when Chris was 11, a police officer shot and killed an 11-year-old local boy named Richard Ross. Residents took to the streets in outrage. Some threw bottles at officers and lit police cars on fire with Molotov cocktails. According to the New York Times’ report that week, one teenager taunted the cops by jeering, “Why don’t you shoot me? I don’t have a gun. This is not Mississippi. You can shoot me.” The riot calmed only after city officials called in Sonny Carson and other local black activists to help clear the streets.
The following year, the city granted the local community board, a majority of whose members now were black, control over the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district. The community board, frustrated by the poor quality of education, dismissed 19 teachers and administrators from Junior High School 271. All 19 were white, most of them Jewish. Albert Shanker, president of the city’s teachers’ union, deemed the decision “a kind of vigilante activity.” Mayor John Lindsay called it “anarchy and lawlessness.” The American Jewish Congress denounced the community board’s actions, and the Board of Education ordered the 19 educators to show up to the school anyway. Tensions between the neighborhood’s black and Jewish residents had existed for decades, thickening as the area’s racial demographics and political power base shifted. Now, the uneasy truce seemed to be shattering. When the dismissed educators returned to the school one May morning, hundreds of Brownsville residents blocked the entrance. Police arrived to prevent possible violence.
At the start of the next school year that fall, teachers across New York City went on strike to protest. The strike lasted three months, until the state stepped in and stripped the community board of its authority over the school district. The 19 dismissed educators got their jobs back, but the dispute had exposed a lasting divide. Shanker captured the mind-set of many white people of the era when he later reflected to the New York Times that “the whole alliance of liberals, blacks, and Jews broke apart on this issue. It was a turning point in this way. It was a fact in the late 1960s that the African-American community was moving from the idea of integration toward the idea of black power, toward organizations like Rap Brown or the Black Panthers. Was it civil rights for minorities or civil rights for everybody?”
In June 1970, two Brownsville residents, angry that the city’s sanitation department allowed garbage to pile up for days in the neighborhood without pickup, lit a mound of trash on fire. Police arrested the men, and riots started soon after. For two days, some locals lit more trash on fire, shattered windows, and looted stores. A year later, Brownsville residents marched through the neighborhood to protest social service cuts in the state’s budget. The rally turned violent when police tried to disperse the crowd. Residents and officers fought. Some people lit buildings and cars on fire and then threw rocks and bottles at the fire fighters. By the end of 1970, around 700 abandoned buildings dotted the neighborhood. After visiting in 1971, Boston mayor John White said that Brownsville “may be the first tangible sign of the collapse of our civilization.”
The following decade was rough on New York City, and Brownsville was hit hardest. Factories, which had fueled Brownsville’s economy for decades, closed down. Landlords cut their losses and abandoned properties. The most cynical among them lit the buildings on fire for insurance money. Facing bankruptcy, the city cut more services, and housing projects fell into disrepair, becoming dark, towering caverns of heroin addiction and violence. All across the city and country, housing projects had begun to emerge as monuments to failed public policy, a policy that warehoused a high concentration of poor people into cramped blocks outside the view of wealthy and middle-class residents. Brownsville was at the heart of this failure. Around 25,000 people, more than a third of Brownsville’s population, fled the neighborhood during the decade. By 1980, a fifth of the neighborhood’s men were unemployed and more than 40 percent of families lived in poverty. Brownsville historian Pritchett concluded, “Public housing and urban renewal ‘failed’ because they were not designed to address the root causes of the slum—economic inequality and racial discrimination.” At a time when many of America’s neighborhoods were turning increasingly poor and violent, Brownsville was among the poorest and most violent.
And, many would speculate years later, maybe it was this struggle, this nothing-to-lose environment, this breeding ground for grit that explained why so many great athletes came out of Brownsville. Chris Legree knew many of them. He played baseball with Willie Randolph. He played basketball with World B. Free, and his brother hooped with Pearl Washington. He saw Fly Williams hanging around the blacktops with his girlfriend Pam Grier. And then there was the quiet little boy in torn and dirty clothes who sometimes dropped by the Legrees’ apartment. He went by “Little Mike” and he kicked it with Chris’s cousin Kenny back then.
“Lemme tell you what we used to do with Mike Tyson,” Kenny said to Chris one day many years later, as the two men stood in front of the Brownsville Houses. “Me and my brothers, we used to take him on the bus. We used to ride on the back of the buses back then.”
“Hitchhike,” Chris added.
“A couple blocks up here, they had a store called Woolworths. We’d kick it in the Woolworths, you
know, steal and stuff like that. Come on out, get back in the bus. Ride Tyson to Brownsville. Beat him up!”
He paused to chuckle at the irony.
“We was a little older than him,” Kenny continued, “but mainly my brothers, they used to beat him up, take his stuff, man. Send him back to Amboy Street.”
“He wasn’t no star then,” said Chris, joining in the laughter.
“Yeah, he wasn’t no star,” said Kenny. Then his face got serious and he added, “But that’s how he got so tough. Then once he went to jail, went upstate, when he came back it was a different ball game.”
“He was ripped,” said Chris.
When Tyson gained fame as a boxer, Chris still saw the little kid who first started flying pigeons on a roof on Amboy Street. The kid who seemed to have it harder than the rest of them.
“Mike, he was just like us, man,” said Kenny. “But, you know, Mike was a little more messed up than what we were. ’Cause we used to have a mother and a father that we could run to. Mike’s mom, she was like in the drug game. He had no father. So Mike, he was always running around, here and there, seeing where he could get a plate of food. Used to come to my house sometimes, and sleep, eat, stuff like that.”
“When you look at a grown man and his behavior,” said Chris, “all that stuff in his childhood come into play.”
Chris grew up in a stable household with 10 siblings. His mother worked as a public-school receptionist for some years, before enrolling in college to get a degree and becoming a police officer. She kept all her children on track without Chris’s father around. He was an Air Force veteran and spent most of Chris’s childhood in prison. Chris didn’t hear from him until his senior year of high school. It was Chris’s grandfather Fred Evans who handled the discipline. The backbone of the family, Chris called him. He beat them for any disobedience. He never used a belt or a switch or an extension cord; just his hands. “He had big hands, too,” Chris said. “His philosophy was: If I don’t beat them, someone else gon’ beat ’em. Better them get beat here than out on the street.” And he retained this role until the day he died. A stroke left him partially paralyzed and he was unable to escape when his house caught on fire.
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