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places like the 1652 Wyckoff Farm House or the ca. 1783 Lefferts House, are palpable reminders of early migration and development—processes that persists centuries later in Brooklyn through the gentrification and emergence of new neighborhoods.
The poet and playwright MICHAEL SCHWARTZ authored a collection of writings for this project including works of prose, poetry, and dialogue for a play. They are linked by the neighborhood of his youth, Coney Island, a place he calls “a volatile concoction” thanks to its eccentric composition of beach and boardwalk, honky-tonk culture, mix of ethnic groups, and high levels of poverty and crime. Schwartz expresses a personal history embedded in place, setting his works in such Coney Island sites past and present as the boardwalk, Luna Park, and the Robert Moses-era housing projects. In the story “A Voice for My Father,” incidents of an awkward ado- lescence are inextricably tied to such places as Neptune Avenue, Nathan’s Famous, and the Kiddie Park. In his novel in progress, time travel plays a central role; it is a literary device that allows the author to evoke cycles of development and decay, always haunted, as he says, by Coney Island’s “burning ghosts of history.”
DANIEL JOSÉ OLDER integrates modern forms of music with a story set in a historic locale, a means of evoking place as a realm that binds genera- tions and that carries forward the histories of its past inhabitants. Murder in Old Crow Hill is a contemporary opera to be staged at the Brooklyn Historical Society and screened in BRIC Rotunda Gallery’s Project Room. Older set his work, weaving a murder mystery amidst historical events, in Crow Hill, an early name for Crown Heights. The roots of the name are unclear. It may be a derogatory reference to a settlement of African American laborers who lived in shanties in the area, but “crow” may also refer to the inmates of the Kings County Penitentiary built at Crow Hill’s highest point in 1846. In Older’s musical drama set in the 1880s, a young girl is accused of murdering a police officer and is sent to the prison, an
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