I heart Brooklyn

Via New York Magazine: As more-established groups go hunting for better real estate and newer groups replace them, the cultural map of Brooklyn we carry around in our heads quickly goes out of date. Sunset Park is becoming less Chinese and more Mexican, Bensonhurst less Italian and more Chinese, Flatbush more Jewish and more Muslim at the same time. The South Asian enclave in Kensington is expanding into Midwood and down to Brighton Beach.

“Anytime there’s a vacancy, it’s a South Asian family that’s moving in,” says Mohammed Razvi, executive director of the Council of Peoples Organization, a nonprofit group that helps new immigrants from its office on Coney Island Avenue. “Brooklyn is the Lower East Side for the South Asian community: As soon as they get out of JFK, they head here.”

The data streams don’t reveal much about the borough’s spiritual life, but this deceptively dull intersection anchors a rich religious ecosystem. The gorgeous eighteenth-century Flatbush Reformed Church hosts a Ghanaian Presbyterian congregation and also offers services in Spanish. Over on Coney Island Avenue, Makki Masjid, Brooklyn’s largest mosque, is undergoing a renovation to merge three buildings and accommodate 3,000 worshippers at once. A few blocks south, a Jewish girls’ school, Bet Yaakov Ateret Torah, has added new quarters.

Nowhere outside of Jerusalem do so many Jews and Muslims live in such intense proximity, observes Rabbi Bob Kaplan of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York—and here they enjoy a more uneventful coexistence. “No group is in control here,” says Kaplan. “They’re all here to participate in the American lifestyle.”

We head south toward Neptune Avenue in Brighton Beach, where the data show a surge of Mexicans and Bangladeshis among the Russians, whose children have been settling in Bensonhurst. Sure enough, several Spanish-speaking women are herding preschoolers into a doorway marked “Young Israel of Brighton Beach,” which houses a Head Start program. Across the street is the neighborhood Islamic Center. Just up the block a store advertises “Asian, Mexican, and Russian groceries.” Salvo chortles. “It’s nice when you can see the data. This is the future.”