Thursday, December 18, 2014

Williamsburg History

This picture from the New York Times, August 1, 1974, charting out the 
various turfs of northern Brooklyn street gangs.  It's not a souvenir from 
the film  The Warriors, but an actual list of the many violent gangs which 
kept Brooklyn a dangerous place to walk around in during the 1970s.























By the 1970s, Williamsburg was best known for its steeply rising crime 

rate, harboring both violent street-gang activity and organized crime.
The New York Times ran of list of several notorious Williamsburg gangs, 
including the Dirty Ones, the Driggs Boys Of Justice, the Tomahawks
the Devils Rebels and the Screaming Phantoms. In 1981 Luis Garden 
Acosta, a prominent community leader, called northern Brooklyn 
(Williamsburg, with its neighbors Bushwick and Greenpoint) the 
“killing fields” for the number of teenagers killed in bloody gang 
conflicts.
There is a nice little article on Brooklyn in 1981 here.

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