Starrett City, now I get it . . .

February 21, 2007
Brooklyn Tenants Reflect on Successful Experiment
By ELLEN BARRY

Life on the sixth floor of Building F3 continued more or less as usual last week. Fran Garcia’s 2-year-old grandson, in his pajama bottoms, padded down the hall to 6G, where Ethel Banks, 78, was lighting a candle in memory of her identical twin sister, June.

In 6E, a retired transit worker, Freddy Trow, 77, was sitting with Josie, his sweetheart, who had come down from 7C in a red satin housedress. At the end of the hall was Anna Sadovskaya, who worked for 30 years as a chemist, formulating plastics in Ukraine. She had made a honey cake.

Ms. Garcia grew up in Brooklyn, surrounded by family members in Canarsie. They were Italian, and 26 years ago, when she announced that she was moving to Starrett City, now called Spring Creek Towers, “they considered it the projects.” But now, after the decades of baptisms and cancer treatments and holiday dinners, the sixth floor has become her family.

“You just go over for coffee,” she said, “and before you know it, their children are godparents to your grandchildren.”

The relationships grew organically, but they were no accident. Starrett City was an audacious work of social engineering. It was marketed as an exclusive island of middle-class strivers in the blighted neighborhood of East New York, Brooklyn, when residents first moved in in 1974; even more remarkably, its planners carefully arranged families on each hallway, like chess pieces, to maintain the racial mix they considered most stable: 70 percent white to 30 percent black. Now, the 5,881-unit rental complex is being sold, prompting a fresh debate over affordable housing.

The unorthodox leasing practices have been abandoned, but residents still feel their community is “better than outside,” as Freddy Trow put it.