'It does all come together in this neighborhood': Stories from Kensington, Brooklyn
WNYC's Community Partnerships desk regularly teams up with the nonprofit, Street Lab, to collect and share stories from neighborhoods across the five boroughs. We recently stationed ourselves in Brooklyn's Kensington neighborhood. Here's some of what we heard.
The transcript of the voices we collected have been lightly edited for clarity.
Shuhana Uddin: "I'm from Borough Park slash Kensington. My story is I'm the oldest of five girls, and I'm currently a freshman in college. So it's really exciting staying in the city for college and just like being able to be with family. Growing up since I am Bengali American, I grew up with Bengali culture my whole life, and it really has impacted my love for the social sciences. That's what I studied in high school and made me just appreciate like the culture that we have here and how unique it is, and it shapes like just the culture of Brooklyn in general."
: "I am a mother. I have two kids and, one girl and one boy. I am one year ago in New York. I am from Bangladesh. My husband is in work, and I am looking for job. I have no choice because of my rent is very high. Because now here is one person income is not possible for survive family. I have dream. I have a small house and here is my family members is here. That's it. There's my dream."
David Miretsky: I like neighborhood. This is the place which I visit regularly. This this is the best produce store in the city. And then it's multicultural, multicultural everybody. Multireligion, multicultural, they're all mixed. It's a real America. I like it because I originally born in Ukraine, in Kyiv, yeah, and when I visited, and I saw the people homogenic very much. All, all this, suddenly all the same, and I said, oh, I miss this diversity. So that's what I like about this neighborhood. It's just very diversified. I came in 75 as a young man, fleeing the Soviet Union, fleeing the, you know, inequality, many things, many things, and I'm an artist, and I look for artistic freedom, first of all, you know, and everything else."
Cheryl Klein: My story is a story about thinking about stories. My grandfather was a professor of children's literature, and I'm now a children's book editor, and author, and a mother. So I spend a lot of my day thinking about the narratives we tell to children, how to make those the best narratives possible, so they can then tell better narratives with their own lives, and the business of doing that as well, cause since it's both an art and a science.
Michael Rosenbluth: I'm a Kensingtonian. This neighborhood is so rich in culture, and it's rich in options. I can crisscross Brooklyn every which way. I can get the F train, the G train. I can take the B35 bus. I could take the 67, 69, 103, and get wherever the heck I need to go. This neighborhood is between Borough Park and Kensington and Prospect Park, and the mix of folks, whether they're coming from a mosque, or a shul, or a church. It's just so unique because it does all come together in this neighborhood.
Doja Khandkar: It's really nice to be in this neighborhood, but more than anything, it's really nice to be in New York. I've lived in a lot of places. When I was, when I was really young, I lived in the Maldives, and I grew up in Bangladesh. Then I moved to America, and I lived in Iowa, and I lived in Chicago, and I lived in D. C. And finally, New York feels like home of all the places that I've been to. It's a place for all the oddballs to end up. To some extent, you know, everyone finds their home over here. It feels like I can blend in in this neighborhood that I don't seem to stick out so much. The signs are in Bangla. I can hear my own language. There's just something about the sheer size of this place. All the people that are here. All the people that come here.
