Culture
Portraits of the Neighborhood
One artist is painting 200 residents of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, to forge connections in one of the most rapidly changing parts of the borough.
On a recent rainy afternoon in Crown Heights, the artist Rusty Zimmerman sat behind his easel, trying to capture the pattern on Jon Greenberg’s signature bright blue Hawaiian shirt. Greenberg owns Rosco’s Pizzeria around the corner on Franklin Avenue—a street once infamous for crime, now notorious for expensive coffee shops and a rapidly evolving restaurant scene.
While he painted, Zimmerman tossed questions to Greenberg: how do you make the perfect pie? How did Rosco’s get its name? (Answer: Greenberg’s dog.) An audio recorder spun in the background, capturing the whole conversation. Zimmerman’s questions soon turned to the neighborhood itself—what’s good, what’s bad, what’s changing too quickly, what’s not changing quite fast enough.