The night was clear and warm when ten young men, all white, gathered in the East New York section of Brooklyn on July 21, 1966. They were members of a loosely knit group calling themselves SPONGE. They were the Proud Boys of their day. The name stood for Society for the Prevention of Negroes Getting Everything (or “n*****s,”depending on who was listening), a racist witticism currently making the rounds. Led by the red-haired James McMenemon, known as Sandy, and his younger brother John, a.k.a. Johnny Reb, SPONGE members converged on Frank’s Restaurant, located just before the apex of the triangle formed by Livonia and New Lots Avenues, to make what would become their last stand.
It was a fitting location. The triangle was a famous location in East New York, and a favorite hangout of a local neighborhood gang, the New Lots Boys, who counted a number of SPONGE guys among their ranks. Frank’s was their place, and one of the few remaining white holdouts in what had increasingly become a Black neighborhood over the last ten years. The SPONGE guys were there to heckle Mayor John Lindsay, who was meeting with local leaders about growing racial unrest. While Lindsay was inside discussing how they could ease the tension, SPONGE members carrying signs surrounded the place shouting, “Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate.” The number of picketers soon grew to thirty-five. Although the police hadn’t been alerted to Lindsay’s visit, word got out and a police detail of twenty-five cops were sent to keep order. Lindsay left without incident, but the boys didn’t come to chant slogans and go home. They wanted something to happen. The crowd continued to grow.
When a group of Black young men and boys came up from Warwick Street and made their way down New Lots Avenue the SPONGE mob charged. The patrolmen were able to stop them, but this was a more organized protest than they’d realized. Shots were fired. As kids ran in all directions, the police were pelted with rocks from above. They’d later find caches of bricks, bottles, and Molotov cocktails stashed on the roofs.
The crowd now numbered more than one hundred. A code 10-13 was sent for Dumont and Ashford Streets. Officer needs help. The cops who rushed to the scene found an eleven-year-old Black boy named Eric Dean lying in the street. His aunt, who’d heard shots, had seen her nephew clutch his stomach and collapse. He was just there to see the mayor, she said. Eric Dean was pronounced dead at Brookdale Hospital a few hours later.
Three more 10-13s were called in that night as the fighting spread and continued. Over one thousand officers eventually swarmed the neighborhood. Days later the NYPD would send out a memo titled “Unusual Disorder: 75th Precinct.”
Frank Fauci, the owner of Frank’s Restaurant, told reporters there hadn’t been any “real trouble” with the Black people who’d moved into the neighborhood, “until last week when they bombed a cab service where the white kids used to hang out.” From his point of view the trouble only began when Black residents fought back against ongoing resistance to their presence in Brooklyn. “The SPONGE kids?” Frank continued. “Oh, they’re just boys. There are about twenty of ’em and there’s no real harm in them. They’re just kids.” According to one SPONGE member, “The Negroes are breaking us up, and trying to throw us out of the neighborhood. We’re standing our ground and we’re not leaving.” The police report would say the crowd had grown to two hundred.
Two days after Eric Dean was murdered, Mayor Lindsay brought together twenty-four-year old SPONGE leader James McMenemon, thirty-five-year-old Vincent Jones, who was Black, and Robert Benjamin, a twenty-nine-year-old, who was Puerto Rican. Lindsay got the three men to shake hands and agree to a truce. “I understand Mr. Jones has a lot of friends,” McMenemon said, “and he seems to be a nice fellow. I’ll talk to my friends and he’s going to talk to his friends.”
Although Lindsay’s gathering was credited with calming things down, another meeting entirely was responsible. After learning what had happened, a few of Lindsay’s aides gathered to discuss how to respond. It was the first year of the Lindsay administration, and “We were still novices in a lot of ways,” Sid Davidoff, administrative assistant to the mayor, remembered. Dr. Frank C. Arricale, director of New York City’s Youth Board, had told them that morning that he knew a guy who knew Albert and Larry Gallo, mobsters who had ties to the Genovese crime family. Let me see if the Gallos would be willing to have a word with the SPONGE kids, he said. They might not care what the police say, but they weren’t going to ignore the Gallo brothers. It was an outrageous idea, but everyone agreed. Lindsay, however, was not consulted.
East New York was essentially under martial law, but the police issued Albert Gallo a pass. We don’t need the heat, Gallo told McMenemon. This is going to stop, right? When a member of SPONGE replied with a racial slur he was slapped to the ground. What choice did McMenemon have? SPONGE, who’d always been considered attention-craving posers in the neighborhood, was no longer a problem for the Lindsay administration.
The next day, when Lindsay gathered them in City Hall to meet with Black and Puerto Rican representatives, “We had a very different meeting than we would have had.” Lindsay would later defend Arricale from fierce criticism when word got out about how he’d addressed the situation.“You can’t always deal with people who are leaders in the Boy Scout movement. Sometimes you must call upon individuals with fairly rough backgrounds.”
“I would have sent the devil in if I thought it would have worked,” Davidoff says of their decision. “We were in unchartered territory, but one thing we knew was the police were not going to solve it. They always say the police are your first line of resistance. It’s actually your last line.”
Seventeen-year-old Ernest Gallashaw, a Black boy, was later arrested for Dean’s murder. Fauci was relieved. “Just think if it had been a white boy,” who had pulled the trigger. But Ernest Gallashaw hadn’t killed Eric Dean. Dean’s case was added to the growing list of unsolved murders in East New York, and it remains a cold case to this day.
Reverend Joseph Judge, of Our Lady of Mercy Church, said, “The whites in East New York have to get over the idea that this place is theirs. It’s our home too.” Another big problem, he said, was a lack of community organization. But East New York was brimming with community groups. Within weeks of the brawl, Frank Rivera and William Wright formed the United Negro and Puerto Rican Front (which was quietly investigated by the NYPD, who had a tendency to see community activists as a possible threat). SPONGE and those who shared their views not only objected to the influx of Black residents, but also to the many Puerto Rican families who were moving in.
East New York would simmer for the rest of the summer as helicopters hovered over the neighborhood during the day and a beefed-up police presence roamed the streets at night.
It hadn’t always been like this. East New York wasn’t perfect. Like every other neighborhood in New York, there were bad parts of town. The mob was in East New York. But they were more of a danger to each other than to their neighbors. For the most part.
Just a few years before racists had converged on Frank’s Restaurant, East New York had been a thriving community of working-class and middle-class Jewish, German, and Italian immigrant families and their descendants. It was the kind of place where all the moms in the neighborhood banded together to make sure you had dinner every night when your father lost his job. In 1948, Frederick Heidenreich, the son of German immigrants, published a memoir called Old Days and Old Ways in East New York. He described how the neighborhood grew from a “small cluster of farms to a community of modern homes, churches, and schools,” which still preserved “the best elements of suburban character.”
It was also a neighborhood on the way up. When actor Danny Kaye’s family moved to East New York from Williamsburg, they were surrounded by a lively and prosperous group of doctors, lawyers, dentists, and musicians. As far as the Kaye family were concerned, they’d arrived. For Jan Goldberg, who came to East New York in 1957 from Brownsville, the move to the Linden Houses was a step up. “It was like we moved to Heaven.” It was a feeling shared by many of his neighbors. When Jeff Eisenberg’s parents heard about the new middle-income housing in East New York (built by the New York City Housing Authority), they packed up their basement apartment in East Flatbush, also in 1957, and moved into the same projects, where Jeff began “a wonderful, wonderful childhood. It couldn’t have been much better. It was a great upbringing in great surroundings.”
“Those projects were a city unto themselves,” said Steven Lang, who also grew up in the Linden Houses. And every building was “a neighborhood within a city,” Goldberg added. Ira Cutler, whose grandmother bought a home across the street, made many friends in the projects. “There were hundreds and hundreds of kids in each building and on each block,” he said. When school was out kids ran through the halls, knocking on doors to ask if their friends could come out to play. From morning until night in the summertime, and after school the rest of the year, if they weren’t playing in the fields at George Gershwin Junior High, dozens of kids were always hanging out in front of the buildings, playing football, softball, or a street game called Ringolevio. “Everyone knew tons of people,” Ira said, and many remain friends to this day.
Then, in the 1960s, everything changed. It happened so quickly. It felt as if “the neighborhood was ruined overnight,” Ira recalled. Jeff ’s mother was mugged. Ira was mugged. Eric Dean was murdered. On the day of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, before they sent the kids home from Thomas Jefferson High School, administrators asked the football team to patrol the halls, protecting the students from possible protesters. “By 1970, you couldn’t walk down the street,” said Barry Kestenberg, who grew up in the projects. By that time, the families of Jan, Jeff, Ira, Steven, and Barry were gone. Like many others in the neighborhood, they fled the place that had once been a blissful and protected paradise.
How did East New York transition from a thriving neighborhood of German, Italian, and Jewish immigrants to a declining and neglected African American and Hispanic neighborhood where children were shot and killed? Many factors contributed. “We all knew somebody who went off to Vietnam and either didn’t come back or came back a shell,” said Steven Lang. Then heroin and other drugs started to appear. The lives of people “who were shining stars . . . were ruined by drugs,” Steven continued. For some, their “lives ended because of drugs,” adding, “Friends of mine robbed my house.” But two racist financial practices that had ramped up in the fifties and sixties, blockbusting and redlining, were the ultimate triggers. Brokers would convince white homeowners that if Black families moved into their neighborhood schools would go downhill, crime would rise, and property values would fall. They’d parade a Black family down the street to scare white homeowners into selling cheap, then sell the homes to struggling African Americans at inflated prices and pocket the difference. Blockbusting leveraged racial prejudice for profit. Once a neighborhood became predominately Black (or Puerto Rican), banks would literally draw red lines around the neighborhood boundaries, term everyone living within high credit risks, and automatically disqualify them for mortgages, credit, and other financial services.
Still, in the late sixties, East New York was not yet wholly lost, and two historic pieces of legislation passed in 1968 promised to be as important as the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the answer to the decline.
Together they would put an end to housing discrimination, redlining, and blockbusting, and make it easier for low-income families to find a decent home. In the same year that African American sanitation workers held up signs declaring “I am a man,” because it was something that still needed to be said, it looked as if the arc of the moral universe might actually be bending toward justice.
Black and Puerto Rican families who moved into well-cared-for homes left behind when white families fled began building safe, family-oriented enclaves. Walter Thabit, a city planner who’d been hired in 1966 to revitalize the area, wrote, “It would be incorrect to suggest that East New York must be raised from the dead. Much of the area is attractive; thousands of families live in the community with a certain amount of harmony, grace, and satisfaction.” East New York needed help, certainly, but it was also full of opportunity. “The two-family homes are modest in size, but structurally sound. They provide Negro and Puerto Rican families of modest means with the chance to own their own home and establish a middle-class life for themselves and their children.”
East New York was still a lovely neighborhood, and not everyone wanted to take up arms against the new neighbors. When long-time East New York activist and community leader Vivian Bright moved to Pennsylvania Avenue in the 1960s, she and her husband were the first Black family on her block and their white neighbors brought casseroles to welcome them. There was still a chance to turn it all around, and reason to believe they could.
The next year, Julia Arlequin brought her twenty-year-old daughter Nancy back to East New York; she had sent her to Puerto Rico a few years earlier for hanging out with the wrong crowd and getting into trouble. Things had quieted down. The danger was passing. In the small corner of East New York, where’d she’d made their new home, Julia’s other daughter was about to have a baby. It was time for Nancy to rejoin the family and help with the new arrival.
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