The owner of a new kosher steakhouse in Crown Heights wanted the mural painted over, according to the rumor.
Sean Price, the mural’s subject, a local rapper who was known to his fans as “Ruck” and who made up half of the hip-hop duo Heltah Skeltah, had died in 2015 from unknown causes. His lyrics memorialize the drugs, gun violence and casual racism of inner-city life.
On July 8, Marie Cecile Flageul, a curator at the Museum of Street Art (MoSA), woke up to two workmen whitewashing part of the wall on which the mural was painted; the image of Price himself had so far remained intact. When she and her partner, Jonathan Cohen, who painted the mural, demanded that they stop, Ms. Flageul said the workers indicated that they were taking orders from the restaurant owner across the street.
“This is more than a painting of a mural — it’s a shrine,” Ms. Flageul said.
Ms. Flageul and Mr. Cohen, better known by his tag name Meres One, are no strangers to graffiti preservation. Both were players in the landmark case involving 5Pointz, a complex in Long Island City, Queens, that housed the work of 21 graffiti artists, including Mr. Cohen’s. Five years after about 45 illustrations were whitewashed by a new developer, a federal judge fined him $6.7 million for destroying public art.
On July 10, the rumor spread even more after Price’s widow, Bernadette Price, posted on Facebook about the mural being in danger. She also created an online petition to save the mural, which surpassed its 15,000 signature goal.
But a story that began with concern over the preservation of a neighborhood’s cultural heritage rapidly devolved into threats and hate speech.
“If that mural goes down, the restaurant gonna go down next,” read one comment on Ms. Price’s post, accompanied by flame emojis.
Crown Heights is no stranger to racial tensions. In 1991, three days of street riots took place after a 7-year-old black boy was killed by a Jewish driver and hours later, a 29-year-old Jewish student was stabbed to death in apparent retaliation.
Although the neighborhood has seen relative peace since then, gentrification has brought with it some familiar challenges. “There are deep-seated issues that we all need therapy for in this community as we watch it grow,” said New York City Councilman Robert E. Cornegy Jr. “There is a “tendency to rehash old tensions when a new situation arises.”
CreditMark Abramson for The New York Times
On July 23, New York State Assemblywoman Diana C. Richardson and Rabbi Yaacov Behrman, a Chabad-Hasidic community liaison, organized a meeting for community members and local politicians at Meat, the kosher steakhouse in the middle of the controversy.
The rumors about the mural were addressed, as well as concerns over the restaurant’s sanitation practices and the earpiece-wearing security guard at Meat’s entrance. He had been hired about a month ago to protect the restaurant staffers as they prepared to open, causing the business to further stand out against a backdrop of laundromats and fish markets.
Danny Branover, the head of Basil Hospitality Group, which owns Meat, attended the meeting, too. “I had no choice,” he said. “I had to be there to defend myself.”
In 2010, Mr. Branover opened Basil, a high-end kosher Italian restaurant on the corner of Kingston Avenue and Lincoln Place; in 2017 he opened Bakerie, a kosher artisanal pastry and bread shop on Albany Avenue and Sterling Place. Meat is on Kingston Avenue and Bergen Street. With each new restaurant, Mr. Branover has pushed further into majority-black neighborhoods. “I wanted to help close the gap between these two communities,” he said.
Eric L. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, said that Mr. Branover succeeded, for a time, in closing this gap.
A regular at Basil, Mr. Adams would frequently hold late-night political meetings at the restaurant when he was a state senator, he said. “It was good food, a good atmosphere.” Most of all, he said, local residents were “grateful that somebody was willing to open a well-lit, well-trafficked business on what had been a very dangerous corner.”
But the kind of business that was once heralded as a sign of positive change is now seen as a threat, Mr. Adams said. “Gentrification and displacement have led to a super sensitivity toward anything new that opens in the area,” he continued. “Where Basil saw a welcome mat, Meat now faces an unwelcome mat.”
In 2010, when Mr. Branover first pushed past the unspoken Eastern Parkway divide that has traditionally separated the Jewish and black neighborhoods in Crown Heights, he received visceral pushback from his own community, he said. “They said, ‘You can’t break bread with gentiles!’”
Today, Basil has set a precedent for other artisanal kosher restaurants in the neighborhood, from Alenbi, a small-plate, kosher Israeli cuisine spot on Nostrand Avenue, to Izzy’s Smokehouse, a Texas-inspired kosher barbecue spot on Troy Avenue.
TENSIONS WERE HIGH at the July 23 meeting. As the politicians in the room scrambled to referee comments, a cacophony of grievances, finger-pointing and accusations brought the meeting “from zero to one hundred,” Mr. Cornegy said.
Morenike Lambert, who works for a charter school network that supports low-income students, accused Mr. Branover of only inviting one “type of person” to Meat: “white people, Jewish people like you.” Mr. Branover refuted the accusation until New York State assemblywoman Tremaine S. Wright intervened to refocus the conversation on the mural.
Voices continued to be raised and fingers continued to wag and point for about an hour. But suddenly, community council president James Caldwell interrupted the heated discussions to say there had been a major misunderstanding.
It turns out that about 10 days before the meeting, Apolinar Severino, the owner of the building housing the mural, had told Mr. Caldwell that he claimed full responsibility for attempting to paint over the image of Mr. Price. Mr. Severino had been advised by a real estate agent to whitewash the entire wall while trying to refinance his mortgage on the property, he said.
Mr. Caldwell said that upon hearing the news, he immediately told Bernadette Price, asking her to let concerned parties know that the mural was safe for the moment. But the rumor persisted about Mr. Branover, who continued to be blamed on social media, until Mr. Caldwell reiterated what he knew during the tense meeting of July 23.
Mr. Severino, who did not attend the meeting, is not so sure about removing the image anymore. “I didn’t know it was going to be a big thing,” he said.
Rabbi Behrman said that he was “frightened” by the “simmering tensions” in the room during the meeting. He added that he found it deeply troubling that some community members knew that Mr. Branover was not responsible for the mural days before the meeting.
Ms. Price said that she considered “all to be hearsay” before July 23, adding that Mr. Severino had repeatedly declined to speak with her on the matter. Following the meeting, however, Ms. Price wrote another Facebook post, giving an update on what attendees had been told.
Some residents are frustrated with the level of development in their neighborhood. Desmond Atkins, president of the Bergen Street Block Association, said that he has watched the Crown Heights scenery change from swinging jazz clubs to West Indian markets, and from dilapidated storefronts to artisanal coffee spots and yoga studios.
“When we see new businesses open here that don’t seem to be for us, we feel left behind,” said Mr. Atkins, 68.
“For some the change represents something good,” Mr. Cornegy said. “For some, what it means is the community is happening to them and not for them.”
“I wanted to uplift the neighborhood,” Mr. Branover said, gesturing at the newly renovated building. A New York City historic landmark, the brick building was dilapidated and vacant when he bought it in 2012. “Since when have I become the enemy?”
Yet the language of “improvement,” which came up several times throughout the meeting, can also be interpreted as “the ultimate disrespect,” Mr. Cornegy said. “The feeling is ‘I don’t need you to upgrade my community.’ To the people who have lived here, worked here, worshiped here, that is disrespect.”
Meat is scheduled to open in mid-August. In the meantime, leaders from both communities have redoubled their commitments to mutual respect and open communication.
“Racializing this conversation is the easy way out,” Ms. Richardson said. “Our community is bigger than this. We can all be bigger than this.”
