A plaque remaining from the Big Apple Night Club at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem.

Above, a 1934 plaque from the Big Apple Night Club at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem. Discarded as trash in 2006. Now a Popeyes fast food restaurant on Google Maps.

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Entry from May 14, 2013
Little Palestine (Bay Ridge, Brooklyn)

Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, has seen an influx of residents from Arab and Middle Eastern countries. The nickname “Little Palestine” has been cited in print since at least June 2008 and was popularized by its use in the book The Fourth Assassin: An Omar Yussef Mystery (2009) by Matt Beynon Rees.
 
Bay Ridge has also been nicknamed “Little Yemen” and “Beirut” for the same reason.
 
   
Wikipedia: Bay Ridge, Brooklyn
Bay Ridge is a neighborhood in the southwest corner of the New York City borough of Brooklyn, US It is bounded by Sunset Park on the north, Seventh Avenue and Dyker Heights on the east, The Narrows Strait, which partially houses the Belt Parkway, on the west and the Verrazano bridge on the south. While Fort Hamilton is often considered a separate neighborhood, it is part of Bay Ridge. Fort Hamilton and most of Bay Ridge share the ZIP code of 11209; the remainder is in 11220 (actually the Bay Ridge post office is in 11220).
 
Life
Bay Ridge is a largely middle-class neighborhood. With its strong family presence, it is not uncommon to see third or fourth generation families living in the region. Until the early 1990s Bay Ridge was a primarily Irish, Italian, and Norwegian[ neighborhood. Today, Bay Ridge maintains a sizable Irish, Italian, and Greek population, but like other areas in South/Southwest Brooklyn, late in the 20th century it saw an influx of Russian, Polish, and Lebanese, and lesser numbers of Chinese. In recent decades many Middle Eastern and Arab Americans have moved to Bay Ridge. Bay Ridge has many international restaurants and bars, especially along 3rd and 5th Avenue, its main commercial strips. Many refer to the community as “Brooklyn’s Gold Coast.”
 
Free Republic
I’m right near the area. Mosques are rising, though not as quickly as the churches are coming down. The old residents are moving out and being replaced by metrosexual professionals from all over. Little Palestine is growing and moving westward from 5th avenue. The constant is change, though I am not sure it’s for the better.
13 posted on 6/14/2008 2:49:09 PM by Cacique
 
Google Books
The Fourth Assassin:
An Omar Yussef Mystery

By Matt Beynon Rees
New York, NY: Soho Press
2009
Pg. ?:
“Perhaps the believers who live in Little Palestine.”
“What’s that?”
“Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.”
   
Crimespace
Nasty nargila and biblical heat on video
Posted by Matt Rees on July 14, 2009 at 10:23pm
(...)
This week I stopped in to shoot a video for my next novel, THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, which will be out in February. The book’s set in Brooklyn. My Palestinian detective Omar Yussef travels there to visit his son, only to find a dead body in his son’s apartment. The action of the book takes place mostly in Bay Ridge, which is becoming “Little Palestine” due to an influx of Palestinian immigrants. There are also chapters around the U.N. in Manhattan and in Coney Island.
       
Creeping Sharia
Bay Ridge, Brooklyn: ‘Little Palestine’
Posted on February 5, 2010 by creeping
(...)
Bay Ridge - an area that was once a first line of defense against the Redcoats – has been transformed into “Little Palestine.”
 
In “The Fourth Assassin,” Omar Yussef comes to New York for a U.N. conference. He visits the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn, which these days is becoming known as “Little Palestine” because of the steady influx of immigrants from the West Bank.
 
Little Palestine isn’t a community of Palestinian intellectual emigres of the kind that emerged in most major Western capitals during the 1970s. It’s a new wave of mostly young men who come to drive taxis and work several jobs, until they can afford to bring their families over to join them. Theirs is the typical American immigrant story, in fact. Except for the FBI investigations.

 
New York (NY) Times
CRIME
Devil’s Island
By MARILYN STASIO
Published: February 26, 2010
(...)
New Yorkers are bound to be startled by the views of their city advanced by Matt Beynon Rees in THE FOURTH ASSASSIN (Soho, $24). In his new mystery featuring Omar Yussef, a Palestinian who teaches history at a school for girls in Bethlehem, Rees, a former Jerusalem bureau chief for Time magazine, brings his series’s hero to New York for a conference at the United Nations. But first, Yussef visits “Little Palestine,” in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, where his youngest son lives — and stumbles onto the headless corpse of one of his son’s roommates.
   
WNYC
In NY’s Little Palestine, Few Have Hope That Statehood Bid Will Make a Difference
Monday, September 19, 2011 - 06:38 PM
By Mirela Iverac
As the U.S. scrambled to avoid a showdown at the United Nations over the Palestinian bid for statehood, belief that the new initiative will not bear any fruit prevailed in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, home of New York’s Little Palestine.
 
Brooklyn Campaign
Romney’s Remarks on Palestine Stir Contrasting Reactions in Brooklyn
Posted by Nikolas Iubel on September 30, 2012 in District 17
BROOKLYN, N.Y. – Mitt Romney’s secretly videotaped remarks that Palestinians “have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace” have been met with mixed reactions in different areas of New York City’s most populous borough. The strongest opinions on his remarks, which are now at the core of the presidential race, come from New York’s own Middle Eastern microcosm: the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Midwood – a heavily Jewish populated area – and, three miles away, Bay Ridge, which is also known as Little Palestine.
 
Twitter
Joe Catron ‏@jncatron 8 Dec
@HomsiAnarchist @DarthNader @cwharlow @MahmoudR_ @ingili3 Palestinians are the biggest Arab grouping in Bay Ridge/“Little Palestine”, no?
7:19 PM - 8 Dec 12
         
The Margins (Asian American Writers’ Workshop)
A New Resistance in Brooklyn’s ‘Little Palestine’
Bay Ridge group pushes back vs. Islamophobia
sans politicians and beyond electoral cycles.

By Sumaya Awad
OCTOBER 6, 2017
(...)
Mariam’s neighborhood is home to one of the largest Muslim and Arab populations in the country. Walking through Bay Ridge, it’s impossible not to be drawn to the racks of spices displayed in the corner bodegas. Cloves, cardamom, and cinnamon waft through store fronts and linger in the dining rooms of Palestinian and Yemeni restaurants like Yemeni Cafe and Tanooreen, two popular restaurants Arabs from around the city flock just for a bite of Mansaf or Lamb Haneeth.
   
But the neighborhood hasn’t always been ‘Little Palestine’ as it’s known today.
   
Untapped New York (May 6, 2022)
A GUIDE TO BAY RIDGE’S GROWING ARAB COMMUNITIES
Noah Sheidlower NOAH SHEIDLOWER
In Bay Ridge, a neighborhood in the southwest corner of Brooklyn, the scent of cinnamon and cardamom wafts out into the streets, which are lined with Yemeni and Palestinian restaurants, shops selling traditional clothing and manufactured goods, and community and religious centers lining every block. That’s because the neighborhood is home to a rapidly growing community of Arab residents who have nicknamed the neighborhood “Little Palestine” and “Little Yemen.” Though some residents have had family in New York City for over a century, including some who trace their lineage to a wave of Syrian migrants who fled the Ottoman Empire in the late 1800s, most started coming in the 1960s and ’70s, with new waves from the Middle East in the last few years escaping conflict and unrest. Bay Ridge has one of the largest Arab-American and Middle Eastern populations of any neighborhood in New York City, though it was not always so ethnically diverse.

Posted by Barry Popik
New York CityNeighborhoods • Tuesday, May 14, 2013 • Permalink


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