By Miriam Coleman
Brooklyn Daily Eagle

FLATBUSH -- Inside a coach bus rolling down Ocean Avenue on Wednesday morning, a tour guide asked his audience to point north. Most got it right—a good start for a tour designed to orient newcomers to the patchwork of neighborhoods that make up middle and southern Brooklyn. Over the last eight years, the tour has become a regular part of the introduction for professors in their first year of teaching at Brooklyn College.

“There’s a difference between knowing your students in the classroom and seeing where they live,� says tour guide Jerome Krase, emeritus and Murray Koppelman professor of sociology at Brooklyn College. The tour’s route was selected to highlight the diverse neighborhoods that produce the majority of the college’s student body.

As the bus turned down Emmons Avenue in Sheepshead Bay and headed toward its first stop in Brighton Beach, Krase recounted the movement of various ethnic groups in and out of the neighborhoods. He and implored his audience to look closely at the people, the shops, the signage, and the types of housing that make up communities.

He called the group’s attention to the subtle cues of class, race, and religion that identify ethnic enclaves, such as the stone facades and front-garden grape vines of the Italians, and the security bars and open balconies that signal Orthodox Jewish homes.

The tour group included the targeted first-year teachers, as well as a handful of seasoned Brooklyn veterans, students and faculty who have been on the tour before.

“I’m gonna get homesick. I always do,� says Provost William Tramontano, who recently returned to his childhood borough after a long exile in the Bronx. “I look for the ball fields where I played as a kid.�

Krase’s tour is not just a sentimental journey, however, nor a simple celebration of multicultural Brooklyn. On a stretch of the route through Bensonhurst, near the spot where Yusuf Hawkins was murdered 20 years ago, the professor acknowledged the racial violence that has occasionally exploded as different groups have rubbed up against each other and sometimes pushed each other away.

“In many cases, they don’t like each other at all,� he said. “But they do know that if you want to get what you want and get ahead, you have to get along with people who are different from you.�

The tour offered a variety of revelations to its participants. Steve Clark, a visiting professor of nutritional sciences who has lived in Brooklyn for three years, was bewitched by the selection of dried noodles (rice, wheat, clusters, sticks) that he saw during the Sunset Park Chinatown stop. “It gives me thoughts on where I might cast a line on places to go for dinner,� Clark said.

“I was born and grew up in this kind of neighborhood, so everything is familiar,� said Shang Ha, a political science professor from Korea. “But it’s still even more diverse than I expected.� He was interested to learn about the subtle variations in culture, and hoped that it would help him better understand where his students were coming from.

Handball Courts

Among the amenities available along the route, Krase recommended the handball courts off the Brighton Beach boardwalk and the economical selection of produce available in most ethnic neighborhoods.

“Many people talk about how they ran away from Brooklyn because of all the new people coming in,� Krase said as the tour moved from Orthodox Borough Park through Bangladeshi Kensington to its final stopover in Caribbean Flatbush. “As someone who has stayed, if it weren’t for the new people coming in, Brooklyn would be a disaster. It would be a wasteland.�

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