How Hattie helped save Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn, part two

Many unconnected threads, bits, and pieces of life experiences, came together to make Hattie a successful community leader.? She was born in September 1900, a city child, in Washington DC.? Her father was a Baptist minister and at one point, before 1917, Hattie’s family lived on Eastern Long Island. The family had a car, and Hattie would ride with her father on the long journey into Brooklyn on the weekends where he would preach and lead church services. ??As a child, Hattie found the long drive very boring.? To pass the time, she would pick out certain trees along the way that she admired.? On every trip, she would look for these trees, and as they drove by, Hattie would check up on them to see how they were growing.? Young Hattie decided to adopt these trees, and each week check on them like a mother would check on her children.?

Hattie, her family remembered, was a curious child, and always went to bed with a book.? Thanks to her father and his preaching style, Hattie learned to be an excellent public speaker.? Her accent was delightful, each word pronounced clearly from beginning to end, with a slight touch of a Virginia accent which she used to give some of the words in her sentences a gentle lilting, an almost sophisticated British sound, to them.?Hattie also loved meeting people and speaking to people.? Her sister remembered that it was truly wonderful to see how quickly Hattie could get someone engaged in an enjoyable conversation.

At age 17, Hattie married 19-year-old George Hale and the family moved to Portsmouth Virginia.? New homes had just been built on Key Street, built especially for Black families.?George worked as a laborer at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard.? Hattie loved the tall trees, fresh air, and the Black community that created the little village of Truxton.?Soon Hattie and George were raising two sons there.? Sometime around 1926 Hattie and her family moved north to Brooklyn New York. Hattie would spend the rest of her life living in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Somehow, Hattie hoped she could bring the big trees, fresh air, and friendly Black community of Truxton to the city with her.? Many Black families moving from the South to Brooklyn felt the same way.?

?Life was hard in Brooklyn.? As soon as she arrived, Hattie noticed that people she met in Brooklyn did not love trees the way she did.? They seemed to feel “indifferent” about trees and the “wonders of nature” that she so much enjoyed back in Virginia. Hattie used her people skills and worked as a waitress and later as a school teacher.? George worked as an apartment building superintendent.? Hattie’s two sons, her parents, and her two brothers lived with them on Bainbridge Street. She made sure her son Reginald went to college. By 1937 her husband George had left the family and Hattie lived alone with the two boys, struggling to support them.? Soon a severe case of arthritis attacked her, making her joints ache and shrivel.? She could barely move, “I was a cripple” she remembered.?

While struggling with arthritis, Hattie remarried in 1943. ?Sam Carthan worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and owned a car.? She and Sam would head out of Brooklyn every autumn and admire the colorful trees in the countryside.? In 1954, they began to look for a home to buy in Brooklyn.? Home prices were high, but Hattie managed to save for a home in Bedford-Stuyvesant.? She chose a home on Vernon Avenue.? The homes on the street were beautiful and well-kept, and best of all, beautiful trees lined both sides of the street.? Finally, Hattie could live in a neighborhood that reminded her of the countryside.?

?Then the same Block Busting tactics real estate developers used to tear apart many other neighborhoods, came to Vernon Avenue in the late 1950’s.?Homes were abandoned, roofs caved in and buildings collapsed.? The city workers did not show up to pick up trash or clear away debris.? Crime came to the sidewalks.? People were afraid to go out on the street at night.? Instead of walking their trash out to garbage cans in the evening, fearful people tossed trash out the windows and hoped it would be picked up.? Hattie’s sons convinced her to put bars on her windows to keep out robbers. Worse of all, slowly all but three trees on Vernon Avenue died or were cut down.

Hattie watched all of this happening but had little time to think about it. For the first time in her life, Hattie had a job she enjoyed.? She was hired by a market research company.? Her job was to speak to people about their likes and dislikes and help companies develop products based on the answers people she interviewed gave.? This job fit her personality perfectly.? It also gave her lots of experience learning about the essence of a person by being a skillful interviewer.? At first, the company gave Hattie only Black people to interview.? After seeing her amazing skills, the company began to have her interview people of all races and ethnicities.? Hattie could make anyone comfortable speaking with her, and she was comfortable speaking to anyone.? For the first time in her life, Hattie had a good-paying job, and a job that brought her joy and one she excelled at.?

?In 1964, at the age of 64, Hattie Carthan decided it was time to retire. She lived in an era when most people were expected to live only to age 72. She had the money and now had just a few years left to relax a bit after a hard life. As she looked over her Vernon Avenue neighborhood, she wondered what it would be like to spend most of her day there rather than at work.? Now that she had some savings, she wondered if she should sell her home on Vernon Avenue and move to St. Albans in Queens New York. This was the neighborhood of fine homes where baseball player Jackie Robinson and his wife Rachel recently lived.? Those streets were lined with trees like Vernon Avenue once had, and St. Albans had no crime or trash littering the streets. She wondered what her retirement should be like, should she relax with her feet up in St. Albans Queens, or should she spend her days trying to save her Vernon Avenue neighborhood?? ?After some thought, she decided that the problems on Vernon Avenue would follow her to St. Albans.? The problems of racism, joblessness, crime, litter, and hopelessness had to be solved there on Vernon Avenue or they would continue to spread.? Hattie decided that step one to solving these problems was caring. “So I decided to meet the challenge.”? She explained simply.?

?Hattie started to save her neighborhood by taking a walk.? She began doing market research, but this time researching the homeowners in her own neighborhood, finding people who seemed to care about their homes and sidewalks.? On a note card, Hattie wrote down their street addresses.? Back at home, she wrote a letter to these homeowners telling them that she wanted to form a Block Association.? She proposed that she and her neighbors meet together and come up with ways to restore the neighborhood to the safe and beautiful place it once had been.? Hattie expected dozens of people to show up at the first meeting, instead just seven people came.? It seemed to Hattie that most people thought she was too old to form and lead a Block Association. The problems on Vernon Avenue seemed too big for a retired Black woman to take on. To the seven people who showed up at the first meeting, Hattie said: “People say [to me], ‘leave it to younger people, you’re too old’, but you could sit forever waiting for younger people…we’ve already lost too many trees, houses and people, your community-you owe something to it. I [don’t] care to run [away].”

?During the meeting, Hattie used her interview skills to get to know all seven people who showed up.? They soon saw how she was interested in their ideas. The group saw that Hattie wanted to work with them to make their ideas and dreams come true, not impose her ideas on them.? This Block Association would try to be an organization where everyone had a voice and everyone was appreciated. Hattie told them that she believed that Black people working together had shown time and time again that they could make powerful changes for good. The Block Associations in Bedford-Stuyvesant in the 1930’s had once been powerful forces for good and their group could be just as effective.? She told the group that their hidden talent, the power to find solutions and make change happen, would be the “essence of the movement.”? ?The group decided on a name, the T&T Vernon Block Association.? T&T stood for Tompkins and Throop Avenues, but Hattie loved the fact that the name sounded like TNT or dynamite.? The group name revealed the power Black people had to turn their neighborhood around.

Next, the group decided that they needed to attract more neighbors to join and raise some money to pay for some kind of dramatic improvement to Vernon Avenue.? They decided to hold a Block Party.? A neighbor offered to roast a pig.? The group would charge $1.25 for a plate of food.?

?The 1964 Block Party was a success, over a hundred people showed up and the group earned $200 and more people began to join their Block Association.? At the next meeting, after congratulating themselves on their first success, the neighbors started to discuss how to spend the money.? What improvement could they buy for two hundred dollars that would tell the community that positive change was coming to Vernon Avenue??? Should they buy a new street lamp, or pay for someone to clean the littered streets?? Hattie spoke up and said “Let’s buy some new street trees!”? She told everyone there that her dream was to raise money to line the street with trees once again. “Why not start with four using the money we raised?” She said.

Everyone in the group hated the idea. Trees drop leaves and the leaves rot and make dirt which just adds to the grime and litter already on the street, they told her.? Hattie began to tell them all of the reasons why her idea was a good one.? The discussion got very heated.? For a while, it looked like her neighbors would throw her out of the group. They called her “Tree-nut” and “Tree idiot,” but Hattie was very good at persuading people. After a lot of discussion “old age prevailed” as she put it, and she was allowed to use the money to buy four trees.? The group planted the trees, but all four trees died.? The trees Hattie bought had a warranty, so she was able to replace them for free.? Next, Hattie began to teach herself about how to help a street tree survive, and with that knowledge, the next four trees began to grow and thrive.

Soon it became clear to the T&T Vernon Block Association that Hattie’s simple tree-planting plan had the power to transform a neighborhood.? Hattie had discovered the secret ability of trees to restore a broken city long before ecologists and sociologists came to similar conclusions. Her life, long before in Truxton Virginia, was made pleasant because of its trees.? When Hattie first moved to Vernon Avenue in the 1950’s, she brought some of the country to the city by adopting trees growing on Vernon Avenue’s sidewalks.? Connecting with a tree as one connects to a person, gave Hattie a comfortable connection to the natural world.? Vernon Avenue was a case study for Hattie.? When Vernon Avenue had trees she saw how those trees connected people with nature and provided cool fresh air, when the trees were gone, she saw how the lack of trees in the summer led to dirty air, overheated homes, and unhappy people.?

Bringing the trees back was also a powerful sign of hope. The T&T Vernon Ave Block Association purposely planted beautiful trees in front of homes that were burnt-out shells of their former selves.? The tree was a powerful symbol of two things, first, the tree said that “this place mattered” and deserved to have a beautiful tree growing there. People could see how much each new tree improved the look and feel of the street. ?Second, the tree brought hope that one day the home behind the tree would be restored, and the owners would once again enjoy the shade and clean air provided by a beautiful street tree.? The group came up with a powerful motto for what they were doing, “[Plant] a tree, save a neighborhood.”

The T&T Vernon Ave Block Association began to dream of hundreds of groups just like theirs raising and buying street trees to place in front of the empty lots and burnt buildings of Bedford-Stuyvesant.? Hattie figured she needed someone to draw in large crowds for their 1965 fundraiser.? She wrote a letter to the mayor of New York at the time, John Lindsay.? Hattie explained why planting trees in Bedford-Stuyvesant was such an important method for restoring the neighborhood. She asked him to attend their next barbeque.? He agreed to attend. ?After his appearance at the barbeque, many new Block associations formed with the goal of raising money and planting trees.? Even better, after the barbeque the mayor agreed to plant ten street trees for every four trees each Block Association purchased.? Soon Hattie was busy inspiring and advising over 100 tree-planting Block Associations called the Bedford-Stuyvesant Beautification Association.? All the groups together planted more than 1,2000 trees.? Many of the larger trees growing along the streets of Bedford Stuyvesant were planted by these groups in the 1960’s. Part Three: Hattie plants seeds in the minds of the next generation of community leaders

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