Crown Heights North: Holistic Neighborhood Preservation Through Community Archiving

This partnership between Crown Heights North Association (CHNA), Adjunct Associate Professor Rebecca Krucoff, and Masters Candidates in Historic Preservation Julia Bucci, Zoha Masood, Macarena Olivares Alvarez, and Judy Walsh extends the work of Pratt’s HP Heritage Documentation Studio in Spring 2025. The course, co-taught by Professors Rebecca Krucoff, Ward Dennis, and embedded historian Suzanne Spellen, researched and documented the Crow Hill section of Crown Heights in support of and in partnership with CHNA.

Through this initial experience, Krucoff and Spellen (on behalf of CHNA) became motivated to propose a Taconic project that would add to the depth of resources for interpreting and amplifying CHNA’s mission of Pride ~ Preservation ~ Community ~ Roots through a community archiving project. This project highlights the history of Black preservation empowerment by providing a model for community residents to add to and sustain their archival record and by identifying oral history sources– elders and their artifacts– who will contribute to the historical record.

The project will digitize and make publicly available records and ephemera important to CHNA’s history and advocacy; house and maintain collections of CHNA’s records in perpetuity through the Pratt Institute Libraries and Archives;  preserve and share cultural heritage through oral histories of community elders; expand the circle of CHNA’s activism through intergenerational relationships; provide students opportunity to partner with an empowered Caribbean and African American community which models self-directed preservation activism; and will begin to rectify the invisibility of Caribbean and African American preservation efforts in the historic record.