Linda Greer can still vividly remember the Bedford-Stuyvesant of her youth, where almost every family she grew up around was Black and the bars in Brooklyn, like the one her parents owned, the Tip-Top Bar and Grill, were not a rarity.
Now, the ruby red awning that defines the neighborhood staple that she and her family still own and operate sticks out amid the newly built apartment buildings, wine shops and cafes that make up a larger part of her block and most others around it. The bar’s regular patrons, who used to be mostly Black men, are now largely white.
As her sister, Betty Alston, 73, put it: “This is a Black-owned bar, but our clientele is white. But we don’t discriminate.”
But on Thursday night, the scene was markedly different. A crowd of young, Black patrons filled the bar, its neighboring event space and outdoor patio, the most young Black people Ms. Greer, 74, had seen in years. They played dominoes and card games and danced to music from bygone eras in between sips of rum punch and picklebacks that they had to pay for with cash. It was a return to a classic weeknight ritual, a game night at an old-school watering hole.
Organizers, who called the party “The Rest Is History,” planned it to foster community and salvage a part of the neighborhood’s culture that feels increasingly scarce.
The exodus of New York’s Black residents, which has already altered the city’s politics, has also taken a toll on cultural and societal touch points in historically Black communities. Many Black small businesses like Tip-Top have closed their doors, as their owners have left the city or found it too expensive to stay open. Others, however, have simply changed with the times, catering to a public that skews younger, whiter and newer to the city.
Noting these rapid shifts, Jerald Cooper, a creative consultant who helped plan the event and lived in New York before moving back to his hometown, Cincinnati, felt a need to pay tribute to the Black families and businesses that once defined Bedford-Stuyvesant and other rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. He organized “The Rest Is History” to support the community’s Black elders and resurrect the practice of hanging out in their spaces.
“If we see the neighborhood changing, a lot of people online will be up in arms,” said Mr. Cooper, who is also the founder of the media company Hood Century. “But the big thing that we can do is actually a small thing — it’s just, go do business.”
Tip-Top has been a site of ritual gathering and fellowship since its opening in the late 1950s. Walter Alston, known to most as Junior, founded it shortly after moving his family to New York from Warrenton, N.C. The establishment, then called the Brothers Social Club, was designed to give the young men of the neighborhood a space to fellowship, play pool and catch up after work or school. By 2001, Tip-Top had grown into a full bar, and it served soul food plates on weekends that became indulgent lifelines for the area’s many southern migrants.
Ms. Greer’s family owns the building that includes the bar and the apartments above it — something she said has helped protect it against rising rents and property taxes.
The bar itself, with its white tile floors and dark wooden paneling, is reminiscent of a Black elder’s living room: Family photos line one wall, while various tributes to former President Barack Obama are plastered throughout, including a clock with the former president’s face just above the bar itself. On Thursday, two flat screen televisions were showing the Knicks game.
Christmas lights, Halloween decorations and a red Valentine’s Day heart also pepper the walls, feeding its homey and timeless feel. The space is so beloved that some patrons have asked Ms. Greer and Ms. Alston — who tend bar together — and their mother, Irene, not to change a thing. They want to keep the character of the space and the culture it represents alive. But it also serves as a reminder of just how different the neighborhood has become.
“It reminds them of the bars in the little towns in the Midwest,” Ms. Greer said of Tip-Top’s biggest fans. “That’s why they talk about, ‘don’t change anything.’”
Bedford-Stuyvesant is one of New York’s most rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. Its Black residents comprised roughly 40 percent of the population in 2023, down from 75 percent in 2000, according to a study from the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University. Investors have taken a particular interest in the neighborhood, known for its ample brownstones and relative proximity to Manhattan.
That interest has also fed unrest. In April, Chi Ossé, a city councilman who represents Bedford-Stuyvesant, was arrested while trying to stop an eviction proceeding in the neighborhood that may have been tied to deed theft. And on Wednesday, a group of Black pastors and community leaders gathered at the nearby Antioch Baptist Church in Stuyvesant Heights to rally against changes to the city’s short-term rental laws, as companies like Airbnb seek to gain a foothold in New York.
But even as she has watched the neighborhood’s demographics shift, Ms. Greer and her sister say that it’s not all the product of the not-so-subtle push of gentrification. Some older Black New Yorkers who built their lives in the city decided to return to the South to buy cheaper homes and live quieter lives. And many died during the Covid-19 pandemic.
But on Thursday, the focus was on the current moment, which made even first-time patrons nostalgic. Tony Lomax, 30, attended the party after seeing it advertised on Instagram. Being in the bar, he said, reminded him of the kind of places he might go with his grandmother. But it also made him think of what else he might be missing.
“We are the only generation — millennials I mean — that have the best of both worlds. Like, we have the internet and we know what it’s like to be outside,” he said, before noting his rum punch’s seemingly perfect mix of juice and liquor with a simple refrain.
“We’re losing recipes,” he said.
