Myrtle Avenue today looking east from Carlton Avenue, a shadow of its former self. Plans are afoot to return it to its past glory.

t’s amazing that so much growth could take place, and it doesn’t filter down to the projects," says Blackwell. "It’s like a tale of two cities."

Myrtle Avenue now has the distinction of marking the northern end of the Fort Greene historic district, which received landmark designation in 1978. But in so doing, it also serves as the unofficial border between the neighborhood’s upper-, middle-, and low-income dwellers.

Proudly interracial, Fort Greene was described as one of America’s most integrated neighborhoods in a 1993 study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development conducted by Jan Rosenberg, professor of sociology at Long Island University.

But for the most part, that integration is not economic. Today, the differences in living standards between residents to the north and south of Myrtle Avenue have deepened. And, as the price and prestige of the brownstone district have soared, Myrtle Avenue and the areas north of it have continued to deteriorate.

Blackwell, who once lived in the housing projects and now lives in the brownstone section, sees little change in the area’s class politics. So stark were the class divisions when he was a boy, he says, that he and his friends used to call the section south of Myrtle Avenue "the suburbs."

"Fort Greene is broken down into north and south," says Blackwell, who puts the neighborhood’s black-to-white racial mix at 60/40 compared with 80/20 in the 1980s. "You don’t see people from the north [socializing] in the south, and you certainly don’t see people from the south in the north."