How this thriving NYC neighborhood became a killing field with a haunting legacy of unsolved murders it cant escape

East New York has a reputation for violence — with good reason.The 75th precinct has a violent crime rate that’s 84% higher than New York City as a whole and 279% higher than the rest of the country, according to FBI data.

It wasn’t always this way.During the early 20th century, it was a thriving community of German, Italian, and Jewish immigrants, where neighbors treated each other like family, and kids could play safely in the streets.

But that began to change in the 1960s, largely due to racist, predatory lenders that changed both the neighborhood’s demographics and the financial stability of its residents, as Stacy Horn reveals in her new book, “The Killing Fields of East New York: The First Subprime Mortgage Scandal, a White-Collar Crime Spree, and the Collapse of an American Neighborhood” (Zando/Gillian Flynn Books; Jan.28th).When the area was founded in 1835 by shoe merchant John Pitkin — who “imagined he could turn the quaint Brooklyn town he’d just bought into a glittering metropolis,” writes Horn — he published a letter in a local newspaper, promising that East New York was a place where “a poor man may purchase in a healthy country, with delightful water, and ocean air, a lot of ground,” for a lot less than they’d pay for “a miserable hovel” in Manhattan.

For a time, it was exactly that, “an almost enchanted place where you could arrive with nothing and work to build something,” Horn writes.But, by the late 1960s, 160,000 people were living in East New York, and the neighborhood was becoming increasingly crime-ridden.Barry Kestenberg, who grew up in the area, told the author that during his youth in the ‘70s, “you couldn’t walk down the street.”Some of it happened because of drugs and rising poverty.

But Horn suggests that the ultimate trigger for East New York’s downfall was “two racist financial practices that had ramped up in the fifties and sixties: blockbusting and redlining.” Brokers had managed...