• If you go to Erasmus and don’t even know how to make tea … You have huge chances of becoming a pro in cooking pasta and frozen pizza. • Many babies are coming from Erasmus experiences. We can call them Erasmus babies. There is a strong possibility to fall in love and remain together after Erasmus. Only the fact that you have lived such an experience together can form a lifetime connection. • A group of Erasmus students has managed to get a couple “divorce” before they even got properly married? Yes…you heard me. I think it’s time for that short story I promised. In this way, you will understand what I’m saying.

The brilliance of east flatbush: Erasmus hall Nestled in the middle of Brooklyn lies one of New York’s most precious yet unrecognized treasures — Erasmus Hall. Arguably the oldest secondary school in the State of New York; the school has grown to become an iconic symbol in East Flatbush. The school’s roots date back to Dutch settlements in the late-1700s when it was built from a land grant and the generous donations of some of our founding fathers (i.e. Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, Peter Lefferts and Robert Livingston). Erasmus Hall, initially consisting of one tiny wooden structure, was officially founded in 1787 and landmarked in 1966. Due to the massive influx of immigrants and the passing of school attendance legislation, more and more students were crammed into the small Erasmus building up until the turn of the century. As a result, the City’s School Board presented plans for a new campus on the Erasmus site in 1904. The task was charged to C.B.J. Snyder, who was at the time the Superintendent of Buildings for the Board of Education. He has been credited with over 400 of New York City’s most architecturally-heralded schools. Snyder’s plans called for four new wings that would be phased in as classroom demand required them. The four sections adorned in the Collegiate Gothic Style popularized by Snyder became monuments to the East Flatbush neighborhood. #erasmus

The Erasmus Neighborhood Federation (ENF) was established in 1979 as a federation of block and tenant associations seeking to implement solutions for emerging problems of neighborhood change. ENF primarily serves East Flatbush, an 80-square-block area of Brooklyn, bounded by Clarkson Avenue, Clarendon Road, Bedford Avenue, and Brooklyn Avenue, with a population of more than 170,000. Forty years ago, the area’s residents were 75 percent white. As the population changed, the neighborhood changed in ethnicity and declined in average income level. The influx of immigrants has brought new life and new problems. In 1994, 90 percent of the residents were people of color, and 70 percent were immigrants from the Caribbean and Asia. Although the New York City Human Resources Administration Office of Strategic Management and Planning shows only a modest 4.2 percent increase in population, ENF has observed a more rapid increase in the number of residents, indicating that both the total population and the number of immigrants were undercounted in the 2000 Census. The neighborhood can be characterized as a low to moderate-income working-class and undeserved by municipal services and the financial community, with overcrowded schools and increasing population pressure on the available housing stock. The housing stock of some 13,000 structures is mainly multi-unit apartment buildings (78 percent), with the remainder being single and two-family dwellings. #erasmus

East Flatbush is a neighborhood in transition … and I mean this literally, it is physically morphing right before our eyes. If you take a walk anywhere from East 31st Street over to Brooklyn Avenue, you will see nothing but fenced-off lots, cranes, excavators and bulldozers. There is so much building activity going on in this area, you would think that some natural disaster had befallen the area, and that a massive reconstruction effort was underway. Fortunately, this could not be further from the truth. The neighborhood is on fire, but in a positive way. In fact, StreetEasy, one of the most popular online platforms for real estate searches in NYC, identified East Flatbush as No.2 on their NYC Neighborhoods to Watch in 2019 list. According to the real estate platform, searches by their users for housing in the neighborhood increased by 343 percent, absolutely crushing the Lower East Side, which is the neighborhood with the next greatest increase in searches at 92 percent. East Flatbush’s increase in popularity was also a product of the great L train shutdown scare. For more than a year, the public received urgent notifications that this critical subway line, which connected trendy Williamsburg to Manhattan, would be closed for repairs in the spring of 2019. This turned the Brooklyn real estate market into a tailspin, leading masses of people in Williamsburg and other areas that were dependent on the L to look for other alternatives. #flatbush