New York City's Optimistic Tone Feels Out of Reach in Brownsville Christian Hansen for The New York Times A view of Brownsville, Brooklyn, on a recent visit. This week's column is the first in an occasional series in which Ginia Bellafante will explore neighborhoods in the city new to her. Daniel Murphy, executive director of the Pitkin Avenue Business Improvement District, crossing Pitkin Avenue in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Iqbal Chhabra, who has been selling suits at his shop, the Handsome Boutique, since 1984. Even the mayor's claim that the city is exceedingly healthy and safe meets grim rebuttal in Brownsville: the neighborhood maintains the highest infant mortality rate in the city, a rate about the same as Malaysia's. While the murder rate in the crime-ridden Morrisania section of the Bronx, where the mayor delivered his speech, fell 25 percent from 1998 to 2011, in Brownsville over the same period, it declined not at all. Brownsville is a neighborhood so distinguished by negatives that even on a cloudless day, a dismal, enervating tension can take hold. In this sense, it is a place that has changed little since the days of Alfred Kazin's boyhood in the 1920s and "30s - days that, Mr. Kazin, the writer and literary critic, chronicled with such a cool and distanced sentimentality in his memoir, "A Walker in the City." Then as now, poverty and gang violence impede any feeling of sustained civility. Having read Mr. Kazin's book recently, and invited others to do so, I was compelled to visit a part of the city that like almost no other has seemed ordained to its depredations - a counterpoint to the reigning mood of municipal optimism. As I walked up and around Pitkin Avenue, the neighborhood's main commercial thoroughfare, I encountered people who felt not only that the quality of life had barely improved since the days of the crack epidemic in the "80s and "90s, but that in certain respects it had grown worse. Early in my excursion, I met Anthony Morrison, a poet and 35-year resident of Brownsville who works at a hair salon across the street from a just-completed apartment complex, built by Habitat for Humanity. He took little comfort in this sign of renewal. The violence in the neighboring public housing facilities (Brownsville has one of the highest concentrations of public housing in the city) is so intense, Mr. Morrison told me, that if he is ever moved to go out at night, he goes to Manhattan. Anxieties have only escalated since October, when a young mother lost her life trying to protect school children from sniper fire one afternoon. Over the years, several of Mr. Morrison's friends have been killed. Since 1994, he said, he has lost 200 of his 300 clients at the salon. Ignored by gentrification, the businesses of Brownsville are up against the repercussions of not only a weakened national economy but also, to a certain extent, of a retracted drug trade that however insidious kept money in the neighborhood in motion. The Handsome Boutique, at 1603 Pitkin Avenue, a purveyor of men's suits and clothes, has been owned and operated by Iqbal Chhabra, an Indian immigrant, since 1984, when he chose the location over Jamaica Avenue in Queens because the sidewalks of Pitkin Avenue were then always teeming. "I saw no store empty here," Mr. Chhabra said. It was typical in those days, he said, for men to arrive at the Handsome Boutique with wads of cash to be spent on suits that were not meant to signal a quiet tastefulness. Mr. Chhabra pointed out that in January the store was still full of inventory, which years ago would have hardly been the case. "Now it is as though Christmas never happened," he said. In the "20s, "30s and "40s, Pitkin Avenue, which figures greatly in Mr. Kazin's memoir, drew shoppers from around the city - in 1942 there were 43 men's clothing stores alone. But as a study conducted in the "30s indicated, few Brownsville families managed to join the ranks of the city's middle-income population. Today, the enormous challenge of trying to develop an indigenous middle class in the neighborhood seems to have been taken up, at least in part, by Daniel Murphy, an affable and energetic urban planner who a year ago became the director of the Pitkin Avenue Business Improvement District. After some effort, I found Mr. Murphy's windowless office up a winding linoleum staircase in the back of the second floor of Shopper's World, past aisles of elastic slippers, towels and DVDs. The gateway to Pitkin Avenue is the fabled Loew's Pitkin theater erected in 1929, the place where Mr. Kazin pursued his escapism. The building has been vacant for decades but is being refurbished by a Westchester County developer. A charter school, Brooklyn Ascend, part of a small nonprofit chain run by Steven F. Wilson, the Harvard-educated author of Massachusetts's charter school law, will soon occupy the top floors. The bottom floors will be filled by retailers; and while that might not seem like a logical fit, they will bring jobs to an area where the largest employer, Mr. Murphy told me, is the seemingly doomed United States Postal Service. Mr. Murphy faces many challenges: Pitkin Avenue has no parking meters because the Department of Transportation took them out 15 years ago. For the revamped theater, Mr. Murphy said he'd like, above all, to see a place "where a guy can bring a date; where you can get a salad." "I've never liked chains," he said. But right now I'd be really happy with an Applebee's. E-mail: bigcity@nytimes.com