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A few decades ago, Brooklyn’s multi-million dollar brownstones were going for $30,000. Prospect Park was a dumpy bum camp and Park Slope had more late night gun battles than hip restaurants.

So who gets credit for turning Brooklyn from a dirty word to a hot spot — politicos, developers, grass-roots organizers or some other interest group?

On Saturday, community activists from yesteryear met at Borough Hall to tally up the heroes and goats from Brooklyn’s slow-but-steady turnaround from the 1970s to the ’90s.

And most speakers — at least the ones who have to get re-elected — credited We, the People.

“We owe the citizenry a great deal of gratitude for what they did in the 1980s to make that happen,” said Assemblyman James Brennan (D–Park Slope).

Street by street, residents banded together to force banks to issue loans within Brooklyn, despite its sometime resemblance to a slum. They hoped to save the borough’s landmarks from the wrecking ball, and direct cops to brazen criminals.

“You can’t really talk about the rise in Brooklyn without the pushback of the community against crime,” said Brennan, who also praised former Mayor David Dinkins and former Governor Mario Cuomo, both Democrats like Brennan, for adding police. (He knocked former Mayor Rudy Giuliani for taking the credit for safer streets.)

Even when crime was at its worst, John Muir was organizing the Prospect Park Environmental Center, a group that believed that saving the crime-ridden park would be the key to revitalizing Brooklyn.

“The whole park seemed to be dying,” Muir said.

People were afraid to walk near the park for fear that muggers would leap from its hedges, which the city removed later removed.

As New York’s economy changed from manufacturing to service- and technology-based, much of Brooklyn was abandoned as a post-industrial wasteland, panelists at the symposium said.

“About a third of the shops on Seventh Avenue were boarded up,” said Everett Ortner, who bought a brownstone in Park Slope in 1963 — and then spent the next decade cajoling his friends to do the same rather then flee to the suburbs.

Ortner, founder of the Brownstone Revival Committee, and others petitioned the Brooklyn Union Gas Company to buy old homes and restore them as showrooms. The company offered tours of homes renovated with new appliances, heating and cooling systems.

The plan removed eyesores from otherwise well-kept blocks.

In the meantime, Philip and Mary Gallagher picketed banks that were unwilling to invest in much of Brooklyn.

“The strategy was to fix two or three of the worst houses on about a dozen blocks [to] encourage other homeowners to fix up their own buildings,” Philip Gallagher said.

Of course, the end result of all this hard work was the renaissance of a borough, a Phoenix-like rise that is known around the world.

Now, perhaps, the only worry is that the newfound safe, clean borough will become a victim of its own residents’ success.

Brooklyn’s desirability is encouraging intense growth that brings more people, more cars and some of the very urban ills that borough residents hoped were in the past.

The drastic population influx could give way to Manhattan-style residential density. Love them or hate them, projects like Atlantic Yards and all the new residential towers in Downtown Brooklyn are happening because developers think there is a market for the thousands of units of housing and tens of millions of square feet of office and retail space.

Many of the people who “saved” Brooklyn can’t afford to live there anymore.

But Muir said there is a solution: responsible development that puts high-rises along wide avenues while protecting the smaller homes on the side streets.

“The trick is to save one while making room for the other,” Muir said.

©2007 Community Newspaper Group