For Elsworth Worrell, a long-time businessman in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, aged 69, the area has seen tremendous change and he has the stories to mark them out.
Coming first to New York from Bermuda with a church choir for six weeks in 1955, Elsworth arrived in Brooklyn five years later in 1960, partly at the behest of his mother who wanted to move there. Soon after moving to Brooklyn, his mother would move down to Florida and later, Tuscon, Arizona to live with his brother, both now deceased.
After living with a friend of the church, Arnold Comfers, Elsworth was able to land a job delivering telephone books to businesses, leaving his phone number with many of those he delivered them to in the hopes of landing something more substantial. In 1961, he was offered a job with Corenza Metal Specialists on Bergen Street in Brooklyn and worked for them for 1-2 years while studying to become a barber. After the metal shop, Elsworth worked in a grocery store as a butcher, all the time barbering on the side and began to notice the regular occurrence of a man coming into the grocery store to buy bananas who would often remind Elsworth of the importance of the potassium in bananas to men’s health. It was to be this man that Elsworth would buy his first barbershop from at Fulton and Stuyvesant Street. One year later, the city of New York would reclaim the land to build a school and he lost the land.
After successfully flipping two failing laundromats on Ralph and Prospect, Elsworth was forced out due to a taxing relationship with an overbearing landlord and in 1970, was able to buy the building on Troy Avenue and President Street that currently is home to his Laundry World laundromat business. Once housing 6 separate stores including a grocery store, barber shop and laundromats, Elsworth’s building would soon decide to close down all but the laundromat, as it remains until this day.
After being asked what the biggest changes are that he has seen around the area, he immediately says how many good changes have come. As he looks off into the distance through the grated windows, Elsworth speaks of the hell he once went through when he first began the business. Held up twice and handcuffed one of those times by the assailants (not released until the eventual arrival of the police), Elsworth explains how he carried a handcuff key with him on his keychain for years afterwards. He stops, looks over at me, and explains that with a 9 .mm pointed in his face, he imagined the assailant holding someone else up and that person getting the upper hand. Two days later, he says, the assailant was robbing the owner of a bodega not far from the laundromat and was shot in the back as he ran out, dying on the spot.
Elsworth pauses for a long time, continuing after a long breath. He notes how many nights he spent on guard at this new property, making sure people would not break in and points to all of the iron rails lining the windows. “There’s a reason all those are there,” he says. He explains how he was used to a particularly high standard of living coming from Bermuda and because of this, planted a number of pine trees outside his establishment. Those were quickly destroyed. He traveled to Germany and noticed all of the flowers outside people’s houses and businesses and decided to try this for his business. Only remnants now remain from his beautification attempts, protected by a four-foot fence topped with silver spikes.
He speaks of graffiti, kids knocking out the buildings windows. I ask him why he thinks it happens and he mentions the households without fathers, the lack of proper home-training for kids, the rampant unemployment. He looks off through the window once more, mentions that drugs and crime are much better now since Giuliani, says that the only thing he has against Giuliani was his treatment of Mayor David Dinkins when 
Dinkins offered to break bread with him and resolve their issues. The police checks, the cleaner streets, the increased investigations, the catching of all those with improper city licensing: he slowly compiles a list of all those things which point, in his mind, to the betterment of the area in which he lives. I ask what he thinks of the fact that the New York state prisons, much like most of the United States, burst at the seams with people of color. He stops, returns change to a woman near one of the dryers, and upon returning, states that while it may be true, they are there for a reason and tells me a story of prejudices experienced in Bermuda as well as in the States on a trip he and his mother took with the church choir down south to Florida, a bathroom on the way down clearly delineating “Whites only” areas from “Black areas”. “Don’t’ get me wrong,” he states. “I understand prejudice.” “Times change though,” he says. “A lot of business owners have died or moved on, new people are moving in and new businesses are opening up.”
As we wrap things up, I ask him if he sees himself opening up any new businesses in the future or making a change. “There’s a place and time for everything,” he says with a smile, slowly looking over at me. “A time to get on the ship and a time to get off.”
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