J'Ouvert, Brooklyn's Legendary Night Parade, Will Now Be A Daytime Event

CROWN HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN — One of the city's most legendary street parties, an annual parade called J'Ouvert that rages through central Brooklyn in the wee hours before the West Indian Day Parade (NYC's local version of Carnival) over Labor Day Weekend, won't begin until the sun comes up this year, police announced this week.

After more than three decades of kicking off at 4 a.m. and ending at sunrise, the parade will now begin at sunrise, around 6 a.m., according to the NYPD.

The plan was concocted by a task force of local politicians, community leaders, police and parade organizers. They had been looking for ways to avoid a repeat episode in 2017 of the deadly gun violence that breaks out nearly every year at J'Ouvert.

"This is the best decision going forward to try to keep people as safe as possible,” Police Commissioner James O'Neill said at a press conference Friday.

The parade's president, Yvette Rennie, added in a phone interview: "We think it's very important, based on some of the situations in the past, to move the parade to 6 'o' clock. We decided we had to bring the celebration into the light."

Ask anyone who's been: The scene at J'Ouvert is total insanity. The procession of thousands, anchored by a fleet of steel-band orchestras, seems to almost tumble down the streets of Prospect Heights, Crown Heights and Prospect-Lefferts Gardens — an open-air madhouse of beautiful, moon-drunk men and women of every age and ethnicity, pounding liquor, waving flags, shouting euphoric inaudibles, wagging their jiggly bits, honking on random instruments and grinding against each other like there will quite literally be no tomorrow. By the end, the entire mob — and neighborhood — is slathered in some combination of motor oil, mud, paint and colored baby powder. "Lit" doesn't even begin to describe it.

Brooklyn's huge population of Caribbean immigrants and descendants began celebrating J'Ouvert in the early '80s as an "impromptu" replica of the historic Trinidad event, according to J'Ouvert City International, the organization that has since turned Brooklyn's version into a sanctioned city parade.

And the 4 a.m. start time was no accident. J'Ouvert originally served as a covert way for Caribbean slaves to celebrate — and rebel against — the Frenchmen's annual Carnival festival in the hours before it began, under the cover of night.

But the modern-day J'Ouvert celebration in Brooklyn, beloved as it may be to some locals, has earned an ugly reputation as a magnet for gangs and gun violence.

“Our J'Ouvert was always a success until Brooklyn lost control of guns," Rennie, the parade's president, recently told the New Yorker. "Until America lost control of guns.”

Four people were murdered at the 2014 event. In 2015, gang crossfire along the J'Ouvert route famously struck Clinton Hill dad-to-be and state government employee Carey Gabay, killing him. And in 2016 — although Mayor Bill de Blasio promised it would be "the safest J'Ouvert ever," with an NYPD-approved route patrolled by an unprecedented army of nearly 3,000 cops — 22-year-old Canarsie woman Tiarah Poyau was shot dead, as was another 17-year-old boy.

"J'ouvert is like a violent 'Purge,' if you will," Poyau's devastated mother, Vertina Brown, told Patch a few weeks after her daughter was killed. Just like in the "Purge" film series, she said, J'Ouvert has become a one-night outlet for "senseless crazy people" to reek havoc on Brooklyn.

In the tradition of many grieving moms before her, Brown called on NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio to cancel the 2017 event. "This is senseless — it's been going on for too long," she said. "The murders need to stop."

Instead, it appears the city has settled for a later start time.

The parade's route will remain the same as last year, organizers told Patch.

Launching the procession at 6 a.m. doesn't necessarily mean the party won't start earlier, though: J'Ouvert diehards are known to set out on the town as soon as nightfall on the day prior, all across Brooklyn.

The NYPD has yet to reveal a clear plan for policing the 2017 festival's inevitable unsanctioned sprawl. However, Commissioner O'Neill did say Friday that the department would be deploying "a tremendous detail" overnight. "The changes are pretty significant" this year, he said.

Some in the community are skeptical of the police-state approach.

Kirya Traber, an "educator and artist on faculty" at the New School, recently told Vice:

"The fact that J'ouvert is being targeted is about the changing demographic of [Flatbush and Crown Heights]. It's about white people who don't understand the history and think, This is an inconvenience to me. I understand that there are people who are affected by the violence, who are also upset. But the conditions that lead people to hurt one another in that way is not J'ouvert. That's a bigger issue.

I had a police light shining into my house for a week and a half around J'ouvert this year. Bedford was covered in police signs, barricades, with patrols coming through. But it didn't make me feel safer. It actually made me feel nervous."

Others are torn. Jeffrey Luc, an 18-year-old Flatbush native, said in the same Vice story:

"I was on Empire Boulevard when the shooting happened. I knew it was going to happen—every year, something always happens. But I go because it's fun. I've been going for a few years. I love the music, the other people from other Caribbean countries. I'm not afraid. When I see stuff getting too crazy, I leave. I don't think we should shut it down, but I think we should have more protection, more police."

And Ebrahim Kassim, a local bodega manager, said:

"I mean, I love it personally. I always go to the parade: You see all these people in crazy costumes, people from all different cultures. Last year, I saw the mayor, and I shook his hand. But I can't even lie, it gets crazy at night.

To tell you the truth, it's a beautiful. You dance, and you get powder all over you. But all of the shootings and stabbings need to stop. I think they should end J'ouvert. The parade is enough."

The parade's president, for her part, argued in an interview with Patch that any shenanigans at pre-J'Ouvert festivities shouldn't be lumped into the official event. "The parties, the backyard parties, the clubs — that's not our celebration," Rennie said. "That's not J'Ouvert. That's not our lovely carnival."

"We cannot say what will happen in East New York, in Canarsie," she added. "All we know is we are safeguarding our route."

Care to learn more about J'Ouvert before the morning of? Brooklyn Public Library officials are hosting an interactive info session on the parade called "The Art and History of J'Ouvert: Tradition as Resistance" at the Central Library branch in Grand Army Plaza on Saturday, August 19. RSVP here.

This story has been updated. Photos courtesy of Carnaval.com Studios/Flickr