by by Kaylee Ramirez
Fourteen-year-old Victoria Gawkowski doesn’t see many Polish families like her in Ditmas Park. She likes that her cultural identity offers something new to the neighborhood.
“It’s pretty diverse,” she said. “I feel like I impact the diversity.”
At PS. 217 on Newkirk Avenue administrators boast that more than 30 languages and dialects are spoken at the school, including Turkish, Russian, Bengali, Urdu, Chinese and Spanish.
The ability to live in a safe area that is full of different cultures is one of the draws of Ditmas Park.
And it’s one of the reasons that Kate Ortega moved to Ditmas in 2015.
“We go to the playground sometimes and it’s full of white kids and Hispanic kids and black kids. You just get kids from all over the place,” Ortega, 40, said.
Although Victoria and Ortega see the diversity of people in Ditmas Park, others make assumptions as to their neighbors backgrounds.
“A lot of people look at my family and say ‘you guys are the wrong kind of people for this neighborhood’ because we’re too white but I think that if you just think about people by their skin color you’re selling them short,” said Ortega, whose husband is from Mexico. “Diversity doesn’t just mean one thing that isn’t enough of, it means a lot of everything; a good mix of people.”
This definition is comforting for Pierre Gollet, 54. Gollet, who is Haitian, has been here for 10 years. “Diversity is good because I don’t feel like I’m alone,” she said.