Theresa Wilder, Craig Wilder

Description

Connection to Weeksville: Grew up in Weeksville area; early Weeksville founders; Craig is a historian who has written about Weeksville and African Americans in Brooklyn, he also was among the earliest youth served by Weeksville Theresa Wilder was born in Brooklyn in 1942. She lived on Decatur Street, between Lewis and Stuyvesant Avenues. Theresa’s mother died when she was young. Her father, Leon, bought the house in 1937. He had trained as an engineer, but developed cataracts on his eyes, so worked as a janitor for a German woman who owned a lot of property in Brooklyn. She offered Theresa’s father the house on Decatur Street for five hundred dollars, during the Depression. Leon was able to borrow the money to purchase the house, and owned it by the time of his death: it is still owned by the family today. Theresa has two brothers and one sister. Theresa recalls the neighborhood she grew up in as being close-knit and safe. As a child, she attended Holy Rosary Catholic School on Bainbridge Street. She married her husband in 1962, and had three children with him, Craig, and his two older sisters. By 1969, she and her husband had separated. She recalls that the city began to change in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She began to see drug addiction and drug sales enter into and affect her neighborhood. In this interview, she talks about the changes in the neighborhoods she’s lived in and the differences she has seen in...

Record Contributed By

Weeksville Heritage Center