New coffee shops are often a harbinger of gentrification, viewed as catering to new transplants at the expense of longtime neighborhood residents. Playground Coffee Shop, founded and run by Zenat Begum is countering that trend, offering a space that bridges the cultural and economic gaps between the various people who now live in Brooklyn.
Begum opened Playground on the site of her father’s former store in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. “After graduating from The New School, I helped my father close down his hardware store. While we were in the process of liquidating his business, I realized that I couldn’t just allow the space to be occupied by a gentrifying business,” she says. “It occurred to me that I had the opportunity to keep this place within my family and create a space that fits my interests.” She credits The New School with giving her “a lens, perspective, and a foundation behind the work I do now.”
Although Begum is operating a retail storefront, Playground has developed into more than a coffee shop. Begum consciously designed the business to address the issue of rapid gentrification in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “The New School provided me with my first sense of community and organization, whether it be via Occupy Wall Street or enrolling in Marxist courses through the Economics program.” Now she shares what she learned through classes and seminars at Playground that are offered for free or on a sliding scale.
Given the success of Playground, it may be surprising that Begum came to The New School intending to study music. When that did not work out, she chose a new path: After taking a class early on with William Milberg, then dean and professor of economics at The New School for Social Research, she chose to pursue an economics degree. “I fell in love with various teaching styles at The New School as well as broader ways of thinking.”
In the undergraduate Economics program at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, Begum was encouraged to investigate the economic dynamics of our society, and she has applied those lessons in her work. “I was able to rebrand the way we think about economics and the effects that it can have on sociopolitical ideologies.”
Although Begum did not learn technical strategies at Lang—it is a liberal arts school, after all—it did give her a “perspective on hiring within my community.” She has used her business as a means of positively shaping her environment. Through Playground, she can create employment opportunities for people of color and offer a place where local activists can organize. “As someone who grew up in Brooklyn and spent summers in Bed-Stuy, I wanted to give back to a community that gave me and my family so much love and growth.”
As a person of color, Begum has an excellent opportunity to use her business to address some of the issues she faced growing up. “Being a minority myself and having the privilege of a formal academic education, including The New School, I am able to offer further insight into spaces that I occupy. I have been seen as ‘other’ in environments where I wasn’t necessarily welcomed and would search for folks who identified with my politics, my complexion, my race. I want to offer a platform for people like myself and give them hope that they can pursue their wildest dreams and that dreams can be actualized.”
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