Robert Thomason Prospect Lefferts Gardens Neighborhood Association (PLGNA) Collection

Robert "Bob" Thomason was born in Crown Heights, Brooklyn in 1927 to Otey Hume and Margaret Black. Thomason grew up in Forest Hills, Queens, and later moved to Flemington, New Jersey as a teenager. He joined the army towards the end of World War II and spent time stationed in Panama. With support from the GI Bill, Thomason attended college and received a BA in Social Studies Education from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He later attended the Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Connecticut, and became an ordained minister. In 1960, Thomason lived in Ohio and worked in the Settlement House, where he met Jane Mathers Toy. They were married in 1960. Thomason returned to New York to attend graduate school at the Columbia School of Library Science. Thomason and his wife lived in a multi-family home in Prospect Lefferts Gardens with their two daughters, Katherine and Carolyn. They lived there for nine years before purchasing it from their landlord in 1973. He worked as a reference librarian for 20 years at the Hewlett Woodmere Public Library in Nassau County. He cycled to work 40 miles round-trip every day from Brooklyn.

In 1968, Thomason co-founded the Prospect Lefferts Garden Neighborhood Association (PLGNA) in collaboration with five ministers from the neighborhood. Thomason and his wife Jane were active members of PLGNA's board and committees. He was also actively involved in the Lefferts Nostrand-Rogers Block Association.

After retiring from the library in 1985, Thomason became an avid cyclist taking many long bike touring trips in foreign countries, including China, Scandinavia, France, Thailand, and Japan. Robert Thomason passed away at the age of 92 at home on November 10, 2020.

The Prospect Lefferts Gardens Neighborhood Association (PLGNA) was founded in 1968 by Robert Thomason and a coalition of ministers looking to improve the quality of life for residents in the Prospect Lefferts Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. PLGNA was incorporated in 1969 and organized its first public program that same year, the Prospect Lefferts Gardens House Tour, strengthening the community by inviting neighbors into each other's homes and highlighting unoccupied homes to prospective buyers.

Through the 1970s, PLGNA and East Flatbush residents fought redlining in the neighborhood to promote a diversity of residents and effectively organized to ensure local banks invested directly into the community. From 1983 through 1994, PLGNA received grants from the New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal and the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development for neighborhood preservation and redevelopment programs. Activities included revitalizing the commercial corridor, organizing street clean-ups, enlisting community members in a mobile patrol, and providing consultation to community members on housing technical assistance, including tenant court representation, block and tenant association organizing, and housing rehabilitation. PLGNA worked to get all city-owned abandoned buildings onto the market, either through private development or through a combination of private and public funding.

In 1994, PLGNA lost funding from the New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal for breaching their contract agreement. PLGNA could no longer afford to pay its staff and closed its offices on Flatbush Avenue, suspending activities for the latter half of the 1990s. In 2000, Thomason and a group of ministers led by Reverend Ronald Winley organized to revive the organization. PLGNA was remade as a community-based, community-driven project with a new mission to reclaim and revitalize the neighborhood through positive change. In this iteration of itself, the organization added new youth and workforce development programs to its roster. Meanwhile, continuing to address affordable housing, gentrification, and displacement of residents in the Prospect Lefferts Gardens neighborhood. PLGNA hosted housing forums, art exhibitions, film screenings, community clean-ups, house tours, and an annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Day celebration. The organization is still active as of 2022.