A young, nervous, and tongue-tied Henry Miller used to walk over to 181 Devoe Street to visit Cora Seward, his first love. Forty-two years later, Love Is a Battlefield singer Patricia Andrzejewski, better known as Pat Benatar was born there. This summer, McCarren Park Pool is set to open after opening originally – in 1936. A number of words could be used to describe the history of Greenpoint – unconventional, overlooked, or contentious, but one thing it has always been is unique.
These days, it’s easy to grab a pierogi, then a PBR next door, but Greenpoint was originally a lush and verdent landscape inhabited by the Keskachauge tribe, then sold to the Dutch West India Company, which turned it into farmland. For many decades, the same five families inhabited the entire neighborhood. The working class identity associated with Greenpoint began in the mid 19th century, when a large number of Germans and Irish began establishing a shipbuilding and merchant trade, followed by the Polish in the late century, which has made it the second largest Polish community in the U.S. after Chicago.
With the heavy concentration of industry in Greenpoint’s past, the area has also been known – infamously, for its pollutants. In the last century alone, about 17 million gallons of petroleum has seeped into the ground, much of it from a 1950 explosion that was the largest oil spill in the country at the time. In 2006, officials have pronounced that half of it has been cleaned up.
Greenpoint’s unique identity has always been inextricably linked to transportation. For most of the 19th century, boats were the primary form of transportation to the area. Though the neighborhood is serviced by the G train, there is no direct subway route to Manhattan, which has brought relative stability to the area and kept migration in and out to a minimum. More recently however, as neighboring Williamsburg gained overflowing popularity, and improvements have been made to public transportation and pollutant levels, the neighborhood’s look and feel has begun to change, bringing with it boutiques, higher end restaurants, hip bars, and of course, higher rents. These days, Greenpoint is beginning to resemble many of New York’s neighborhoods, where multiple cultures coexist, with a variety of recreational options from restaurants and bars like Five Leaves, The Manhattan Inn, and Enid’s, to great Thai and Mexican restaurants like Ott Thai and Calexico, to summer concerts and movies in McCarren park. The neighborhood’s unique aesthetic of industrial warehouses and small, charming streets has made it the backdrop for movies like The Departed, Donnie Brasco, and in the recent T.V. series Boardwalk Empire and one of our favorites, Lena Dunham’s Girls. Additionally, from the rooftop of Brooklyn Industries’ first warehouse on the border of Greenpoint and Williamsburg, the Greenpoint skyline served as a visual inspiration for BKI’s logo. With the new store opening on Manhattan Avenue this week, we’re excited to come back to the neighborhood that gave us our start.
