Greenpoint, New York’s fashionable harbor with a dirty past

From farmland to industrial sewer and later to an alternative to Williamsburg: Greenpoint is a New York neighborhood that is not yet crowded with people. But this could only be a matter of time.

A fire blazes at an outdoor bar on Nassau Avenue, allowing a group of twentysomethings to enjoy IPA beer even on a cold night.

Around the corner is the vintage store “Beacon’s Closet”, where people with sunglasses on their hair browse the offer looking for new and old clothes.

And, down the street, Transmitter Park offers a view of the skyscrapers of Midtown Manhattan, as an orange sun descends behind the buildings.

Greenpoint, in North Brooklyn, is packed with bars that strike a chord and young residents who find Bushwick too “cool” and the Upper East Side too bland.

The neighborhood is not an architectural beauty like other parts of Brooklyn, but gentrification is also in full swing here, for decades.

But Greenpoint, the shy brother north of the well-known Williamsburg, was not always so fashionable. “It sucked to heaven,” says Geoffrey Cobb, who probably knows the place better than anyone.

This Irishman has lived here for 30 years. With just 19 he crossed the Atlantic and, since then, he wrote several books about this neighborhood.

“The place we’re walking through right now was an old apple garden,” says Cobb. Guernsey Street, which leads from “Beacon’s Closet” in the direction of lively Franklin Street, is lined with trees almost ready to bloom.

To the left are lined up old buildings in shades of gray and beige, and to the right, residential buildings clad in wood. Not pretentious, but rather petty bourgeois, albeit in a New York style.

You have to go back 400 years to get to the time when Greenpoint was still truly a “green zone”. At that time the Lenni Lenape tribe lived here, which was displaced by settlers.

The subsequent development of the neighborhood into a dirty industrial town can be mainly linked to a specific date: October 26, 1825.

That day the Erie Canal was inaugurated, a waterway that connected the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean for the first time. As a consequence, the economic importance of New York increased rapidly. And Greenpoint, too, was quickly transformed.

Along the East River and Newton Creek, which separates Greenpoint from Queens, the industry settled. Greenpoint became dirty and Newton Creek became a symbol of urban pollution.

This image also seemed to contribute to making Greenpoint the “kidney of the city” with the advance of the 20th century. Since then, on the edge of the neighborhood is the largest water treatment plant in New York, which purifies the wastewater of more than a million people. The citizens of Greenpoint resisted its construction, but it was completed anyway.

The development of Greenpoint was already irrepressible. Inhabitants of clearly more expensive Manhattan came to the neighborhood and displaced many of its old inhabitants. Although the population, mostly from the Polish-American community, remained strong until today.

Expert Geoffrey Cobb says the rise in home and house prices is “absolutely insane.” The price drivers can be seen almost everywhere in the neighborhood: the tall apartment buildings on the East River that rise into the Greenpoint sky like “goddamn mushrooms after the rain,” according to the Irishman.

Change is an intrinsic part of New York. Geoffrey Cobb knows it and he likes this “cool” neighborhood that his New York area has become. However, he says, this has the consequence that it becomes increasingly difficult to settle in Greepoint. And he adds that the neighborhood shouldn’t just become a way station for young people.

And it is that, for them, Greenpoint will continue to be a convoking place to go, even after the restrictions due to the coronavirus.

Whether it’s outdoors in the park, at the many cultural festivals and concerts, at the legendary “Greenpoint Fish & Lobster” fishmonger, among numerous slot machines at the “Sunshine Laundromat” laundry room or at the popular “Paulie Gee’s” pizzeria. . The dirty days of the neighborhood are long gone.

dpa

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