A Throwback to an Earlier Era
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Greenpoint is a working-class immigrant neighborhood that seems like a throwback to an earlier New York.Where most such neighborhoods endured physical devastation as their populations turned over and their industrial bases eroded in the decades after World War II, Greenpoint weathered the storms — including the erosion of its industrial base — to remain, residentially and in its high-street commerce, much as it ever was.
Greenpoint’s is an amazing story of survival. Not only has this part of Brooklyn lost much of its industry, but the city long saw neighborhoods like it as dumping grounds for noisome facilities.Yet Greenpoint’s high street, Manhattan Avenue, throbs with life. The stores are likelier to have signs in Polish than in English. The residential streets look like they are deeply cared for — not just the lovely streets of the Greenpoint Historic District, but also the streets where aluminum-siding salesmen struck gold years ago.
Greenpoint’s East River waterfront, however, was recently described by the New York Times as “yawning, trashstrewn decrepitude,” as distinct from the tidy inland streets. To walk along West Street is to weep for New York’s past glories. This was once one of the most intensive loci of industries in a metropolis that as recently as the 1950s led all the world’s cities in industrial output.
Anyone interested in “industrial archaeology” should go to Greenpoint posthaste. The city’s recent rezoning of the Greenpoint waterfront to encourage the development of massive highrise luxury apartment complexes means that most of the visible reminders of the great industrial past shall soon be no more.
This strikes me as a very odd setting for luxury housing, given that only one subway line, the G, penetrates Greenpoint, and it does not even go to Manhattan.That said, find the G and take it to Greenpoint Avenue. You will come up on Manhattan Avenue, a short distance to Greenpoint’s greatest street, Milton Street.
Milton stretches two blocks from Manhattan Avenue to West Street. The first block, between Manhattan Avenue and Franklin Street, is one of the most wonderful row-house blocks in New York. The way the beautiful St. Anthony of Padua Church terminates its eastern vista can only be described as thrilling.The next block west, between Franklin and West Streets, is altogether different: This is where the old industrial Greenpoint resides.
At West Street sits a burned-out group of buildings that was recently the Greenpoint Terminal Market. The 16-building complex was an encyclopedically varied combination of brick and reinforced-concrete industrial buildings that had once been the American Manufacturing Company, one of the city’s largest employers and one of the largest rope factories in the world. The site is now zoned for high-rise housing. Just as the complex was being considered for landmark designation, most of it burned to the ground in a blaze that could be seen for miles around.
Shortly before her death, Jane Jacobs suggested that Greenpoint was one of the last best places in New York for the cultivation of the live-work, crafts-based businesses the municipal economy requires yet is shortsightedly jettisoning for environmentally reckless mega-projects of crackerjack housing. One day soon, Greenpoint will be no more.
