Milano | CNYCA: Feet in Two Worlds: Talking Hearts: My First Radio Experience

Destination Greenpoint

by Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska
reporter, Polish Daily News

Years ago, whenever New York’s mainstream media outlets reported on Greenpoint, Brooklyn, it would automatically be a story for the Polish Daily News, where I work as a reporter. Now, as news from Greenpoint pops up on almost a daily basis in the mainstream press, the Polish-language media has gotten used to it.

Basketball legend Magic Johnson is putting $12.4 million into a 130-unit condo project in Greenpoint, according to the New York Post. Housing prices in Greenpoint rose 65 percent in 2006, the most of any neighborhood in Brooklyn, announced the same paper quoting a report by the Real Estate Board of New York. The McCarren Park pool, which closed in 1984, is going to be reopened as part of the mayor’s PlaNYC 2030 initiative. The work is budgeted at $50 million, reported the New York Times.

New restaurants, new tattoo parlors, new coffee shops and new boutiques are opening all over the area. Some papers and magazines, like AM New York and Time Out, have even published guides to the neighborhood.

Greenpoint is hot. And with every new development project and incoming hipster, it’s increasingly becoming “Manhattanized.”

For New Yorkers, gentrification is an old story that has been covered many times by the mainstream media—the East Village, Chelsea, DUMBO and Park Slope. Greenpoint is just the next in line.

But for Polish immigrants living there it’s a new process they struggle to grasp as their old working-class neighborhood turns into a trendy “nabe.”

“We came here to work and to support our families. What do we care about New York politics or history?” some of them would say in the past. And indeed they didn’t have to care. For years Greenpoint was a place where they could find a job and a cheap apartment, eat a pork cutlet and sip Zywiec beer after work, put money in the Polish bank and go to the Polish mass at St. Stanislaus Kostka church on Sunday. And all of this without having to speak English.

Now, whether they want it or not, Polish residents of Greenpoint find themselves in one of the most rapidly changing areas of New York City. Some of the residents—especially homeowners and youth—love it. Their neighborhood is finally on the map!

Others—the elderly and the poor in particular—feel uncomfortable or even frightened as they become victims of landlord harassment and eviction. Greenpoint may be emerging, but in the process they are being erased.

While working on “Feet in Two Worlds: Greenpoint, Brooklyn” for WNYC, New York Public Radio, my goal was to show all these consequences of development from the perspective of Polish immigrants. And this time, for a change, a story from the ethnic press has become news in the mainstream media.