Greenpoint Brooklyn

Early colonization and agricultural era

At the time of European settlement in New York, Greenpoint was inhabited by the Keskachauge (Keshaechqueren) Indians, a sub-tribe of the Lenape. Contemporary accounts describe the area as remarkably verdant and beautiful, with Jack pine and oak forest, meadows, fresh water creeks, and briny marshes. Waterfowl and fish were abundant. European settlers originally used the “Greenpoint” name to refer to a small bluff of land jutting into the East River at what is now the westernmost end of Freeman Street, but eventually it came to describe the whole peninsula.

In 1638, the Dutch West India Company negotiated the right to settle Brooklyn from the Lenape. The first recorded European settler of what is now Greenpoint was Dirck Volckertsen (Batavianized from Holgerssøn), a Norwegian immigrant who in 1645 built a 1+1⁄2-story farmhouse there with the help of two Dutch carpenters. It was built in the contemporary Dutch style just west of what is now the intersection of Calyer Street and Franklin Street. There he planted orchards and raised crops, sheep, and cattle.

19th-century industrialization

Greenpoint first began to change significantly when entrepreneur Neziah Bliss married into the Meserole family in the early 1830s after purchasing land from them. He eventually bought out most of the land in Greenpoint. In 1834, he had the area surveyed, and in 1839 opened a public turnpike along what is now Franklin Street. He established regular ferry service to Manhattan around 1850. All of these initiatives contributed to the rapid and radical transformation of Greenpoint, which was annexed to the City of Brooklyn in 1855.

In the years that followed, Greenpoint established itself as a manufacturing district. Its largest industries were shipbuilding, porcelain and pottery, and glassworks, but the area had other industrial concerns such as brass and iron foundries, breweries, drug plants, book, furniture, box, and boiler makers, sugar refineries, and machine shops. Germans and Irish arrived in the mid-19th century, and large numbers of Poles began arriving before the turn of the century. The homes built for the merchants and the buildings erected for their workers sprang up along streets that lead down to the waterfront. Today, this area is on the National Register of Historic Places as the Greenpoint Historic District.

20th and 21st centuries

The petroleum industry continued to expand, despite the occasional catastrophe. On September 13, 1919, the Standard Oil refinery caught fire and soon spread flaming liquids into neighboring oil works and Newtown Creek.

In 1933, Greenpoint gained access to the New York City Subway, with the opening of the IND Crosstown Line (currently serving the G train), running under Manhattan Avenue from Nassau Avenue to Queens. In 1937, the line was extended to Downtown Brooklyn, providing direct access from Greenpoint to points south.

Environmental difficulties and litigation

Greenpoint community residents and activists have periodically banded together, sometimes with the aid of their local representatives, to fight highly polluting facilities and practices in the neighborhood. Such organization led the city to close the huge Greenpoint incinerator in 1994, which was out of compliance with all city, state, and federal regulations. In the late 1980s, after an increasing series of highly odorous releases from the Sewage Treatment Plant which served a good portion of Lower Manhattan, a local group formed calling itself GASP (Greenpointers Against Smell Pollution) that compelled the city to control the outflows and to plan a vastly expanded facility that took 20 years to build. The mid-1980s saw a great increase in the number of trucks driving through the neighborhood with municipal waste, often toxic waste, to be held at “transfer stations”.

2005 rezoning

On May 11, 2005, New York City’s Department of City Planning approved a rezoning of 175 blocks in Greenpoint and Williamsburg. According to the project’s Environmental Impact Statement, the rezoning was expected to bring approximately 16,700 new residents to the neighborhood by 2013 in 7,300 new units of housing. 250,000 square feet (23,000 m2) of new retail space are projected, along with a corresponding loss of just over 1,000,000 square feet (93,000 m2) of existing industrial capacity. The rezoning also includes a 28-acre (110,000 m2) waterfront park. Included in its requirements are provisions for a promenade along the East River, built piecemeal by the developers of existing waterfront lots. An inclusionary housing plan was included in the resolution and provides height bonuses along the waterfront and in Northside Williamsburg for developers providing apartments at rates considered affordable for low-income households (below 80% of the area’s median income); on the waterfront, these bonuses could allow for up to seven-story height increases.