The Death of “The Regular”
Both Greenpoint and Crown Heights are having their long-time residents pushed out of their communities.
By Angelica Hill and Krista Bryant
Greenpoint and Crown Heights may seem unlikely geographical pairings however these two close-knit communities have one key similarity, which is picking the communities apart: the rapid changes happening due to gentrification. There is a lack of recognition of how devastating the effect of this can be on a community and area. In the following piece we will hear the stories of a huge range of residence and business owners, from the manager of a Polish meat market, a woman working in a local cafe as a waitress, to a controversial bar owner misappropriating an areas’ culture.
Both Greenpoint and Crown Heights are currently in the grasp of these changes and the pace of change is startling.
Greenpoint, Brooklyn, is up-and-coming, a prime location for the young, successful and trendy. Real-estate advertisements boast of its “culture, commerce and community” with “direct access to Midtown Manhattan, Wall Street, Williamsburg, and Long Island City.” They describe it as “New York’s most creative neighbourhood for the arts, dining, entertainment, and shopping. With its sweeping skyline views of New York City and its rich, original history.” But many are blind to the crippling implications of these changes on local businesses and long time residents.
Zofia Goreczny
Greenpoint, sometimes called ‘Little Poland’, has the second largest Polish immigrant community in the US, behind Chicago’s ‘Little Warsaw’. Poles settled in Greenpoint at the end of the 19th Century, fleeing the Soviet Union and hoping for the economic prosperity promised by the American Dream. Zofia Goreczny moved to Greenpoint from Poland 30 years ago. She immediately felt at home. Almost everyone spoke Polish. Most of the shops were Polish. The area was rough around the edges but had good schools and a sense of community. Goreczny now manages the Kiszka Nassau Meat Market, an iconic institution that has been serving the community for nearly four decades.
Regulars used to come into Goreczny’s store daily to stock up on the fresh bydgoska and krakowska sausages, kaszanka, and podlaska, as well as the dizzying array of hams and other meats on offer. The shop is a focal point for the Polish community, a place to socialize as well as to shop. They see old friends, catch up with the local gossip, and pause to reminisce about their homeland where they knew each other as children. Many of the workers and customers at Kiszka expressed the sentiment that if Kiszka were ever to close, it would surely mark the end of the Polish community in Greenpoint. Goreczny is confident the shop will survive for the next five years but the customer base, including canny tourists and adventurous Koreans, now travel from further afield. There is a pervasive sadness about Kiszka’s seemingly inevitable slide from community center to tourist attraction or novelty store.
The neighborhood character is dissipating. Greenpoint, perilously close geographically to the giddy hipster heights of Williamsburg, is powerless to resist the economic pull of its proximity to a new kind of immigrant: young and affluent city workers seeking a new area that promises grit, edge and character — but without crime and with easy access to flat white coffees and organic juice. ‘The Greenpoint’, set to be the tallest building in Brooklyn, towers over the neighborhood and markets itself to a determinedly high-class clientele.
“I’ve never heard of a $5 coffee — not around here, never. And you’ll stumble onto that now. You’ll walk into one of these coffee shops opening up, by accident and say “Ay, I want a cup of coffee” and they’ll turn around and say “oh yeah, that will be $5” — Gary Gigante, a retiree who has lived on the same Greenpoint block for over three decades.
Shivane Maraj
Longtime residents simply cannot compete in this new housing market. Shivane Maraj, the manager at a cozy little café in Greenpoint, reflected upon the disappearance of her Polish regulars. The story of Bill, who would come in every Saturday for a chicken on rye or a turkey burger, brought the reality home to Maraj. Bill had lived in Greenpoint all his life. He would usually come in alone and one Saturday Maraj noticed he wasn’t himself and asked what was wrong. “He said his landlord sold his building and he had to find a place, and he just…I mean he’s like 75 he just doesn’t know how he could afford to move around here. This is home, he was born, raised here, this is all he knows, and so he would just say he couldn’t afford.” Months went by and Maraj didn’t see Bill then she told me “I saw one of the ladies that would know him and I said, “Where’s Bill? I haven’t seen him. Is he okay?” and she told me he committed suicide that week of Christmas.” Bill had been found unconscious, partially submerged in the East River, on the Brooklyn shoreline. “He literally just couldn’t, and I’m not saying it’s because he couldn’t afford but that was part of it, it contributed to the fact of it, and he was alone here, he had no one else.”
Yet Maraj recognized that progress cannot be halted: “When you have a one-bedroom apartment that is listed for $3,000 and disappears within two hours of being listed, I mean how can you stop that? There’s nothing you can really do because in the end that’s all they ever care about is money and this generation they want to be living in a “cool town.” According to a 2014 NYU study, average rents in the Greenpoint and Williamsburg areas trebled between 1990 and 2014.
Roberta Flores
Maraj’s colleague at the café, Roberta Flores, a Hispanic immigrant, who was forced to leave her apartment in Greenpoint, after 17 years, echoed the familiar narrative of Greenpoint evolving from a neighbourhood of empty plots and drug deals, to a nicer environment in which it was cleaned up and the rents began to rise….
Maraj summed up the dilemma. “New York City has pretty much become unaffordable and we have to take responsibility, we can’t just blame the landlords, and we can’t just blame the city. The city does hold some responsibility but we as individuals we’re paying it.” She underlines the importance being “socially conscious about somebody’s right to live in a decent priced home.”
Maraj and Goreczny share an uncertainty about the future. The “regular” has become an endangered species, moving to more affordable areas of Brooklyn such as Ridgewood and Maspeth. Both recognize that they are at the mercy of “the market.” The contrast with the newly arrived, whose priorities are economic and practical, is stark. For them, there is little space for sentimentality about the past. Both miss “the old Greenpoint”.
Now we move to Crown Heights…
Much like Greenpoint, Crown Heights is also an up-and-coming neighborhood with brand new businesses to fit the millennials. From bars, restaurants, new-aged nail and hair salons, ice cream parlours, health food stores, etc. You name it Crown Heights offers it. This drastic change is all because of gentrification.
Between the years 2000 to 2010, an influx of new residents invaded the Brooklyn neighborhood, which forced many of the old residents out. Things just became too expensive to maintain. As reported in the New York Times in 2015, former Crown Heights resident, Shirley De Matas was among many who was forced out of her apartment due to a rent increase, little to no maintenance on her apartment by the landlord and vermin infestation. In 1999, De Matas was living in a two- bedroom apartment at 1170 Lincoln Place with her husband and three children, where she was paying $800 a month for rent. In 2014, the rent was increased to $1,300 and with De Matas being a seamstress and her husband being a mechanic, the family had to cut back on a lot of things. Unable to maintain the rent, the family moved to East New York in 2014, where their rent was $750 a month.
These issues are not new to the community, in December 2015 Brownstoner wrote of the “high rents and landlords’ aggressive tactics” pushing out “longtime tenants” especially “African-Americans and Caribbean immigrants.” This is just as true now as it was then, fried chicken joint and braiding salons are being replaced by hipster bars, and restaurants along all the areas high streets. Census data shows that between 2000 and 2010 Crown Heights lost around 14% of it’s black population.
A 2016 Brooklyn tourist guide to Brooklyn described Crown Heights as “one of the borough’s hottest new-old neighborhoods,” and how, “if heterogeneity makes the world go round, then Crown Heights is spinning” there are a huge range of communities inhabiting its streets, from Panamanian and Caribbean, to Asian and Hispanic. The area is described as “a random marriage of the oddest of demographic bedfellows: Hasidic Jews, Caribbean Americans, hipsters, and young professionals.”
The Summerhill Controversy
In June, a new “boozy sandwich shop” called Summerhill opened at 673 Nostrand Ave. Owner, Becca Brennan, said the building, which had been a bodega, had bullet holes in the wall, and heard a rumor that the bodega also had a back room where guns were being sold. She featured the bullet holes on the restaurant’s Instagram.
The residents of Crown Heights found these posts to be very offensive and a misrepresentation of the neighborhood’s cultural history. Brennan has since released an apology, but is still refusing to cover up the “bullet -hole ridden” wall. On August 24th, 2017, there was an emergency town hall meeting held to address the owner and her actions on removing the bullet hole ridden wall and here is what she had to say…
Just as the Polish community in Greenpoint are moving to different areas of Brooklyn so are the West Indian community in Crown Heights. However they are also moving out of state to Boston, Maryland, Philadelphia or some returning to the Caribbean.
I Grew Up Here
To many it may seem like gentrification is an issue that will eventually work itself out, but for those who’ve grown up in the community it’s more than that. Being a resident of the neighbourhood, I have witness the rapid growth and change that has taken place, and the kind of impact that it has had on the community. Since gentrification has consumed Crown Heights, the once cultural, close-knit community, has now become divided and jarringly disjointed. Residents who currently reside there are longing for the sense of community that they once had. I strongly believe in community inclusion, and feel that if you are in the community you should get to know the community from its history, to its current state.
Gentrification in both these areas seems to be inevitable. The question that now needs to be asked is whether there will be any support, or retribution for those “regulars” and “old-timers” who have been forced out of the places they call home, out of communities they have grown to love, and lost friendship cultivated over years? Despite these changes, and the undeniable threat posed by them, the people within these two communities will continue to stand together to keep their culture, and beliefs alive within their respective communities.
Angelica Hill’s work as seen above will be published in a self standing article in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle the week of Monday 4th September.
