BUSHWICK — For the past two decades, 236 Troutman Street has been a reliable stop on the Bushwick nightlife circuit. In the beginning there was Tandem, an early hipster outpost that opened in 2007 and rose to local fame as the neighborhood’s “best hook-up bar” before closing in 2015. Then another watering hole, the island-themed Mad Tropical, took up the baton from 2017 until late last year.
Now the beloved location, a warren of side-doors with a sizable back room, is getting something indisputably new: Shorts Movie Theater, a nonprofit, 40-seat cinema that will exclusively show short films — the first in the world, in fact, based on semi-exhaustive Googling.
Viewers stamp a punch card when they arrive, and pay when they leave based on how many movies they’ve seen. The pricing ranges from $1 for mini-offerings of one to two minutes, to $9 for anything over 31 minutes long.
Karma Masselli conceived of the project in August 2023, after encountering a short film director at the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival in Vermont. “There should be a theater for short films,” she thought in passing, but soon forgot about the idea. It was only when Masselli returned to the festival the next year and met someone else from the industry — a woman who bluntly told her that “people don’t watch short films” — that the idea took hold.
Was there really no audience for short films? Recent studies suggest that the average American watches a combination of Instagram Reels, TikTok, and Youtube for more than two hours each day, which amounts to 30 days of continuous viewing per year. This rapid-fire format was responding to a real need, Masselli believed, and she set about building a brick-and-mortar space that could channel those impulses, heavily monetized on social media platforms through cynical “attention fracking,” towards better ends.
Masselli organized a string of pop-up screenings across Brooklyn last summer as a proof-of-concept, and the results were promising. In June, attendees crowded into a makeshift theater in the bowels of Threes Brewing, a bar in Gowanus, for a Pride-themed lineup of short films. A second gathering followed later that month; in November, Shorts Movie Theater won a $5,000 grant from the Brooklyn Public Library, helping to fuel a partnership with Art House New York and more sold-out events through this spring.
As fun as that period was, Masselli is eager to see her original plan come to fruition. “The danger of doing something besides the goal is that we do it well, and people say, ‘Just do that!’” she explained. “There are so many incredible screening series, festivals, and one-offs every night of the week for short films. The one thing that’s missing is the physical space.”
Last Friday, as New Yorkers began battening down the hatches for the impending nor’easter, Masselli and collaborator Jennifer Allen sat contemplating the layout of the lobby, set to be a bar and café called The Suggestion Box, under the washed-out glow of a skylight.
Patrons from the Tandem days will recognize the countertop, rescued from an Elks Lodge in Elmhurst where Ella Fitzgerald used to sing, and the stained-glass doors, made of repurposed scrap from Frank Gehry’s IAC building in Chelsea. But the faux-jungle foliage of Mad Tropical is gone, replaced with illustrated details of characters holding smartphones — a Tibetan monk, Masselli and her older sister, and Connor Storrie of “Heated Rivalry” as a gladiator — courtesy of local artist Pilar Herrera-Land.
Shorts Movie Theater is looking to carve a niche for itself between 10-second videos and feature films, and the decor reflects its rich but uncertain relationships with both extremes. Take Herrera-Land’s work: Although Masselli wanted to make an explicit visual link between social media and short films, she also considered banning visitors from using their phones — short films’ main competition — before her team convinced her otherwise.
“The goal is to create a space that is so enticing that people naturally don’t pull out their phones,” said Allen. “Sometimes when I enter a place that’s like, ‘No phones,’ it can create a barrier for entry.”
“It’s just not the relationship we want to have with our audience,” agreed Masselli.
If Shorts Movie Theater aims to keep social media at a reasonable arm’s length, it actively seeks out resonances with the heyday of film culture. The lobby will have a custom split-flap board, the kind that greeted travelers at train stations in the 1950s, but displaying showtimes rather than arrivals and departures. And Masselli plans to revive the even older, 1910s-era tradition of movie theaters showing newsreels, too, with a twist — once per week, she hopes to invite local journalists to give a 10-minute recap of citywide news.
“There’s this sense that we’re at the end of humanity. We’ve totally messed up, and we’ve ruined what was an ongoing thread,” noted Masselli. “But one hundred years ago it was the rise of fascism, it was economic collapse, and it was short films in movie theaters. We’re not that different now.”
While some movie theaters sell the chance to step outside of time, Shorts emphasizes its passage. A sun crosses over the bar on a mechanical track; in the back, twelve panels painted by Herrera-Land depict dreamlike scenes from each month, accentuating the feeling of a 1930s jewel box theater. (A review of last year’s Gowanus pop-up in the magazine Copy described the aesthetic as a “worn-in saloon transformed into an idyllic summer-camp movie night under the stars.”)
The space is ultimately in service of a mission. From the outset, Masselli was committed to establishing Shorts as a nonprofit, funded by a combination of donations, grants, and ticket sales — an arrangement that allows her team to focus on providing a tonic to an age of disaffection and disconnection.
“I think that the negativity around diversity is a response to an existential fear that we don’t have enough resources for all of us. That we have no ability to coexist, so the more people there are, the more ways there are to kill each other,” said Masselli. “But imagine if you could frame diversity and the size of the world as a positive, and say that for as many people as there are, there are just as many solutions, stories, and parallels.”
“It’s crazy when you see a short film and you’re like, I’ve never heard this language before, or I didn’t know this country existed,” she added. “And then it’s exciting when you’re like, ‘Oh my god, this is my sense of humor. This is my sense of beauty.’”
Shorts Movie Theater is scheduled to open in late October. For more information and updates about the exact date, visit shortsmovietheater.com.
Debra Bender is among the presumably shrinking crowd of Greenpointers to have given birth in the Greenpoint Hospital.
She had her oldest son there, before the long-dilapidated facility closed in 1982. Now, more than 40 years later, the 61-year resident of the nearby Cooper Park Houses is fighting to secure the former hospital’s future as a 557-unit affordable housing hub.
On Thursday, September 17, Bender and about two dozen Greenpointers gathered outside the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) headquarters in the Financial District to demand that the agency vacate the Greenpoint Hospital site to make way for a long-planned affordable senior housing.
At issue is the City’s abrupt decision to relocate 200 single homeless men from the former shelter at the old Bellevue Hospital on 30th St. in Manhattan — which the Mamdani Administration closed in March — to a temporary intake center at the former hospital, a move that interrupts plans from St. Nicks Alliance and Hudson Companies to redevelop the site as Kingsland Commons, a sprawling complex set to include deeply affordable housing, senior housing, as well as a homeless shelter.
Speaking to the Brooklyn Star, Bender was clear that she and the other protesters are not against homeless shelters— the site already hosts a 200-bed facility for unhoused single men. It’s the City’s lack of communication with the Greenpoint community, and the fact that the intake shelter is preventing developers from moving forward with the senior housing development, that Bender and her neighbors are protesting.
The crucial fourth phase of the Kingsland Commons project — housing specifically for Greenpoint’s seniors — cannot move forward until DHS vacates the site.
“We have nothing against people being homeless because we are one step away from being homeless ourselves,” Bender said. “We want affordable housing. We need affordable housing, especially for our seniors.”
The intake shelter at Greenpoint Hospital was always meant to be temporary, a DHS spokesperson said, and joins several locations throughout the city that are temporarily hosting the men once housed at Bellevue. And with the hospital site having been used as a Department of Homeless Services (DHS) shelter in the past, it was a natural choice, the spokesperson added.
“Following the closure of the 30th Street Intake Shelter, DHS had to address an urgent need for assessment beds so we could continue to connect New Yorkers to appropriate shelter placements,” the DHS spokesperson wrote in a statement to the Brooklyn Star.
“As such, we utilized every resource at our disposal — including sites that previously served as DHS facilities and remained under our control — to meet this operational need.”
The spokesperson did not say how long DHS planned to keep the men at Kingsland Commons.
But for the Greenpointers protesting Thursday, the move represents both a betrayal on the City’s part and an obstacle to the much-needed affordable senior housing slated for development on the site. Phase Two of the Kingsland Commons project is set to complete in early 2027, said St. Nicks Alliance Director of Affordable Housing Policy and Advocacy Frank Lang, with the lottery for its 311 units of 30-80 AMI affordable housing set to open in the coming weeks. But it’s the project’s final phase — which involves the demolition of a portion of the Greenpoint Hospital to make way for 135 units of multifamily housing and 109 units of affordable senior housing, approved by the City in 2021 — that cannot move forward until DHS vacates the site.
Protesters criticized the department’s apparent failure to notify St Nicks Alliance and engage with community stakeholders regarding its decision to move into the site.
It was only after Bellevue’s closure, when a St Nicks Alliance staffer read about the City’s plans to move into the Kingsland Commons site in a news article, did the community learn of DHS’ plans.
”They did not engage us in any of these conversations,” said William Vega, who sits on Brooklyn’s Community Board 1, on Thursday. ”The promises that they made to the community, they broke.”
About 30 minutes into Thursday’s rally, State Senator Julia Salazar showed up to address the crowd, taking care not to alienate the DHS workers in the building above.
“I deeply appreciate the work that the public servants at DHS do, and they deserve and should have a more suitable location to do intake to serve constituents who are currently experiencing homelessness,” Salazar said.
She continued: “It’s not appropriate for them to endlessly use this site for that purpose, especially because it further delays this extremely important project that will benefit all of our communities.”
It’s this last point that drew the most ire from Greenpointers Thursday. Like other Brooklyn neighborhoods, Greenpoint faces a major shortage of affordable housing for its elderly population. Much of the new housing going up along the neighborhood’s waterfront is either luxury housing or affordable housing for single adults, meaning many of Greenpoint’s seniors are either forced into cramped arrangements with their younger family members, or leave the neighborhood entirely.
With such urgent need for senior housing, the community simply cannot afford a delay to the Kingsland Commons project, the protester argued.
“In their last chapter, what are they doing?” said Vega. “They’re sharing the bedroom with their grandchildren, having to travel to have their own apartment in the last chapter of life.”
St. Nicks Alliance, which has provided elder care services in North Brooklyn since the 1980s, has several affordable housing projects for seniors in development around Greenpoint and Williamsburg. According to Lang, these developments already have long waitlists.
“That’s the population that’s lived in the community for generations that’s getting priced out,” Lang added. “They can’t stay in the community.”
Bender, who lives with her 37-year-old, wheelchair-bound son, says she’s witnessed this displacement first-hand in her elderly mother, who moved out of Greenpoint years ago and now hardly recognizes the neighborhood she once called home. Without the seniors who remember how things were, Bender said, the neighborhood will lose its collective memory.
“We’ve seen a lot of change.” she said. “My mom, when she visits, she feels like a tourist here. Sometimes I feel like a tourist here as well.”
After scanning Brooklyn and Queens, Poonam Sharma and her husband Anand Parikh still hadn’t found the preschool they dreamed of for their daughter. They envisioned bright and interactive educational spaces, only to hit a wall of windowless basements and endless waitlists, sometimes years long. Most parents would have settled for the least disappointing choice, but Sharma and Parikh did not give in.
Sharma and Parikh founded the Goddard School of Greenpoint, which is set to welcome the first class of approximately 130 students later this year. The school will open jobs for 30 teachers, who will collaborate across the school’s eleven classrooms. Sharma shared that the center, located at 85 Commercial Street, features bright windows, an indoor movement area, and access to multiple playgrounds.
This is the seventh Goddard School location to open in New York City but the first in Brooklyn. Sharma shared that she was drawn to Greenpoint because it is a “vibrant growing neighborhood” with “a ton of young families.” But these families are faced with a severe school seat shortage. In Sharma’s experience, though there are a number of high quality educational institutions in the neighborhood, their small size and prioritization of siblings make it difficult for new families to secure spots at their school of choice.
“The first five years of every child’s life is so important,” Sharma explained. “It really dictates how they’re gonna approach not only learning but social interaction as they get older.” Sharma didn’t grow up in the U.S. Moving here shaped how she understood the importance of these early years of education. “I’m one of three sisters. My older sister and I, frankly, we didn’t have the best foundation for an education. Coming to this country when I was nine, I realized wow I’m a little bit behind, and it took me a while to play catch up.” Sharma especially noticed the difference in her younger sister, who was educated here under a philosophy that incorporated social emotional learning.
This perspective drew Sharma to Goddard’s educational philosophy. Goddard locations across the country follow the signature “Wonder of Learning” curriculum, which allows children’s innate curiosity to drive the learning process. “Kids learn best when they’re really encouraged to explore their natural curiosity,” Sharma expressed. “They don’t do best when a teacher is talking at them or reading a story at them. They have to get involved in their own learning.”
At the core of Goddard’s curriculum is a collection of open ended questions. Each week, students are asked to contemplate a new idea, like “who am I?” and “how does it feel to be a part of something?” This shifts students away from learning that demands they find a “correct” answer, to a model where success looks like 15 different answers in a classroom of 15 students. The goal of this is to transform school into a space where children learn as much from their peers as their teachers. Critical thinking skills, problem-solving, and creativity are traits that Sharma hopes will sprout in this environment.
While every child deserves the opportunity to explore this form of learning, high tuition costs are a barrier to access for many families. The tuition enables the school to provide quality educators, nutritious food, and childcare from 7 a.m.–6 p.m. every school day for no additional charge. While Sharma hopes to expand access in the future, covering start-up costs without compromising the quality of care poses difficulties.
Though financial accessibility is a work in progress, Sharma seeks to incorporate values of diversity, cultural appreciation, and respect into the curriculum. Sharma spoke about how, because she and her husband come from a different background than many people in Brooklyn, they “want all of our kids, their backgrounds, and where their families come from to be celebrated. Kids aren’t born with empathy or kindness. These are qualities that must be taught.” Sharma says this is a huge part of why she is opening up the school. “I want to expose them to different languages, religions, cultures…I want all my kids to see themselves reflected in books, I want my own child to see herself reflected, I want my director’s grandchild to see herself reflected.”
Reviews of Goddard locations in NYC and beyond are not always positive—there are online reviews galore complaining of health hazards, disorganization, dissatisfaction with curriculum, and more. However, these critiques are typically traceable to management at specific locations. Each Goddard School location is an independently-run franchise; the motives and methods of school administrators make all the difference. While there is no way to know yet how the school will operate in practice, Sharma has her heart set on creating a nurturing environment for all students who walk through the doors of the Goddard School of Greenpoint.
Enrollment for the Goddard School of Greenpoint is open now.
Greenpoint City councilmember Lincoln Restler voiced his opposition to the Monitor Point development in a passionate speech. Photo by Cole Sinanian.
BY COLE SINANIAN | news@queensledger.com
The moment Bryan Kelly began speaking, several of the more than a hundred Greenpointers packed into the Polish Slavic Center solemnly pulled out their signs: “600ft Luxury Towers? Hard Pass,” read one.
“Bushwick Inlet Can’t Be Replaced,” read another.
Tensions in the room were high. Kelly, President of Development at the Gotham Corporation, had come to pitch an enormous mixed-use development that would add 3,000 residents to Greenpoint by its completion in the early 2030s. The sign-bearers had come to voice their disapproval before the Community Board.
Hanging in the balance is the fate of Monitor Point, a spit of land north of Bushwick Inlet that’s Greenpoint’s last swath of undeveloped waterfront. A section of it is part of a 27.8-acre parcel that the City set aside in the 2005 Williamsburg/Greenpoint rezoning for the long-awaited Bushwick Inlet Park.
Local activists with Save the Inlet and Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park have fought for years to prevent private developers from acquiring the promised parkland. Twenty years later, the Gotham Organization — in collaboration with the MTA — is seeking to remove the park designation from the City Map and upzone the adjacent property in order to build three high-rise apartment buildings, the tallest of which would rise to 600ft. The three towers would include 1,150 housing units, 40% of which would be affordable at 40-80% Area Median Income (AMI), and could add some 3,000 residents to the neighborhood. These towers, developers say, would provide much-needed affordable housing to the district, and help fund major public benefits, like a building to house the Greenpoint Monitor Museum, public waterfront access, shoreline rehabilitation, and crucial MTA funding.
But critics argue that the project is a land-grab. The 80,000-square-foot MTA-owned property located at 40 Quay Street will be leased to the Gotham Organization for a century, while air rights at the Greenpoint Monitor Museum-owned 56 Quay Street — designated on the City Map as park land but never acquired by the City — will be acquired by Gotham. It’s a betrayal, critics say, of the City’s 2005 commitment to integrating the land into Bushwick Inlet Park.
Other critics are longtime Greenpoint residents with the trauma of the displacement and gentrification brought by the 2005 rezoning and the luxury high-rises that followed fresh in mind, fearing that such a population bump of mostly wealthy residents will only lead to more gentrification. And for others still, it’s an environmental issue; rare birds and sea life live around the Inlet, which was just a century ago toxic with pollution. Now, years of care and rehabilitation have allowed the public to access the estuary once again, just in time to be overshadowed by residential skyscrapers that activists fear could turn the park and the Inlet into little more than a playground for the wealthy.
Still, several groups in attendance came to support the Monitor Point project, including the labor unions SEIU 32BJ and Local 79, whose workers expect it to bring them good jobs, as well as Los Sures, a local Housing Development Fund Corporation (HDFC) cooperative.
The hearing, held on January 20, was the beginning of the project’s ULURP, set to go before Community Board 1 for a recommendation vote on February 3.
Affordable for who?
Outside the Polish Slavic Center, activists with Save the Inlet rallied before the hearing, braving the cold to chant and hold signs that read “Public Land for Public Good!” and “Stop Stealing Public Parkland for Luxury Towers in GPT!!!”
Inside, developers began by presenting their vision for an integrated, mixed-used community space that would finally connect Bushwick Inlet Park, the East River, the Greenpoint Monitor Museum, and the rest of the North Brooklyn waterfront esplanade via a series of public walkways and open spaces, while restoring a degraded and flood-vulnerable shoreline on Greenpoint’s last remaining plot of undeveloped waterfront. They argued the project goes far beyond housing, and will unlock more than 50,000 square feet of public open space that would include retail, park land, public plazas and lobbies, and the Greenpoint Monitor Museum itself. Part of this is a $20 million investment in “site resiliency, waterfront infrastructure, and pedestrian connections.”
“It adds 51,500 square feet of new open space — some of which was expected in the ‘05 rezoning and more — for the community, for public equity, not just for residents of the new building,” said Kelly. “It’s an open gate to the community, not a gated community.”
It would be all connected by a meandering path inspired by Bushwick Inlet that would finally connect the Williamsburg and Greenpoint waterfronts. Dan Kaplan, senior partner with FX Collaborative Architects, said that the project’s architects were working on a “bird-friendly” design that would integrate texture and setbacks into the buildings to avoid bird collisions, and that an all-glass facade would be avoided “at all costs.”
The 690 units of luxury housing would finance the public benefit, developers said, like an additional 460 units of “permanently affordable” housing at 40-80% Area Median Income (AMI), publicly accessible “open space,” and an expanded Greenpoint Monitor Museum. Key to the development team’s presentation was that the land’s current use — housing a degraded MTA mobile wash warehouse — adds nothing to the community, prevents the public from accessing the waterfront, and won’t protect the shoreline from the effects of erosion and climate change. And in leasing its property to the Gotham Organization, the MTA will earn more than $600 million over the course of the lease that could be put towards transit improvements throughout the city. Money for Bushwick Inlet Park, meanwhile, will begin at $300,000 annually, and increase over the course of the 99-year lease.
Throughout their presentation, the development team repeated that their plan does more for the community than is required by law. At 40% affordable housing at 40-80% AMI, the Monitor Point towers will far exceed the 25% affordability at 60% AMI requirement in the City’s mandatory inclusionary housing law, Kelly pointed out.
“We have had about 150 outreach meetings,” he said. “That’s to your elected officials, religious organizations, civics, friends of open space, people who are not friends of the project, and people who are friends of the project. Because the result is, we’ve done our best so far to make changes to address your concerns, and that concern is 40% affordability.”
Activists from Save the Inlet held a protest against the development outside the Polish Slavic Center before the January 20 hearing. Photo by Cole Sinanian.
Restler weighs in
Much of the public, however, was unimpressed. While Kelly was explaining the annual park funding, some audience members shook their heads and shouted “shame!” When he said that the towers would stand 56, 40, and 20 storeys, respectively, someone in the crowd shouted “Way too high!” And as Kelly explained the goal of the project — to create “intergenerational, mixed income housing and ultimately fighting for the goal of creating open space for everybody,” he said — shouts rang out from the audience: “Liar! Liar!”
At several points throughout, Community Board 1 Second Vice Chair Del Teague, who moderated the hearing, had to silence unruly audience members.
“We have 85 people who want to speak,” Teague said. “I don’t even know if I can give people a full minute.”
The mood turned, however, when Greenpoint City councilmember Lincoln Restler — whose City Council vote will likely determine the fate of the project — got up to speak.
“I want to just say plainly where I’m at on this project to all of you, which is precisely what I’ve said to Gotham and the MTA,” Restler said. “I’m a no on this project.”
A raucous applause broke out before he’d even finished the sentence. Some audience members were on their feet in standing ovation. Kelly and the development team, meanwhile, looked uncomfortable as they retreated into the shadows in the room’s far corner. Someone catcalled: “Atta boy, Lincoln!” After about 30 seconds of applause, Restler approached the mic again:
“We built significantly more new housing in our district than any other district in the city,” he said. “We built well over 26,000 units of housing, but the vast majority of that housing is market rate, luxury housing, housing that our communities quite simply can’t afford.”
He continued: “This is the last large public site in Greenpoint, and the idea that we would build predominantly luxury housing on this site, I have to say, I find it offensive. This was the central jewel of the Greenpoint Williamsburg rezoning. And 20 years later, we do not have a fully funded park. In fact, most of the park is in need of significant remediation before we see construction move forward.”
Scot Fraser, a long time Greenpointer and member of Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park. Photo by Cole Sinanian.
Union jobs, Trojan horse
After Restler’s speech, the some 85 members of the public who’d signed up to speak lined up in waves to deliver their testimonies. First up was the SEIU 32BJ union, which represents building maintenance workers. Several members attended the hearing to express their support for the project, which they argued would deliver reliable, well-paid union jobs to working-class Brooklynites.
“I’m happy to report that developers of this proposed project have made a credible commitment to good jobs at the project,” said Theodore Perez, a worker with SEIU 32BJ. “Good Jobs mean prevailing wages. They mean benefits, and they mean a pathway to the middle class for the people who work them. We need housing built in every neighborhood in New York City to ensure that working families are not displaced by dwindling supply and skyrocketing rents.”
According to an unnamed Gotham Organization spokesperson, communicated via William Roberts with a PR firm called Berlin Rosen, both the unions SEIU 32BJ and Local 79 — which was also present at the hearing — have partnerships with the company that guarantee union employment at all Gotham properties.
“32BJ and Local 79 have been longtime partners of The Gotham Organization,” the spokesperson wrote. “All Gotham-owned buildings are staffed by 32BJ members, and we have worked closely with Local 79 across numerous housing projects. We look forward to continuing this partnership with Monitor Point.”
Sarah Roberts, also known as “the Brooklyn Bird Lady,” opposed the project on ecological grounds:
“I am here to oppose the proposed Monitor Point development not because I dislike change or I don’t want affordable housing,” but because we must protect what is truly irreplaceable,” Roberts said.
“Bushwick Inlet is not just another piece of industrial shoreline,” she continued. “These tidal wetlands provide natural climate resilience. They slow down storm surge, absorb blood water, store carbon and buffer our community from increasingly frequent and severe weather events
George Weinmann, Vice President of the Greenpoint Monitor Museum, testified in support of the project, highlighting the educational value of the museum, which showcases the USS Monitor, the legendary Civil War battleship that was built in Greenpoint. Weinmann traced his family history in Greenpoint back to his ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War, and explained how local children recognize him and his wife, Janice — who serves as the museum’s president — on the street as the “Monitor people.”
“We tell them that we are going to build a museum on the land that shares the launch site of the USS Monitor, the ship that saved the Union, and we don’t want to disappoint them,” Weinmann said. “Please approve and make the Monitor Museum a reality.”
Chris Duerr, a longtime Greenpointer and father, had a different take. He described how his son was eight-years-old in 2016 when Mayor de Blasio assured the community it would get the full, 27.8-acre Bushwick Inlet Park. Now, his son’s off to college, Duerr said, and the full park still isn’t built.
“This is not about affordable housing,” he said. “Affordable housing and this museum are the Trojan Horse for luxury tower development.”
Duerr continued, addressing Gotham directly: “The plans that you guys presented are very compelling, but we’ve seen a lot of plans, and we would appreciate not being gaslit one more time.”
The other night I met James Nunez, a lifelong Greenpointer of Puerto Rican heritage and we reminisced about the long history of Puerto Ricans in North Brooklyn. Though Puerto Ricans still comprise a vibrant part of our community, many have been forced out of our area, victims to gentrification. James’ grandmother ran a Puerto Rican restaurant in the area until the 1990s. When I first arrived in Greenpoint in the early 1990s, walking north of Greenpoint Avenue meant experiencing Puerto Rico’s exuberant culture. Families sat outside on the street often playing dominoes while listening to salsa music, the smell of pork or chicken being barbecued on a grill wafting through the air.
Many North Brooklyn residents are surprised to learn that Puerto Ricans have lived in our area for over a century. In 1924, Congress passed the first immigration law, severely restricting immigration by establishing national quotas based on the 1890 census, heavily favoring Northern and Western Europeans, and completely barring Asians, particularly Japanese, reflecting widespread nativism and xenophobia. This act dramatically reduced overall immigration, created the first U.S. Border Patrol, and aimed to preserve a perceived homogeneous “American” demographic makeup for decades. In the 1920s, North Brooklyn was the beating heart of industrial New York City, then the planet’s largest industrial city. Local factories, heavily dependent on immigrant Jewish, Polish and Italian labor, facing a manpower shortage, looked to Puerto Rican whose residents were American citizens legally able to work in New York.
One of the local industries hit was the by the labor shortage was the American Hemp Rope Manufacturing Company located on a sprawling campus on West Street. Desperate for workers, the firm sent a ship to Puerto Rico and returned with 130 Puerto Rican women to make rope and shoelaces for the company Other local industries also recruited workers in Puerto Rico including Domino Sugar, which once ran the world’s largest sugar refinery in Williamsburg.
Puerto Ricans who spoke Spanish as a first language encountered many problems, including racism, discrimination and language issues because local schools for many years had no programs for immigrant children to learn English as a second language. Puerto Rican children suffered a very high dropout rate in schools. In 1961, Puerto Rican woman Antonia Pantoja founded ASPIRA (Spanish for “aspire”), a non-profit organization that promoted educational reform to help struggling Hispanic students. In 1972, ASPIRA of New York, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit demanding that New York City provide classroom instruction for struggling Latino students and bilingual and English as a Second Language instruction was born helping Hispanic students learn English and stay in school.
By the 1950s, North Brooklyn had become home to thousands of Puerto Rican migrants. Many white residents left Brooklyn in the 1960s for the suburbs and Puerto Ricans quickly replaced them. The North end of Greenpoint became predominately Puerto Rican and the south side of Williamsburg also grew into a huge Puerto Rican quarter.
By the late 1960s, Puerto Ricans comprised about a third of the local population. Many Puerto Ricans bought houses left by locals fleeing the area for the suburbs and a generation of Puerto Rican Greenpointers came of age locally. Although some Puerto Ricans owned their own homes most were renters who were forced out by rising housing prices.
Puerto Ricans soon organized to fight gentrification. In 1972, Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics in the south side of Williamsburg helped organize Los Sures, a community organization that still exists, which fights to help working-class people secure their housing rights. Los Sures was also perhaps the first North Brooklyn organization to provide a number of vital community services including education, senior citizen services and even a food pantry. Los Sures began responding to problems that confront tenants today, including withdrawal of city services, lease violations and illegal evictions. The organization also fought property owners trying to vacate their buildings to gentrify and whiten the neighborhood. Los Sures promoted community-based control of housing, both through management and ownership. In 1975, Los Sures became Brooklyn’s first community-based organization to enter into agreements to manage City-owned properties. It also became one of the first tenant advocacy groups to undertake large-scale rehabilitation. Still fighting for local people, Los Sures is a vital force in community activism.
Though the Puerto Rican presence in North Brooklyn is far smaller than it once was, many Puerto Ricans still and work in our area. Many Puerto Rican Greenpointers run local businesses including lifelong resident Catherine Vera Milligan who runs a wonderful coffee shop at 269 Nassau Avenue. If you want to eat delicious authentic Puerto Rican food try Guarapo restaurant on 58 North 3rd Street, Chrome at 525 Grand Street or La Isla at 293 Broadway. These places prove that Puerto Rican culture is still a vital part of the gorgeous mosaic of cultures that make up North Brooklyn. The other night I met James Nunez, a lifelong Greenpointer of Puerto Rican heritage and we reminisced about the long history of Puerto Ricans in North Brooklyn. Though Puerto Ricans still comprise a vibrant part of our community, many have been forced out of our area, victims to gentrification. James’ grandmother ran a Puerto Rican restaurant in the area until the 1990s. When I first arrived in Greenpoint in the early 1990s, walking north of Greenpoint Avenue meant experiencing Puerto Rico’s exuberant culture. Families sat outside on the street often playing dominoes while listening to salsa music, the smell of pork or chicken being barbecued on a grill wafting through the air.
Many North Brooklyn residents are surprised to learn that Puerto Ricans have lived in our area for over a century. In 1924, Congress passed the first immigration law, severely restricting immigration by establishing national quotas based on the 1890 census, heavily favoring Northern and Western Europeans, and completely barring Asians, particularly Japanese, reflecting widespread nativism and xenophobia. This act dramatically reduced overall immigration, created the first U.S. Border Patrol, and aimed to preserve a perceived homogeneous “American” demographic makeup for decades. In the 1920s, North Brooklyn was the beating heart of industrial New York City, then the planet’s largest industrial city. Local factories, heavily dependent on immigrant Jewish, Polish and Italian labor, facing a manpower shortage, looked to Puerto Rican whose residents were American citizens legally able to work in New York.
One of the local industries hit was the by the labor shortage was the American Hemp Rope Manufacturing Company located on a sprawling campus on West Street. Desperate for workers, the firm sent a ship to Puerto Rico and returned with 130 Puerto Rican women to make rope and shoelaces for the company Other local industries also recruited workers in Puerto Rico including Domino Sugar, which once ran the world’s largest sugar refinery in Williamsburg.
Puerto Ricans who spoke Spanish as a first language encountered many problems, including racism, discrimination and language issues because local schools for many years had no programs for immigrant children to learn English as a second language. Puerto Rican children suffered a very high dropout rate in schools. In 1961, Puerto Rican woman Antonia Pantoja founded ASPIRA (Spanish for “aspire”), a non-profit organization that promoted educational reform to help struggling Hispanic students. In 1972, ASPIRA of New York, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit demanding that New York City provide classroom instruction for struggling Latino students and bilingual and English as a Second Language instruction was born helping Hispanic students learn English and stay in school.
By the 1950s, North Brooklyn had become home to thousands of Puerto Rican migrants. Many white residents left Brooklyn in the 1960s for the suburbs and Puerto Ricans quickly replaced them. The North end of Greenpoint became predominately Puerto Rican and the south side of Williamsburg also grew into a huge Puerto Rican quarter.
By the late 1960s, Puerto Ricans comprised about a third of the local population. Many Puerto Ricans bought houses left by locals fleeing the area for the suburbs and a generation of Puerto Rican Greenpointers came of age locally. Although some Puerto Ricans owned their own homes most were renters who were forced out by rising housing prices.
Puerto Ricans soon organized to fight gentrification. In 1972, Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics in the south side of Williamsburg helped organize Los Sures, a community organization that still exists, which fights to help working-class people secure their housing rights. Los Sures was also perhaps the first North Brooklyn organization to provide a number of vital community services including education, senior citizen services and even a food pantry. Los Sures began responding to problems that confront tenants today, including withdrawal of city services, lease violations and illegal evictions. The organization also fought property owners trying to vacate their buildings to gentrify and whiten the neighborhood. Los Sures promoted community-based control of housing, both through management and ownership. In 1975, Los Sures became Brooklyn’s first community-based organization to enter into agreements to manage City-owned properties. It also became one of the first tenant advocacy groups to undertake large-scale rehabilitation. Still fighting for local people, Los Sures is a vital force in community activism.
Though the Puerto Rican presence in North Brooklyn is far smaller than it once was, many Puerto Ricans still and work in our area. Many Puerto Rican Greenpointers run local businesses including lifelong resident Catherine Vera Milligan who runs a wonderful coffee shop at 269 Nassau Avenue. If you want to eat delicious authentic Puerto Rican food try Guarapo restaurant on 58 North 3rd Street, Chrome at 525 Grand Street or La Isla at 293 Broadway. These places prove that Puerto Rican culture is still a vital part of the gorgeous mosaic of cultures that make up North Brooklyn.
A proposal to build towers by Bushwick Inlet has drawn pushback, and a key hearing is next week. Here’s what you need to know.
By COLE SINANIAN
news@queensledger.com
On Tuesday, January 20, Greenpointers will testify to Community Board 1 regarding plans from the Gotham Organization to build three residential towers just to the north of Bushwick Inlet, marking the beginning of what is sure to be one of Greenpoint’s landmark land-use battles of the year.
The proposed development, located at 40 and 56 Quay Street on a small peninsula called Monitor Point, would also include museum and retail space and require a rezoning from medium to high-density. It has garnered serious opposition from local activists, who argue the towers are far too big for the location and betray a two-decade-old commitment on the City’s part to reserve the area around the inlet for public parks.
There are also environmental and gentrification concerns; the towers would sit on the banks of a rare and ecologically sensitive estuary that’s only just begun to recover from centuries of environmental exploitation. And with nearly 3,000 new residents expected to be added to the neighborhood — most of whom would be paying luxury rent — critics worry that the project will only accelerate displacement in an already gentrified community.
Developers and City planners, meanwhile, have highlighted the importance of boosting housing stock and the public benefits the project would fund. Namely, a new Greenpoint Monitor Museum — which would explore the history of the USS Monitor, an early ironclad ship built in Greenpoint — and an extension of the East River esplanade that would connect the Greenpoint and Williamsburg waterfronts.
But the land on which the proposed towers would be built — currently owned by the NYC Transit Authority and the Greenpoint Monitor Museum — was set aside as park land as part of the 2005 Greenpoint/Williamsburg rezoning, with the intention of eventual acquisition by the City Parks Department. For the local critics, at issue is the question of the role the public should play in deciding the fate of New York City’s treasured waterfront land, and the City’s responsibility in honoring the word of former administrations.
“There’s this choice that’s being presented to us that’s not fair or feasible,” said Katherine Thompson, one of the directors at Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park, at a January 8 presentation at the Greenpoint Library. “That you can have either open space and protect the environment or affordable housing— it shouldn’t be this dichotomy.”
The Plan
The mixed-use development would include three residential buildings, pedestrian connections along the waterfront that would connect Bushwick Inlet Park to the Shore Public Walkway to the north, retail space, and a building that would house an expanded Greenpoint Monitor Museum. The residential towers would stand 640ft tall, 490ft and 260ft tall and sit about 50ft from the Bushwick Inlet shoreline. The two properties, 40 Quay Street and 56 Quay Street, currently house an MTA storage facility and the current Monitor Museum, respectively.
The developers would need a rezoning to build towers of this scale. Currently, the area is zoned R6, which is medium density and requires developers to implement setbacks and other contextual considerations when building towers. They are seeking to upzone to R8, or “high density” residential.
The Gotham Organization estimates construction cost of $630 million. Altogether the towers will include 1,150 residential units.
The Opposition
As part of the consequential 2005 Williamsburg/Greenpoint rezoning that transformed the heavily polluted, once-industrial area into residential neighborhoods, the City set aside several plots of land around Bushwick Inlet to be converted into public park space. Monitor Point was one of these properties, designated as park land on the City Map. Another became the current Bushwick Inlet Park. Others have remained empty, the soil contaminated from years of housing petroleum and fuel storage facilities, still awaiting cleanup.
Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park was formed in part to hold the City accountable for ensuring this land became the public space that the rezoning designated it as, said Greenpointer Steve Chesler, who sits on the organization’s board of directors. In 2015, a paper storage facility owned by CitiStorage caught fire and burned to the ground. The City considered allowing the property owner to sell it to a private developer, but Friends of Bushwick Inlet launched an aggressive campaign, urging the City to purchase the property and keep its commitment to making this land available to the public.
For Chesler and Thompson, the move to build residential towers on a property once slated as park land represents a betrayal by the City, and an insult to years of activism aimed at preserving the waterfront around Bushwick Inlet for.
A petition by a group called Save the Inlet has already gathered more than 5,000 signatures. At the January 8 meeting at Greenpoint Library — organized to educate Greenpointers and to help them prepare their testimonies for the hearing on the 20th — community members expressed concern about the neighborhood’s population density, the shadows the towers would cast, the traffic construction could cause, and the use of small affordable housing concessions to justify what they have described as an unsustainable and out-of-context development.
Scot Fraser, a documentary filmmaker who sits on Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park’s Board of Directors, called out the long shadows the towers would cast over the adjacent neighborhood. He also pointed out the irony of the situation — the northernmost section of the park, known as the Motiva Parcel, is set to open in the coming months after years of cleanup and advocacy. However, should the Monitor Point Towers be built, the Motiva section’s opening will likely coincide with the noisy arrival of cement trucks and construction crews.
“That part of the park is just about to open, the Motiva section of the park, will be immediately devoured by excavating trucks,” Fraser said.
Some residents at the meeting called the city’s affordable housing designations out-of-touch. According to the Draft Impact Environmental study, the Gotham Organization will make 25% of the Monitor Point towers’ residential units affordable at 60% area median income (AMI), a salary that, in New York City, amounts to about $87,000 for a three-person family.
Others, meanwhile, criticized the City for making the discussion about housing at all.
“They love the idea about us spending time talking about what percentage of affordable housing, because then they’ve already forced the false choice,” said a Greenpointer named Andy.
“We don’t want to talk about what percentage of affordable housing. We want to talk about, find another site.”
The Process
Despite the already simmering opposition, the plan is still in the earliest advisory stages of the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, or ULURP, which dictates the approval process for development.
ULURP goes like this: A developer submits its plan, along with a draft environmental impact statement, to the Department of City Planning, which reviews and certifies it. Next, the local Community Board has 60 days to review the application and provide a recommendation. This recommendation is non-binding.
“It’s not technically binding conditions,” said Chesler, who also sits on Community Board 1. “But the board kind of sets the stage. The borough president, and especially our city council member, have to answer to the people.”
The community board review stage is made up of several meetings, of which the public hearing on January 20 is a part. On February 3, the Community Board’s Land Use Review Committee will meet to deliberate, followed by a full-board vote on February 10.
After the community board’s recommendation, the plan goes to the borough president, whose recommendation will take into account the community board’s. Still, the borough president’s recommendation, like the community board’s, is non-binding, meaning the plan could still proceed without it.
The plans are then sent to the City Planning Commission (CPC) for a 60-day review. This decision is binding; the plan dies if the CPC rejects it.
If the plan is approved by the CPC, it then goes to the City Council for a 50-day review. “Member deference” is customary— that is, the City councilmember whose district the plans concern has the final say. In this case, that councilmember is Lincoln Restler.
Finally, the mayor has the option to veto the council’s approval. If he does not, then the project is approved.
The January 20th public hearing begins at 6:00pm in the auditorium of the Polish and Slavic Center at 176 Java St. The public will get one minute to read their testimonies. It might make sense to arrive early— if the January 8 meeting was any indication, the hearing on the 20th will be quite the spectacle.
Greenpointers trace a beloved enclave’s colorful past and uncertain future.
By COLE SINANIAN
news@queensledger.com
Izabella Prusaczyk remembers the Pulaski Day parade of her youth. Everyone was out on the street in Greenpoint speaking Polish, the red and white of the Polish flag painting their faces and hanging from the cars that did donuts in gas station parking lots. Poles would crowd the delis, subway cars and street corners on Greenpoint, Nassau and Manhattan Avenues, out to show pride for their homeland in what was then America’s preeminent Polish enclave. When her father, Marek, arrived from Poland in the early 1990s, he spoke no English, but had no trouble finding his way in Greenpoint, where he now operates a restaurant called Pyza, named for its specialty in pyzy, a kind of Polish dumpling.
“It really felt like the city was ours,” Prusaczyk said.
Polish-American NYU student Sebastian Staskiewicz was born in Greenpoint and spent his early childhood on Diamond Street. The Polish community here back then was tight-knit. He recalls grocery shopping with his Polish grandma, who spoke no English but had no trouble communicating with her neighbors and shopkeepers in the majority Polish-speaking community. Polish flags hung from storefronts and almost every corner was a Polish-owned bakery, deli or butcher shop.
“It was a very friendly community,” he said. “She would push me on a stroller and every block or so we had some sort of friend or relative that we could wave ‘hi’ to at the local deli. For her it was much easier in that sense because she could still use Polish to navigate and live within the US.”
Alain Beugoms, current principal of PS 34 on Norman Ave, was just beginning his teaching career in 2002, and remembers the Greenpoint of this era as one of New York’s most vibrant ethnic enclaves.
“It was almost like a Chinatown kind of experience,” he said. “Many people on the street speaking Polish, many stores and little restaurants and little shops, bookstores in Polish, all serving the Polish community.”
In 2025, Greenpoint’s Polish heritage is not so easy to spot. Nowadays, English is more commonly heard than Polish, and many Polish businesses have disappeared, replaced by American chains, cafes and now, cannabis dispensaries. Beloved Polish butcher shops and specialty supermarkets peddling smokey kielbasa, blood sausages and other Polish delicacies have closed their doors as corporate supermarket chains have moved in. Meanwhile, an influx of wealthy professionals who began moving to Williamsburg in the 2000s has spilled over into Greenpoint, while higher housing costs and luxury residential towers have followed, forever altering the neighborhood’s once working-class, predominantly immigrant character.
“I always saw someone I knew at the store I’d go to to get deli meats,” Prusaczyk said. “Now it’s a weed dispensary. We’re really on the decline here.”
“Everything is so expensive now,” continued Prusaczyk, who works with her father and her mother, Grazyna, at Pyza. “People get mad at us for our prices being so high, but I’m like, do you know where you are? There’s avocado toast for $18 down the block.”
But although many members of Greenpoint’s original Polish community have left — often moving either to the suburbs or back to Poland, where economic conditions have improved drastically since the fall of the Soviet Union — others stayed to raise families with children now growing up as Polish Americans, whose presence continues to influence neighborhood life through their cuisine, customs, and language.
A view inside the Eberhard Faber pencil factory on Kent Street in 1915, after the first peak of Polish migration to Brooklyn in the 1890s. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Historical Society.
Poles in America
Polish immigration to America reached its peak in the 1890s. By the 1920s, more than 2 million Poles had immigrated to the US, according to the Library of Congress. Many of these early arrivals were economic migrants and political refugees, working as steelworkers, miners, meatpackers and autoworkers and congregating in enclaves in America’s industrial centers.
Later, a subsequent wave of Polish immigrants arrived after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1980s and 1990s. A New York Times report from 1984 counted 50,000 people of Polish descent living in Greenpoint. These were economic migrants as well, mostly younger, educated people who took low-paying, working class jobs with intentions of saving money and eventually returning to their country once conditions there improved.
“Our 80s in Poland in the 20th century were truly devastating,” said Mateusz Sakowicz, the Polish Consul General in New York. “There were no products on the shelves and you could barely make ends meet. People had to line up to buy diapers.”
According to Sakowicz, Greenpoint’s “Little Poland” era peaked in the early-mid 2000s. In addition to gentrification and rising housing costs, Sakowicz partially attributes Little Poland’s decline to Poland’s 2004 entry into the European Union, which brought the country unprecedented economic growth and facilitated easy immigration to other European nations. Since 2004, Polish immigration to the US has slowed to a trickle.
“Finally my country has much more to offer, and it’s actually a preferable place to be, in particular if you’re of Polish origin,” Sakowicz said. “And if they were deciding to emigrate, people were choosing different states, closer to home,” he continued.
Partly as a result of Poland’s economic growth — with the country’s GDP having grown by 300% between 1989 and 2024, according to a report from Wrocław University in Poland — more people of Polish origin are returning to Poland than are leaving the country.
Meanwhile, many of the Polish economic migrants to Greenpoint of the 1980s have since moved on, having kids in Greenpoint, then purchasing homes outside the city. This is precisely what Staskiewicz’ family did, moving to Linden, New Jersey while Staskiewicz was in elementary school. Other family members moved to Long Island and Pennsylvania, Staskiewicz said, chasing better affordability and a higher quality of life to raise their families. Many of Prusaczyk’s childhood friends moved to Masbeth, Middle Village, or further out on Long Island.
Izabella Prusaczyk and her father, Marek Prusaczyk. Marek came to Greenpoint from a small town in the north of Poland in the early 90s. He opened Pyza, a Greenpoint staple serving traditional Polish food, in 1993.
Little Poland lives on
Like much of Central and Eastern Europe, Poland is a deeply Catholic country. St. Stanislaus Kostka Church on Humboldt Street, founded in 1896, remains a community hub. Staskiewicz attended Sunday mass here with his family as a kid, while Prusaczyk, now in her 30s, regularly goes to mass conducted in Polish by Pastor Grzegorz Markulak. On December 7 at 5:30pm, the church will host a screening of Triumph of the Heart, a Polish language film that tells the story of Maximilian Kolbe, a priest who was killed at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Given Poland’s deep Catholicism, it should be unsurprising that Greenpoint’s Polish community is most visible around Christmas and Easter.
In Polish culture, Christmas is traditionally celebrated on December 24, not December 25. And the Christmas Eve meal contains no meat. The holidays are a busy time at Pyza, Prusaczyk says, with Polish and Polish Americans coming from all over the tri-state area to pick up their special orders. Many are loyal customers who’ve since moved out of Greenpoint, usually to Masbeth or further out on Long Island. One Polish woman named Eva was once a Pyza regular but now lives in Connecticut. Still, she comes without fail every Christmas Eve to order Polish Christmas specialties like krokiety (croquettes), saurkraut, kapusta (cabbage) and mountains of pierogies. Some years, Pyza sells more than 3,000 pierogies over Christmas.
On Easter, baskets are packed with food and gifts, and local Poles line up outside St. Stanislaus’s to have them blessed by a priest, part of a tradition called Święconka that dates back to the 7th century. This confuses many tourists and non-Polish Greenpoint residents, Izabella says, who raise their eyebrows at the long line of people carrying their baskets outside the church.
For Sakowicz, the Polish General Consul, it is the long queues that form around the holidays outside bakeries like Syrena, Cafe Riviera, and others serving Polish bread and pastries, that most remind him of Poland.
“Maybe they expect communism a little bit,” he said. “Because in communism, there was scarcity of products and oftentimes they’d have to line up for a day and a half.”
Sakowicz, who’s lived in America since 2011, currently resides on the Upper West Side, although he commutes to Greenpoint regularly to get his haircut at his favorite Polish salon. During the warmer months, he says you’re most likely to hear Polish spoken in Greenpoint during the evening, as the sun is setting over the Manhattan skyline and most people are doing their shopping.
“You have many Poles that would leave Greenpoint, but still go there every now and then to do a routine,” Sakowicz says. “You have your favorite hairdresser, you want to go and gossip.”
New Opportunities
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, many of the Polish immigrants to Greenpoint took blue collar jobs below their education levels, in fields like construction, manufacturing and caretaking that allowed them to work without English fluency. But nowadays, the comparatively few Polish people coming to New York are of a different class entirely, Sakowicz says.
“It’s not a blue collar migration,” he said. “These people that decide to pursue their careers in the US these days are highly qualified, skilled and educated people. We’re talking Wall Street, IT, AI, arts, these kinds of fields of work.”
And conversely, the Polish government finances internships and visa programs to Americans of Polish origin, offering them the chance to work, live for a while and perhaps emigrate for good to the country of their heritage. This is, of course, much easier if you speak the Polish language.
Along with Staskiewicz, Polish student Max Miniewicz runs the Polish and Eastern European Society at NYU. Originally from Warsaw, Miniewicz came to New York three years ago to study, now getting his Master’s in Economics. The first time he visited Greenpoint, he saw traces of Poland, but did not initially see it as the vibrant Polish enclave he had heard about.
But as he explored the neighborhood more, its Polish soul started to reveal itself. He recalls a time he took a Polish classmate on a tour around Greenpoint. They got coffee, pastries, and went to a few bookstores, speaking to each other in Polish the whole time. In each of these places, Miniewicz said, as soon as the cashier heard them speaking Polish, they’d start speaking Polish too. This was the case even in American chain restaurants and seemingly non-Polish establishments, suggesting to Miniewicz that much of the Polish community from the golden era of Little Poland remained, but their businesses had been swallowed and absorbed by American establishments.
“We spent a few hours walking around, and we were shocked by how many places were like this,” Miniewicz said. “I think a lot of those Polish people are still there, but they’re just like kind of hidden and working for American businesses.”
For Beugoms, the principal at PS 34, language is a key to unlocking the community’s Polish heritage. In 2015, under former principal Carmen Asselta, the school launched its Polish-English dual language program. Now in its eleventh year, about a quarter of the student body is enrolled in the program, Beugoms says. Students progress from kindergarten to fifth grade in a mirrored classroom, with everything written in Polish on one side and English on the other. The bilingual teachers in the program guide students through math, science, social studies and literature in both Polish and English, paying special attention to Polish historical figures like Marie Curie and Copernicus. And every student, Beugoms says, Polish or otherwise, knows what a pierogi or a pączki (donut) is.
“It unlocks a door to culture,” he said. “Language might appear to be a barrier from someone accessing a new culture, but when you learn, even in small increments, you start to unlock things.”
Inside PS 34’s Polish-English dual language classrooms, students learn literature, science, math and social studies in both Polish and English, with a special focus on Polish culture.
For some Polish-American parents who’ve lost touch with their heritage, the program provides a new motivation to learn (or re-learn) the language of their family through their children. Beugoms recalls one parent of Polish descent who didn’t grow up speaking Polish. But both of her children are in PS 34’s dual-language program, and for a parent-student read-aloud the school hosted one year, she came ready with a Polish book in-hand.
“The Polish that she heard as a kid from her grandparents was coming back to her,” Beugoms said. “So she came with a book and said ‘don’t judge me.’”
Although the program is mostly made up of Polish heritage students, many of whom speak Polish at home, others aren’t Polish at all. The school holds a celebration for Polish children’s day on June 1st. One year, a non-Polish fifth grade student who’d been in the program since kindergarten, gave a presentation on Copernicus, in near-fluent Polish, to a room full of stunned Polish parents.
And with more Poles returning to Poland than ever, the program has another purpose: preparing Polish students for life in Poland, should they decide to return.
“I’ve had students from this program move to Poland, and then the parents write me an email stating how the school in Warsaw was impressed,” Beugoms said. “There’s a lot of opportunity in Poland nowadays, so it’s attracting a lot of folks back.”
The gods of transportation taketh, but they giveth too.
Last December, the MTA was facing a strange problem: the wheels of one model of subway car, R160s, were wearing out over the course of a few weeks, rather than months, and had to be rapidly replaced.
These R160 cars run on the E, F, and R lines, so theoretically the G should have been unaffected. But when the defective cars were pulled from service, substitutes from the G took their place — and vintage models from the 1980s were dusted off to fill any vacancies. Those cars, R68s, are slated to be phased out this year (prompting passengers to preemptively eulogize their unique yellow-and-orange “lover’s seats,” which are arranged in a cramped L-shape.) The end result, at least for the moment, is that G riders have been left with mostly musty, outmoded trains.
Yet efforts to modernize the G line, the sole subway that doesn’t enter Manhattan, are also underway. After a “summer of pain” — not the citywide transit Tartarus of 2017, but the G-specific woes of 2024, when the line was shut down for repairs — the route started up again in September with a new signal system installed, which will come online in 2027.
A more palpable change has been the introduction this month of open gangway trains, R211Ts, to the G line. The MTA initially rolled out two R211Ts, which have no doors between cars, on the C line, before announcing that it would be repurposing half of those 20 cars for the shorter G, where the 10 compartments could, like mitosis, form two additional trains with 5 apiece.
The transit authority is bullish on the revamped models: last year it approved a plan to buy 80 more open gangway R211Ts, ostensibly funded by congestion pricing. And at a press conference on March 4, Brooklyn lawmakers were similarly ebullient, praising the rollout.
Assembly Member Jo Anne Simon called the open gangway trains “more comfortable;” state Senator Andrew Gounardes and AM Emily Gallagher both argued they would relieve crowding, while making it more accessible for riders using wheelchairs or strollers. Council Member Lincoln Restler simply said the update was “awesome.”
But many Brooklynites are split on the design, largely over public safety concerns. Online, the chatter has fallen into two broad buckets: the people who think the open gangway is indeed safer, because you can move away from someone who’s bothering you more easily, and those who maintain it’s the opposite, since you can’t switch cars. Anecdotally, the divide seems gendered, with men largely feeling safer on the R211Ts and women expressing reservations.
Sophie, from Windsor Terrace, fell into the latter camp — she had the sense that the long corridor would make it harder to escape, and she also worried that the trains were becoming too “screen-oriented,” with little to gain practically. “They play TikToks and moving ads on the new trains,” she said. “I don’t think we need that.”
That aside, she acknowledged that the trains have been in dire need of improvements, and that the system has lagged behind international analogs. If the open gangway moves the needle on repairs, she noted, that would be a win.
A fresh wave of open gangway trains are on their way, so they may eventually become the norm in New York City rather than a shiny toy. But for the time being, commuters on the G line roll the dice each day — will I ride a holdover from the 80s, or the digitalized train of the future?
The year is 2021, and former Mayor Bill De Blasio is apologizing as he holds up a $75 million check, flanked by local leaders from Greenpoint and Williamsburg. “A promise was made to this community a long time ago for this park,” he says, pulling down his mask, “and the city of New York did not keep the promise.”
The promise referenced by De Blasio was made back in 2005 by his predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, who included plans for the 27-acre Bushwick Inlet Park as part of a massive rezoning of the two neighborhoods that year that paved the way for the frenetic development currently reshaping the borough’s northern tip. The condos have come up, but the full stretch of green space — the announcement of which was already perceived as ‘a long time ago’ in 2021 — has yet to materialize.
Now, in 2025, real change seems to be afoot. The demolition of the enormous CitiStorage building on Kent Avenue wrapped last week, putting an end to a land struggle that had prevented the Parks Department from moving forward with construction. As with many other local sites, the grounds will still need to undergo a significant remediation process, but officials praised the progress nonetheless.
“This has been a long and drawn-out fight, but the Citi Storage facility is finally down, making way for our long promised Bushwick Inlet Park,” said Council Member Lincoln Restler. “Our community has waited for far too long to see this promised park space, and I’m thrilled that this milestone means we can finally realize the full potential of our waterfront.”
The demolished CitiStorage building was one of two structures owned by the company that had posed problems for the park’s development. The other, a nearby warehouse, was damaged by a fire in 2015. Though it was earmarked for the park, CitiStorage attempted to sell the 7.5-acre property to private developers before the city swooped in to make a $160 million purchase. The promised park’s planners now have access to land spanning from the North 9th Street soccer field all the way across the Bushwick Inlet, leading community organizers to believe that the 2005 designs may be feasible at last.
“The CitiStorage building sat on some of the most beautiful land in our district, and that land was held hostage for a decade since the fire, while the community fought for this outcome. The fact that the building has finally been torn down, and the park design process can move forward, represents a tremendous victory for the community,” said Assembly Member Emily Gallagher, celebrating the demolition. “This didn’t just happen — it is the result of decades of tenacious organizing from the Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park, past and present local representatives, and so many community members who came together to demand that the land be used for public good, not luxury condos that would drive up prices in our district.”
Greenpoint and Williamsburg continue to have among the lowest number of parks per capita in the city, leaders say, and that gap is becoming more urgent as thousands of new residents pour into freshly-unveiled apartment complexes. There’s a climate angle, too: “As New York City increasingly becomes hotter and more expensive,” Gallagher noted, “it is essential that we fight for parks as free spaces where our neighbors can gather, find shade, and build community.”
One of the main forces pushing for the 27-acre green space to be realized has been the organization Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park, which launched a campaign nearly two years ago called “Where’s Our Park?” to pressure the city into action. Its president, Katherine Conkling Thompson, said the sudden view of uninterrupted coastline afforded by the demolition was “astonishing,” and thanked her fellow organizers for their efforts.
“Over 150 years ago, the birth of the fossil fuel industry began here,” Thompson said in a statement. “As we begin to remediate this land, restore the riparian shoreline, plant native species to create precious public open space for all people to share, we can acknowledge that this is not only an investment in the future of our beloved Brooklyn but a symbol of the victory of the people coming together to demand environmental justice and [for] the city to fulfill its rezoning promises.”
You can watch a time-lapse of the demolition here, courtesy of Stephen McFadden.
In 2019, lawmakers gave one of the largest jails on earth until 2026 to shut down completely. Five years later, officials are still dragging their feet on reforms — so the federal government is poised to wrest control of the facility from New York City officials to ensure the closure actually happens.
On November 27, Manhattan federal judge Laura Swain held the city in contempt on 18 counts for its handling of Rikers Island, ruling in favor of the plaintiffs in Nunez v. the City of New York, a case first brought in 2012 that alleges “a pattern and practice of using unnecessary and excessive force against incarcerated individuals.” The decision paves the way for a federal receivership, which would strip local agencies of jurisdiction over Rikers.
The case was settled in 2015, with the stipulation that the Department of Correction (DOC) take concrete steps to fix what critics have described as a culture of impunity for officers within the jail. As part of the deal, a monitoring team was created to track compliance with the plan.
But in a 65-page decision, Swain observed that the monitors had consistently found DOC unwilling or unable to implement changes. “Progress will likely not be achieved,” they wrote in December 2021, “no matter how many remedial orders or other potential sanctions may be imposed,” because of “foundational” problems within the department.
If anything, Swain noted, progress has trended backward. “The use of force rate and other rates of violence, self-harm, and deaths in custody are demonstrably worse than when the Consent Judgment went into effect in 2015,” she wrote, with cases in which corrections officers used force against inmates climbing from around 4,500 incidents in 2016 (or a rate of 4 per 100 people) to nearly 7,000 (more than 9 per 100 people) in 2023.
These issues have been compounded by DOC’s unreliable record-keeping. Last year, the New York Daily News reported that the monitor had “no confidence” in the department’s in-house data on violence at Rikers and cited six attacks made with blades that had not been classified as slashings or stabbings.
At two recent hearings in September and October, City Council members pressed DOC leadership to explain why reforms recommended by watchdogs had not been fully implemented, and why a track record of abuses appeared to be continuing unabated.
At the October hearing, several formerly incarcerated women testified to what they said was a decades-long system that abetted sexual abuse of inmates by corrections officers at Rikers. Over 700 sexual lawsuits have been filed to date against the DOC through the 2022 Adult Survivors Act (ASA), which amended state law to allow sexual assault victims to file civil cases even if the statute of limitations had lapsed, for a one-year window.
Representatives for the corrections officers union argued that the federal judge’s concerns were mislaid.
“Seventy percent of our inmate population is facing violent felony charges,” said Benny Boscio, president of the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association. “That same population is driving the hundreds of assaults on our officers, including sexual assaults, as well as inmate on inmate attacks, which requires necessary, not excessive force, to keep everyone in our jails safe. Outsourcing control of Rikers Island to a federal receiver will not be a silver bullet and will not solve any of these problems. Giving correction officers the manpower and resources to enforce law and order in our jails will.”
Historically, the union has wielded significant power over any changes within city jails. As The CITY reports, it has previously stonewalled reforms that would have introduced stab-resistant vests and reduced cases in which solitary confinement can be used to punish inmates.
Even when fixes are implemented, many do not last long. Federal monitors argued for years that body cameras were necessary to keep corrections officers accountable, and it eventually won out: by 2020, nearly every officer in city jails was required to wear one. But in 2024, the 3,500 devices were recalled by DOC Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie after a camera caught fire. According to Vital City, the review was slated to take at most two weeks; months later, the body cameras are still out of circulation.
While the initial target date for closure was delayed by a year until 2027, the city has maintained it is on track to close Rikers. Yet the federal judge’s decision reinforces broader skepticism that the DOC’s plan to redirect the island’s inmates to four borough-based jails will be feasible.
Per Swain’s order, the next step will now be for the Legal Aid Society, which filed the initial case back in 2012, to negotiate the terms of the receivership—including who will helm the effort—with city and federal officials. The relevant parties have until mid-January to do so.
