Once the Batory, Now Biedronka: the Polish Road Across the Atlantic

Greenpoint is a little like a Poland that stepped off an ocean liner, looked around Brooklyn and decided that, having crossed the Atlantic, it was not going to change its habits now. That is probably why, walking along Manhattan Avenue or Nassau Avenue, you can still find the Polish photo studio Kubuś, a Polish immigration lawyer, a Polish clinic, a butcher’s shop with a white-and-red flag, the Pyza restaurant, Star delicatessen, a Polish school, and the Polish National Home, whatever may be hiding under that name in a neglected building with graffiti on its walls. You start to wonder whether you are really in New York or somewhere between Rzeszów and Białystok, only with more expensive parking meters.

Poles began settling in Greenpoint on a larger scale as early as the end of the nineteenth century. They came mostly from Galicia and the Russian-ruled Kingdom of Poland, usually “for bread”, as the Polish phrase for economic emigration goes, to work in the factories, refineries and industrial plants of north Brooklyn. The parish of St Stanislaus Kostka was founded at the end of the nineteenth century and became one of the main gathering points of the local Polish community.

Over time Greenpoint acquired its own shops, restaurants, organisations, banks, doctors, lawyers and, of course, places where the situation in Poland could be discussed in more detail than the Polish government ever managed.

And then came the Batory. In 33 years of service the legendary Polish ocean liner made 222 regular crossings and carried more than 270,000 passengers. For some of them the voyage across the Atlantic was a trip. For others it was a move for the rest of their lives. They boarded in Europe with a suitcase, a few addresses written on a slip of paper and the belief that “in America you’ll manage somehow”. Many really did.

The Batory sailed to New York after the war too. And then there was the MS Stefan Batory… So you could say that for several generations of Poles the Atlantic did not end in Manhattan. Greenpoint came after it.

The 1970s and 1980s brought another great wave of Polish emigration. Greenpoint then became a true “Little Poland”. People came looking for dollars, for a normal life, sometimes for political freedom, and often for all of these at once. After martial law was declared in 1981 and the Solidarity movement was crushed, emigration grew even further.

And then Greenpoint began to fulfil one more extremely important role. It became a Polish stage on the other side of the Atlantic.

Artists known to the whole of communist Poland came to perform at the Polish National Home. Among others, Irena Santor, Jerzy Połomski, Violetta Villas, Irena Jarocka, Piotr Szczepanik, Hanka Bielicka, Bogdan Smoleń, Jan Kobuszewski, Daniel Olbrychski, Anna Dymna, Anna Seniuk, the Piwnica pod Baranami cabaret and Wiesław Ochman appeared here. Krzysztof Krawczyk, one of Poland’s best-loved pop singers, came too. For the artists, an American tour was not only a meeting with the diaspora but also a very lucrative venture, because in the realities of communist Poland the dollar had almost metaphysical properties. Polish singers still visit today: yesterday Piasek performed here, and Organek is coming soon.

That is precisely why we decided we had to ensure the continuity of tradition. We gave our son a Krzysztof Krawczyk record with very precise operating instructions: open a window in Greenpoint, set the volume to a level that requires consultation with the building management, and play Krawczyk at full blast.

This is not, of course, about simply listening to music. It is an integration programme. Because when “Parostatek”, “Bo jesteś ty” or “Jak minął dzień” blasts from a window in Brooklyn, there are basically two possibilities. Either a neighbour calls the police, or he knocks on the door and says:

“Turn it up a bit, mister.”

Either way, first contact with the neighbourhood will have been made.

Greenpoint is changing, of course. The factories have gone, rents have shot up, young professionals and artists have taken over the flats of former emigrants, and the number of Poles is steadily falling.

Today’s Greenpoint is much more international than it was twenty or thirty years ago. But the Polish layer is still clearly visible here: on signs, churches, restaurants, schools, clinics and noticeboards, and in the people. The long blonde plaits, or the perms on ladies of a certain age, bring back memories of trips around southern Poland.

You can always borrow a little money at the Polish & Slavic Federal Credit Union

On one of the noticeboards we even found an announcement from the IPN, Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance, about a concert by Tadek, that is Tadeusz Polkowski, a rapper who has been singing for years about the “Cursed Soldiers”, the anti-communist partisans of the 1940s and 1950s, and about Polish history. His songs have a simple structure. Heroes are heroes, traitors are traitors, and there is little room for half-shades or historical nuance. And perhaps that is exactly why they suit this part of Greenpoint so well, where emigrant memory also likes a simple division: over there was captivity, over here freedom. As if time had stood still and Poland were still a country you had to flee, rather than a large European economy that belongs among the world’s twenty largest. But why undermine the meaning of the decisions of people who once left everything behind and came here to start from scratch? They needed to believe that they had chosen freedom. And as we walk around Greenpoint today, we keep that myth alive a little along with them.

A few hundred metres further on, a Polish school advertises itself, then a Polish doctor, a lawyer and a restaurant. So history has come full circle in a rather amusing way. A hundred years ago Poles sailed here with their suitcases to become Americans.

Today their grandchildren speak English far better than Polish, drink cold brew and pay several thousand dollars a month for a flat in a neighbourhood their grandparents chose because it was cheap. But some of the Polish establishments are in need of repair and restoration. The Polish eagle that features on so many Polish shop windows could do with a new image. Sometimes it looks as neglected as the Poland from which our emigrants once took it with them. Today it ought to look much better, but that probably costs money…