June 11, 2019: Greenpoint's environmental history... it's a mess!

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Jun 11, 2019

Hi! Hello. Welcome. This is the June 11, 2019 edition of East & Creek, the Greenpoint newsletter.

Q+A: Acacia Thompson of the Brooklyn Public Library

One morning last week, archivist and oral historian Acacia Thompson recounted to e&c what may be a common sight at Greenpoint’s community meetings, particularly those related to the environment: “Often there's somebody who shows up and says, ‘I just moved here. I don't understand. Why is this happening?’ And everybody's like, ‘There's so much to tell you!’”

Thompson is a good person to do some of that telling. As Brooklyn Public Library’s Greenpoint outreach archivist, she has spent the past several months collecting dozens of interviews and many more documents detailing the environmental past, present, and future of the neighborhood.

It’s all part of the Greenpoint Environmental History Project, one of many projects funded by the proceeds from a civil suit against the companies that spilled millions of gallons of oil into Greenpoint’s land and waterways. The Brooklyn Public Library now features dozens of oral histories online, and its digital collection includes several posters, petitions, citizen documentaries and other artifacts.

e&c spoke with Thompson last week about the people she met and the stories they told. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

e&c: There's no simple, narrative arc to this history. It's not, like, birth and destruction and renewal. There are things that are getting a lot better right now, and things that are not. What do you see as the main environmental threads through this history?

Thompson: You can only do so much to a neighborhood until people start fighting back. It took a while because it was a neighborhood that suffered incredible environmental inequity and injustice for so long. I think people were busy living their lives — trying to exist, take care of their families — and felt like they were just going to deal with this.

e&c: There are a lot of historical wrongs in this neighborhood's environmental past, and I wonder if you can just enumerate a few of those.

Thompson: One of the biggest things is our wastewater treatment facility. The renovation of the plant — and, I mean, the fact that we have that here at all — that's been one of the major issues. And because of just the air condition… the smell. I lived here in 2001 and I remember, before it was renovated, what was going on with that.

The Greenpoint incinerator: that was huge! I heard great stories about people taking in their laundry and finding ash all over their laundry. The fact that people had to fight to say, "We need a better solid waste management plan than just burning things in our neighborhood!" The huge fight over two power plants in the early aughts — those fights I think were really important. And our trucking routes still are an issue. [The trucking routes and waste transfer stations were the subject of a 1991 citizen documentary, which e&c recommends viewing.] It's such an important part of city infrastructure, so that's such a hard fight.

e&c: And then there's also the petroleum industry.

Thompson: That is really one of the biggest parts of the story. In 1950, ten manhole covers exploded above Greenpoint Ave. At first the community thought, owing to the Red Scare, that they were under attack. It was the first sort of physical form that showed us all just like, "Oh, we have petroleum in our aquifer." And there were also several people who told me how firefighters would routinely hose down the sewers as a preventative measure.

Now, if you want to know about what's going on currently with ExxonMobil's remediation, you can go through their reports and go to the meetings, but they are not in any way trying to say, "Hey guys! This is what we're doing."

But that history is deep. And it continues on. I interviewed Paul Pullo, who runs United Metro Energy, and he talks about the way that they're trying to, as a family-run business and as a lifelong Greenpointer, trying to do it responsibly.

e&c: What did it take to make a change in this neighborhood? What did it take to finally turn a corner and say, "You know what? We don't actually like this."

Thompson: First of all, it took the law. It took the 70s. It took the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts to arm people with the law. And anything that has really happened has to do with the law. Fighting the power plant, that was entirely the law. We had a very motivated lawyer who knew how to fight it.

Some of it took a changing demographic in the neighborhood, that people weren't just saying, “You have to just accept the way things are because you can't do anything about it.” And in some of my interviews with people, you can hear the old-timers say, "That's just the way it was." That said, there were people in the neighborhood who were fighting since the 50s. But I also interviewed people who moved here in the 80s in their 20s and they were like, "This is nonsense! Why do we have to put up with this?"

e&c: Are there any people's stories that stood out from other people's stories? People whose experiences were really different from other people's experiences in the neighborhood, with the environment?

Thompson: I interviewed people who just wanted to talk about growing up here. Some of the old-timers, they were just like, "Well, I don't know. We just dealt with it. That's how we lived."

But as far as the environment, I had a very long interview with Kim and Scott Fraser. Their story was really telling about the arc of activism — about how you find something, you fight for it, you win or lose, and then there's this depression. And how there's just another thing and another thing. Because there's always something.

e&c: So, I guess the future of Greenpoint as a coastal community, at least in the oral histories I've heard, doesn't come up quite so much — other than Sandy, obviously. But that's going to be a huge part of our environmental future. Are we going to be underwater in fifty years? A hundred years? Did you see any sort of precedent for that in your histories? Is there any —

Thompson: No. The only people who have talked about it are the people from the Newtown Creek Alliance and Riverkeeper — not even in our oral histories, just in talking with them in the neighborhood. I think Geoff Cobb mentions it briefly, about living over on Clifford and about the people who were affected by it. I think maybe Ed Michaleski might have mentioned it, too. He's a lover of history, a lover of Greenpoint, and for the last 30 years, he's been making these albums about Greenpoint and documenting the history of the neighborhood. And at some point in the 90s, he walked up and down Manhattan Ave. and took a picture of every single storefront, from Ash the park, and we're going to accept them into the collection.

But no. Nobody really, besides those people who think about climate change, brings up flooding. What's interesting is that at every North Brooklyn development meeting, somebody brings it up to the developers and nobody really has an answer.

e&c: This history isn't over. And your work, I presume, isn't over. Now that this collection exists, what is your next step?

Thompson: One of the things I'm working on is trying to get an oral history tool kit to be something that can be checked out of the library. There's just so many more stories to tell. I can tell from the Soundcloud that people are more interested in hearing... like, the environment's fine. It's a little depressing. But they like the stories about what life in Greenpoint used to be like, and I think I would like to do more of those.

The thing I'm most disappointed about in the project is that I worked really had to more latino voices. It has been such a struggle. [The library did not receive funding for either Spanish or Polish translators.] And then the Polish immigrant experience. That's something that I was trying to get, that I feel like if I could continue doing this project, I would work specifically on those two things.

[The Greenpoint Community Environmental Fund, formed to disperse settlement money from ExxonMobil,] has made the community so much better. The awareness and the programming has been really great. And now it's going to be gone this month! [The GCEF is winding down, as planned.] But I think that this momentum is really important.

The Brooklyn Public Library will showcase the Greenpoint Environmental History Project on Tuesday, June 20 at A/D/O.

What’s up in Greenpoint?

So, let’s recap. Robert Winnicki, a far-right member of Poland’s parliament, spoke to a receptive crowd of about a hundred in Greenpoint last Wednesday. An antisemitic Holocaust revisionist, Ewa Kurek, spoke twice in the neighborhood, once for at least an hour on Friday evening at the Polish Catholic National Church on Leonard St. and once Saturday afternoon at the Polish National Home (which is affiliated with the venue, The Warsaw).

Ewa Kurek spoke for at least an hour on Friday at Greenpoint’s Polish Catholic National Church. (Photo credit: Anonymous.)

An individual who attended Kurek’s first talk — and who requested anonymity — confirmed that about 50 people gathered in the basement at the Polish Catholic National Church to hear her speak. This person described an audience of older, white attendees “listening intently,” murmuring at some moments and laughing at others. There did not appear to be clergy present. Neither this church’s pastor nor its bishop responded to e&c’s requests for comment.

A Polish-speaker who reviewed video taken at that event confirmed to e&c that Kurek spoke about, among other things, Jews. It is not known to e&c what Kurek said at her second appearance, on Saturday. It remains unknown what exactly Winnicki discussed in his talk last week, and it is also not known to e&c what meaningful consequences will come from this past week’s events.

Speaking of local poisons: Recent testing for Enterococcus microbes (which can indicate the presence of fecal matter) in Newtown Creek has delivered results that are… off the charts. Perhaps Combined Sewer Overflow during rainfall events — e.g. this week, today even — has something to do with the results? (Full data, including other area waterways, here.)

The monthly meeting of Brooklyn Community Board 1 is tonight. Read the agenda here. Expect to also hear about a certain S.U.V., a certain fascist or two, and who knows what else.

The petroleum vapors town hall, hosted by North Brooklyn Neighbors, is tomorrow night. Facebook event here. From NBN: “We have confirmed that both the City and State Department of Health will be in attendance, as will the Department of Environmental Conservation and the Department of Environmental Protection.”

Meanwhile in New York City…

Thousands of city parking tickets may have to be thrown out because the violations took place — will take place? — in the future. The clerical errors could cost the city an estimated $242,790 in revenue from lost fines. (Daily News)

A trans woman being held on Rikers Island on $500 bail died in solitary confinement on Friday. The member of the famous House of Xtravaganza had been behind bars since April. (The City)

The waiting list for Penn South, an affordable limited-equity cooperative in Chelsea, is now open, via lottery. (Penn South FAQ)

“Incidents” on the subway involving homeless people have tripled in the past decade, while the homeless population on the subway is believed to have grown 23 percent in just the past year. (NY1)

A drunk driver killed an e-bike rider in Canarsie on Sunday. He was the 11 bicyclist killed so far this year in New York City; ten cyclists were killed last year. (Brooklyn Daily Eagle)

Last week e&c linked to the story of the driver who tried to kill a bicyclist on the West Side Highway. Over the weekend the driver, an off-duty FDNY firefighter with a terrible driving record, told Gothamist, “It’s totally blown out of proportion.” And on Monday he turned himself into the NYPD, who charged him with reckless endangerment and aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle. (Gothamist)

And then there’s this: