Greenpoint Is Being Taken Over By Me's

Photo by Jessica Dimmock for The New York Times, 2009

A good way to gauge what happens on Manhattan Avenue is to look at the trash on the street. There are cardboard vegetable boxes from early morning deliveries to the Korean-owned grocery store, pages of local newspapers written in Polish, empty food cartons from a taqueria, and broken coffee cups from the Dunkin Donuts on the corner. Seeing this litter mixed together and passing down the wide avenue is a good representation of the demographic jambalaya in Greenpoint, Brooklyn’s northernmost neighborhood.

On Manhattan Avenue, the stores and restaurants vary from culture to culture, but the unusual demographic feature of Greenpoint was that nearly 50% of the population was of Polish decent. Since this census was taken a decade ago, wealthy Williamsburg commuters have extended in all directions, including north towards the primarily Polish neighborhood. Manhattan Avenue is a division line between Greenpoint and the younger, more affluent Williamsburg, to the south. Small clothing boutiques, specialty restaurants and bars are plentiful up until Manhattan Avenue. And slowly the new culture has encroached into Greenpoint.

This Monday I found taped to the entrance of my building, 680 Manhattan Avenue, a piece of paper informing tenants that the owner of the building had changed. Park 80 Holding LLC had purchased the seven-story, 35 apartment building. The real estate company took it off of the market for $7.41 Million from a Polish man named Jerry Lebedowitz; The sale of the building is not only of interest for the people who live in the building. Its sale is part of a larger trend of Polish business and building ownership being bought out by larger companies like Park 80 Holding.

The news of the new owner is unsettling, as the rent for each unit has increased every year. The possibility of renovations and rent increases looms over the heads of—not only the tenants of 680 Manhattan Avenue—but also the general population of business owners. Single-building-owners like Lebedowitz are a dying breed, being replaced by faceless companies like Park 80. Gentrification is inevitable. But it is not too late to ask the question: is it possible to reinvent a neighborhood while still maintaining its demographic variance? Or will all of the trash start looking the same, scraps of the Wall Street Journal instead?