Read as part of CBR17 Bingo: book begins with the letter “G”
I worked in Greenpoint for two years and really came to love the area.
My grandmother was from east Baltimore, the same east Baltimore featured in John Waters’ Hairspray. Patterson Park, Canton, Dundalk. Those were her stomping grounds. Those neighborhoods featured a glorious mix of ethnicities, religions, languages, and cultures coming together in a dense rowhouse-packed area. She always spoke fondly of growing up there.
Greenpoint gave me a similar feeling, though like most of west Brooklyn, it’s been economically gentrified. Beautiful townhomes, gorgeous parks, quirky local culture (that’s sadly fast fading).
I bought this book when I worked there but I left my job on harsh terms so I set it aside for a while. Fortunately, a book bingo that satisfied this and other library challenges forced me to either get to it or donate it.
And it’s great. I love a good local history. I want to know what happened On This Date and In This Spot. Gregory Cobb is well-respected in the neighborhood and delivers in full. And it is to his credit that he begins with a detailed, thorough examination of how the Dutch stole the land from the local indigenous folks and contributed to the genocide. You can still read about Greenpoint’s culture in full but you cannot forget its origins.
If I have one beef with this book, it’s that it’s oddly structured. Cobb segregates stories by theme, not history, so they start, stop and pick up in a different section. It negatively impacted the storytelling momentum. It’s otherwise a very good look at the history of a Brooklyn neighborhood before Brooklyn became BROOKLYN.