Ana Dricdzic doesn’t want her neighborhood to change. The owner of Staropolski Meat Market & Deli, located on Manhattan Avenue — Greenpoint’s main commercial strip — Dricdzic holds forth on the ethnic character of her neighborhood in between phone calls in Polish and warm transactions with customers.
Her small shop is stocked with Polish breads, teas and candies. In a glass display case are heaped links of kielbasa and other meats as well as platters of potato pancakes and cheese blintzes.
“This [is a] Polish area,” she said. And she wants it to stay that way. “American a little bit, Spanish a little bit is okay,” Dricdzic said, referring to the predominantly white twenty- and thirty-somethings who have moved into the neighborhood in recent years, and to the now-sizable Latino population in north Greenpoint, but she doesn’t cater to those demographics.
Dricdzic is a holdout in what was once called Little Poland. Not many years ago, residents say, anyone on the street in Greenpoint was assumed to speak Polish. But now, though many parts of the neighborhood still feel Polish, many of the markers of Polish culture — bakeries, meat markets and restaurants — are gradually disappearing.
The real estate market is seeing a similar demographic shift. Victor Wolski, a broker at Greenpoint Properties Inc., said few people buying homes in the neighborhood today are Polish. The new residents are of various ethnic backgrounds and nationalities and rents are going up because of the influx of what he describes as young urban professionals and creative types.
And the neighborhood has gotten more expensive. Wolski estimates that rents have increased 50 percent in some cases over the last five years. Although this is a boon for some Polish landlords — especially on trendy Franklin Street and the Lorimer Street corridor — other residents feel they are being priced out of the neighborhood. Some retirement-age Poles are selling their Greenpoint homes for a profit and moving on.
According to Wolski and other residents, many Poles have moved away in the last five years — and the exodus seems to be accelerating. Some former Greenpointers have formed new Polish enclaves in cheaper neighborhoods such as Ridgewood and Maspeth in Queens. Others have returned to Poland.
The eclectic tastes of their replacements, many of them young people, are evident in the new boutiques and bars that have sprung up. Among these is Kill Devil Hill, a modern take on the concept of a general store. Opened in 2008, it sells vintage workwear and specialty grooming products as well as 10-cent candy.
In 2008, Justyna Goworowska, a graduate student in geography at the University of Oregon, presented a master’s thesis detailing the “eradication of [Greenpoint’s] distinctive cultural landscape.” Her findings indicated that Poles are being displaced “through expensive housing units, disappearing manufacturing jobs [and] the changing commercial landscape.”
After Poland’s 2004 entrance into the European Union, she wrote, “migrating to the United States for economic reasons ceased to make sense.” With long-time Polish residents leaving for cheaper neighborhoods and few recent immigrants to replace them, Goworowska concluded that “Greenpoint is rapidly transitioning from a Polish ethnic enclave into a hip urban American neighborhood.”
Martin Cyran is well placed to observe the transition. He emigrated with his mother from Poland 10 years ago and works with her at the family restaurant, Happy End Polish Cuisine at 924 Manhattan Ave.
He and his mother lived in Greenpoint for the first five years, then Cyran bought a house in Maspeth, one of the Queens neighborhoods to which former Greenpointers are flocking. His mother stayed behind in Greenpoint. In the years since moving, Cyran says he has seen business at Happy End steadily decline. Their regulars are leaving and the new residents aren’t interested in Polish cuisine.
He regrets that there’s little future for the homemade Polish food he’s proud of, but is resigned to the change. “That’s the rules: if you cannot belong inside, then you got to move out.”
The changes in Greenpoint have been bad for his restaurant, but good for his lifestyle. At 30, Cyran says he spends a lot of time partying in nearby Williamsburg.
“If I had enough money,” he said, “I would buy [a] condo over here.” He dreams of opening a coffee shop with broad appeal when Happy End closes down.
The local restaurant landscape has already reacted to new palates. Across the street from Happy End is the popular Thai Café. A neighborhood institution for the last 15 years, it has since been joined on Manhattan Avenue by three other Thai restaurants, a number that would have been unthinkable five years ago. La Taverna — a nearby Italian restaurant operated by a Hungarian — used to be a Polish bookstore.
One of the three remaining Polish bookstores in Greenpoint is located at 161 Java Street, near the Polish & Slavic Center. On a Monday afternoon it was empty and quiet. Books by Czesław Miłosz, the Polish poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, were prominently displayed.
Owner Andrzej Szymanik, once a member of the anti-communist resistance in his homeland, emigrated to the United States in 1981, shortly before martial law was enacted in Poland. A brusque man with short gray hair, he says the Polish flight from Greenpoint is “across the board.” People of all ages are leaving.
In addition to the young workers leaving for Europe in search of better pay and benefits, many political refugees of Szymanik’s generation have chosen to return to the homeland they once fled. Little by little, the culture they brought to Brooklyn is leaving with them.
“They moved back because of the political changes,” Szymanik said, referring to the overthrow of Communism in Poland, “and because also they were involved in [the] opposition, and right now they have a lot of friends who are in government. So they have all those connections because those people who were in [the] opposition movement went to power.”
Szymanik, like Cyran, accepts the changing demographics as inevitable even as he pursues new strategies to stay in business. Because his bookstore is suffering, he now operates a Polish food business, buying from a local wholesaler and shipping all over the country.
“Without the food business, probably I would have to close the bookstore already,” he said. His next project is a gallery and online store of Polish contemporary art attached to the bookstore’s website.
Asked why he doesn’t return to Poland himself, Szymanik said he has put down roots in New York.
“I have family here,” he said. “I have four kids and a house. Everybody’s here. My sister also is here.”
When he visits the old country it is to see his mother, who still lives there.
“I know Poland well enough, so I don’t need to go back.”
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