![]() The Hay property and other holdings came into the possession of Pieter Praa, a captain in the local militia, who established a farm near present day Freeman Street and McGuinness Boulevard, and went on to own most of Greenpoint. Jan Meserole established a farm in 1663 his farmhouse at what is now 723 Manhattan Avenue stood until 1919 and last served as a Young Women’s Hebrew Association. Starting in the early 1650s, he began selling and leasing his property to Dutch colonists, among them Jacob Haie (Hay) in 1653, who built a home in northern Greenpoint that was burned down by Indians two years later. Volckertsen had had periodic conflicts with the Keshaechqueren, who killed two of his sons-in-law and tortured a third in separate incidents throughout the 1650s. Volckertsen's wife, Christine Vigne, was a Walloon. He initially commuted to his farm by boat and may not have moved into the house full time until after 1655, when the small nearby settlement of Boswyck was established, on the charter of which Volckertsen was listed along with 22 other families. Volckertsen received title to the land after prevailing in court one year earlier over a Jan De Pree, who had a rival claim. He was called Dirck de Noorman by the Dutch colonists of the region, Noorman being the Dutch word for "Norseman" or "Northman." The creek that ran by his farmhouse became known as Norman Kill (Creek) it ran into a large salt marsh and was later filled in. ![]() There he planted orchards and raised crops, sheep and cattle. It was built in the contemporary Dutch style just west of what is now the intersection of Calyer Street and Franklin Street. ![]() The first recorded European settler of what is now Greenpoint was Dirck Volckertsen (Batavianized from Holgerssøn), a Norwegian immigrant who in 1645 built a 1 + 1⁄ 2-story farmhouse there with the help of two Dutch carpenters. In 1638, the Dutch West India Company negotiated the right to settle Brooklyn from the Lenape. European settlers originally used the "Greenpoint" name to refer to a small bluff of land jutting into the East River at what is now the westernmost end of Freeman Street, but eventually it came to describe the whole peninsula. Contemporary accounts describe the area as remarkably verdant and beautiful, with Jack pine and oak forest, meadows, fresh water creeks and briny marshes. It is patrolled by the 94th Precinct of the New York City Police Department.Īt the time of European settlement in New York, Greenpoint was inhabited by the Keskachauge (Keshaechqueren) Indians, a sub-tribe of the Lenape. Greenpoint is part of Brooklyn Community District 1, and its primary ZIP Code is 11222. ![]() There have also been efforts to reclaim the rezoned East River waterfront for recreational use and also to extend a continuous promenade into the Newtown Creek area. Since the early 2000s, a building boom in the neighborhood has made the neighborhood increasingly a center of nightlife and gentrification, and a 2005 rezoning enabled the construction of high density residential buildings on the East River waterfront. Greenpoint has long held a reputation of being a working class and immigrant neighborhood, and it initially attracted families and workers with its abundance of factory jobs, heavy industry and manufacturing, shipbuilding, and longshoreman or dock work. Originally farmland – many of the farm owners' family names, such as Meserole (Messerole) and Calyer, are current street names – the residential core of Greenpoint was built on parcels divided during the Industrial Revolution and late 19th century, with rope factories and lumber yards lining the East River to the west, while the northeastern section along the Newtown Creek through East Williamsburg became an industrial maritime area. The neighborhood has a large Polish immigrant and Polish-American community, containing many Polish restaurants, markets, and businesses, and it is often referred to as Little Poland. It is bordered on the southwest by Williamsburg at Bushwick Inlet Park and McCarren Park on the southeast by the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway and East Williamsburg on the north by Newtown Creek and the neighborhood of Long Island City in Queens and on the west by the East River. Greenpoint is the northernmost neighborhood in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, in the U.S.
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