Decode Greenpoint.

Greenpoint's Buried Secrets

On January 30, 1862, a strange vessel slid into the East River from the Continental Iron Works shipyard at the foot of Calyer Street in Greenpoint. It was barely visible above the waterline — just a flat iron deck with a revolving gun turret — and it looked, as one journalist wrote, "like a cheese box on a raft." Six weeks later the USS Monitor fought the CSS Virginia at Hampton Roads, Virginia, in the first battle between ironclad warships. The outcome changed naval warfare forever, and it all began in a Brooklyn shipyard that's now a stretch of waterfront between a park and a fuel depot. Transmitter Park, just north of that spot at Greenpoint Avenue and the East River, occupies the old site of the WNYC AM radio transmitter tower and offers one of the most quietly spectacular views of the Manhattan skyline you can find without a crowd.

Walk south along the waterfront toward Newtown Creek and the scale of what's buried there starts to become clear. In 1878, a series of underground storage tanks belonging to Standard Oil's Greenpoint refineries ruptured, releasing an estimated 300,000 barrels of petroleum into the soil and the creek. The spill went largely unaddressed for over a century. When the EPA finally measured it in the 1970s, they found a floating plume of oil beneath Greenpoint's streets — larger in volume than the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster. Newtown Creek was declared a federal Superfund site in 2010. The massive silver "digester eggs" of the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant, designed by Polshek Partnership (now Ennead Architects) and completed in 2012, loom over the creek's south bank. They process sewage from 1.5 million New Yorkers. From the Pulaski Bridge above, they look like a science fiction city dropped into industrial Brooklyn.

Manhattan Avenue, Greenpoint's main commercial strip, has been the spine of one of New York City's most enduring immigrant communities since the 1890s. Polish immigrants came first to work in the shipyards and glass factories; their descendants never fully left. Peter Pan Donut & Pastry Shop at 727 Manhattan Avenue has been selling potato donuts and crullers since 1953. Lomzynianka at 646 Manhattan Avenue still serves borscht and pierogies the same way it did in the 1980s. The neighborhood resisted the gentrification wave that consumed Williamsburg to the south — partly because of the G train, which doesn't connect to Manhattan, and partly because of a community that knew what it had. A StoryHunt through Greenpoint traces all of it: the shipyard that changed history, the buried contamination, and the Manhattan Avenue merchants who outlasted everything.