NORSE, OF COURSE

SCANDINAVIANS have largely disappeared from Bay Ridge and Sunset Park, just as other neighborhoods have radically changed over the years. Immigrants from northern Europe first began arriving in Brooklyn in great numbers in the 1890s, and work was readily available in the great port city New York was at the time. The Brooklyn Navy Yard, also a major employer, reached its peak when the Second World War made a lot of construction jobs available.

At the peak of Scandinavian influence in Brooklyn there were as many as a hundred thousand people who traced ancestry to Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland living in Bay Ridge and Sunset Park, including 60,000 Norwegians. Most have now moved on. My family and I went to a restaurant called the Scandia; bought bread at Lund’s Bakery; our super was Norwegian (he was followed by a Jamaican); Nordisk Tidende (Norway Times) was on every newsstand; and the Norwegian Day Parade still marches in Bay Ridge each May, commemorating Norway’s adoption of its constitution on May 17, 1814.

There are also remaining Nordic highlights in Bay Ridge, at least the ones that remained that year. There are a few more: on 56th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues in Sunset Park, you’ll see several apartment buildings with Nordic names over the front entrances, like the one with “Valkyrie” shown above.

The apartments have chiseled names with Scandinavian themes above their doors. Skansen is a celebrated open air museum and zoo in Sweden, while Upsala is Sweden’s oldest university. One of the names has been removed; I wonder what it was.

A block away is Lutheran Medical Center, a modern-day relic of Sunset Park’s Scandinavian past:

Lutheran Medical Center was founded in 1883 by a Norwegian Lutheran Deaconess-Nurse, Sister Elizabeth Fedde, to serve the Norwegian immigrant community. The institution has provided care for the southwest Brooklyn communities and for 80 years grew and declined with other neighborhood institutions on the Brooklyn waterfront. In recent decades Lutheran Medical Center aggressively volunteered to be the corporate stimulus for community renewal, the catalyst for constructive change, and the advocate for the health and well-being of this entire urban area. Volunteer NYC

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3/19/24