by Geoff Cobb 
The recent tragic fire on Diamond Street made me think about one of the most fascinating characters from my book “ Greenpoint, Brooklyn’s Forgotten Past. “Joseph Bartnikowski, born in 1926 just down the street from the blaze, was a reclusive and eccentric self-taught genius painter who died in 2005. It was only after his death that people understood the sheer size of his work and the talent he had.
Starting in the seventies, Bartnikowski for…
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My family knew Joe well. For many years during the 70’s/80’s, he shared an apartment/storage space with my uncle on Bedford Avenue. Joe wasn’t the talkative type and mostly kept to himself whenever the rest of us were around (even at my uncle’s table, he almost never engaged anyone else in conversation) but his comings and goings, packing his tools on his bike, setting himself up on the corner, rummaging through the store room for his things, mumbling a bit whenever we spoke to him, were all part of our family experience.
As a kid, on occasion I’d mill around looking at his works stacked around the place over the years and wonder if that’s how the neighborhood really looked to him. We grew up knowing him as ‘Joe the Painter’, but only my uncle knew him on a personal level. Eventually he moved out to Islip while we all grew older and spread out from the Northside to Greenpoint.
It was quite a few years before I could appreciate the quality of his work, and then, only from my memories of what I saw in my uncle’s storage room when I was a kid.
My mother in Central Islip helped him and I have some paintings!