Oak & Iron’s Latest Greenpoint History Night Was One for the Books

A crowd packed Oak & Iron (147 Franklin St.) last night for the latest Greenpoint History Night, a celebration of the neighborhood we call home. 

The event, in its fourteenth iteration last night, is the brainchild of author, bartender, and friend of Greenpointers, Rick Paulas. 

What started as a Greenpoint-specific event has blossomed into a Brooklyn bar phenomenon. Paulas recently partnered with Defector, a worker-owned news site, to bring history nights to other neighborhoods in a Greenpoint History Night World Tour. Last night brought the tour back to Greenpoint to wrap up its run (but if you’re looking to bring a history night to your own neighborhood, get in touch!)

The guys from Unemployment Club (which is a nice thing and not a capitalist conspiracy like some of y’all are alleging) sold t-shirts raising money for NBK Mutual Aid. Arif Hossain was also on hand to sell Greenpoint History Night merch. 

The night’s line up included Geoff Cobb (another friend of Greenpointers!) presenting on Peter McGuinness, Christian Wade doing a run down of local dive bars, Michelle Novak on a 1910 women’s labor strike, and yours truly talking about, well, the very thing you’re reading now—Greenpointers. 

Putting together the 15-minute presentation proved more difficult than I was expecting. After all, I was attempting to cull through nearly 20 years worth of content. In the process, I ended up journeying through more than a few rabbit holes. Several worthy contenders for topics got the axe as I tried to home in on the funniest, most infuriating, and exemplary discussion points. I traced our site’s founding as a personal blog in 2007 to becoming a fully-fledged news site over the following decade. If you get a free minute, root around in our archives—there’s plenty of crazy, somewhat forgotten news worth learning about. 

It struck me just how different and free our tone used to be (ahh, the halcyon days of the Brooklyn blogosphere, where the PBR flowed freely and blotted out the fears of a defamation lawsuit!) But along the way, we’ve still tried to maintain our scrappy, community-led origins.

The event felt like a real homecoming in a lot of ways. We put some faces to names, hung out with past and present contributors, and those keeping that tight-knit community spirit alive.

So thanks to everyone to came out! Huge shoutout once again to Rick! And if you like what we do and want to keep us around another 20 years, stay tuned for some ways you can help keep us afloat (merch drop???), at the next Greenpointers Market on April 12!