Building Brooklyn: Finntown

Episode Transcript

Adwoa Adusei In our last episode of “Building Brooklyn,” we talked about Brooklyn’s Chinese-American neighborhood in Sunset Park, which is centered around Eighth Avenue. If you walk north on Eight Avenue, away from the epicenter of Chinese-American businesses, market stalls, and restaurants — eventually, you’ll get to 40th Street, between 7th and 8th Avenues …. which also is called Finlanndia Street.  

Krissa Corbett Cavouras The first time I saw it, I was confused. What was Finlanndia doing in a neighborhood that I knew of as predominantly Chinese and Latin-American? Well, as it turns out, that street sign is one of the only remnants of a neighborhood once known as Finntown. 

Robert Saasto I encouraged them to get the street name changed.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras This is Robert Saasto. He's a native Sunset Parker and Finn, who grew up in and around the neighborhood in the waning days of its Finnishness.

Robert Saasto And I gave the speech during those festivities, and I pointed to all the buildings and I remember being very expressive and poingint to all the buildings and saying, "You see these buildings? Some day, the Finns will all be gone and we won't have any of us left." And that's sign is meant to remember, to remind people of what this neighborhood was.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras That street name on 40th Street remains the most obvious indicator but, as you walk around, you would see that a lot of the apartment buildings, about a dozen of them, are yellow brick and they have these entrances centered around the courtyards. These buildings have a pretty unique story … and I should know, because I actually live in one!

Adwoa Adusei Krissa, did you know there was anything unusual about them when you moved in?

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Not really. When we first saw the apartment, back in 2007, I just knew it was in our price range and I loved the light on the top floor. 

Adwoa Adusei Were there Finnish people in the building? Were there flags flying everywhere or something?

Krissa Corbett Cavouras There was none of that. I think the first clue I had was someone in my building who was older mentioned to me, "Oh, we don’t have any Finns left in the building." And that’s when I started to learn more about it, how the Finnish community built these buildings at the beginning of the 20th century and actually left their mark on New York City’s housing system.

Adwoa Adusei So, in this episode, we’re stepping back in time to tell you what the neighborhood was: Finn Town. I’m Adwoa Adusei.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras And I’m Krissa Corbett Cavouras. You’re listening to “Building Brooklyn,” a special mini-series on Borrowed: the podcast from Brooklyn Public Library.

[Music fading into street sound]

Adwoa Adusei Let’s set the scene. It’s the late 1940s in Brooklyn, post-war. You’re coming home after your job making women’s shoes or chewing gum at Bush Terminal. It smells like spring. Ahead of you, rising over the crest of the hill, are a cluster of pale yellow brick houses. Your grandparents helped build those buildings, and three generations of your family have lived in those apartments. The voices you hear around you as you trudge up the hill are speaking a collection of languages unique to this little pocket of the city. Here’s how Robert Saasto remembers it.

Robert Saasto Everyone was Finnish around the place, either finish or Norwegian, Swedish, Scandinavian. I was born in 1947 in that co-op. And in those days you could hear Finnish on the street. There were 30 co-op buildings surrounding Sunset Park and there was the Finnish hall. There was the newspaper and there was a tailor. There was everything that you could imagine because they gravitated towards that neighborhood because they didn't have to learn English.

Adwoa Adusei Robert’s family moved to Dyker Heights when he was five, but his grandparents still lived in Finnish co-ops, and he spent a lot of his time with them.

Robert Saasto And particularly Mummo, which is the Finnish word for grandmother and Pap, which we call Pappa. So it was Mummo and Pap, we called them. And they lived on the corner of 40th Street and 7th Avenue in the co-op building, which had the nickname kiusata, which means tease or teaser. And so we used to go there. They also had a courtyard. So we were there constantly, all the time.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Robert’s memory is one of a big, gregarious Finnish social life, full of dances and meeting halls and social clubs.

Robert Saasto My mother was in the gymnastics club. My father played all the sports. And they were big on their dances. You have to imagine that there were hundreds of people going to the dances. And when I was a little kid, I would go with my parents, they'd take us into the into the Imatra Hall. And there'd be, oh, it'd be a wild party-like time. There was a bar there, they’d be drinking and they’d be doing the hoopa, they called it, it was like the tango.

[Finnish music]

Adwoa Adusei These social venues — the socialist clubs, the gymnastics clubs, the churches — this would be where Finns would find their footing, share resources and experiences in this new culture they found themselves in, but also where they’d keep the fabric of their own culture intact, and their politics. 

Robert Saasto Every community there were two halls. There was always the regular Finn hall and then the Socialist, Communist, left-leaning hall. 

Joanna Chopp There's sort of a running joke that if you see three Finns walking down the road, they're on their way to form two church congregations, a Socialist club, a sports club, and within all of those things, there was often division. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras That’s Joanna Chop, an archivist with the Finnish American Heritage Center at Finlandia University in Hancock, Michigan. We talked to her to get a bigger picture of Finnish life in America. She mentioned that politics and religion were not only a big part of Finnish-American life, but also is what was fueling their immigration in the early 1900s. 

Adwoa Adusei New York in the late 1800s was an immigrant town, of course; so what pushed the Finns to leave Finland was not dissimilar to other European migrations. Here’s Joanna Chopp again.

Joanna Chopp So, there was a lot of political upheaval for quite a long time. Add to that that there was a famine going on in the 1860s. For a short period of time there was even the threat of conscription into the Russian military. So all of these things helped to fuel immigration. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Chopp also noted that, though many Finns came to the United States to escape an unstable country in the late 1800s and early 1900s, there were Finns in America much earlier than that, as far back as the 1630s in New Jersey and Delaware, in what was then called the New Sweden Colony.

Joanna Chopp The oldest log cabin still in existence is in New Jersey, built by a Finn. There was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence who could trace his ancestry to the New Sweden Colony. So Finns have been in the US.. for a long time. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras And here’s where the connection to housing comes in, Adwoa. That first log cabin is significant, because Finns have for a long time been skilled carpenters and builders. So, the Finns didn’t just move to Sunset Park — they actually built it. Here's Robert Saasto again. 

[Construction sound]

Robert Saasto So when they came here, they all picked up a hammer and they got a job. And then they decided among themselves to build the co-op buildings so that they could have a good apartments to live in. And they did it in their form, which was called which was the co-op form. Everybody would share equally, buy a share and have an apartment. 

Adwoa Adusei Robert talked about where this came from, this cooperative building practice. It was baked into the fabric of life back in Finland, too.

Robert Saasto The Finns actually have a word for it. I think it's -- I always mispronounce it -- Toku, douku, something like that. What it meant was, and they did this in Finland all the time, all the men would get together and they'd build the house literally within a few days. And it would be a major community event and the women would all get together and at the end they would all have a big party and eat and drink. And then the next time that someone got married or needed a house, they all went together and did it. They did it in the co-operative form.

Joanna Chopp The Finns, especially in the U.S., if there was a chance to be cooperative, they took it. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Joanna Chopp again.

Joanna Chopp There were co-operative bakeries, co-operative dairies. I think there was even a co-operative gas company. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras If you’ve lived in New York long enough, or read the Real Estate section of The New York Times — you know what a co-op is. It’s a housing model where you buy a share in an organization in order to live in the building and contribute to its upkeep. In New York City, co-ops are an institution. Today, over half of all co-ops in the United States are in the New York area, and about three-quarters of apartments in Manhattan are co-ops.

Adwoa Adusei But, very few people know that some of the first co-ops in the country were in Sunset Park, and they were built by the Finns. In the first decade of the 20th century, a few dozen Finnish builders and tradespepole formed the Finnish Building Association and began buying land and building single-family homes, which were then purchased at cost by Finnish families. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras By the teens, the Finns started thinking bigger; in 1915, sixteen Finnish families scraped together $500 each to purchase a lot on 43rd Street, between 8th and 9th Avenues, and built a handsome four-story apartment building that became known as Alku — which means, “new beginnings” in Finnish. Completed in 1916, Alku became the very first nonprofit housing co-operative in America. And it’s still standing today. At their height, there were more than 30 Finnish co-op buildings, all centered around the blocks around the park itself. They were radical for how luxurious they felt, in a working class neighborhood. 

Adwoa Adusei In 1935, A reporter noted in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle that there were saunas in some of early Finnish co-ops, and that they were so well-built that they “look as if they would be standing after whole areas of speculative apartments have collapsed.” 

Robert Saasto These have withstood the test of time. You have tall ceilings, big windows, spacious rooms. They weren't in your tenements that you saw on the Lower East Side or even in Brooklyn. I mean, they were well built. These were real carpenters who built these buildings.

Adwoa Adusei Robert mentions the Lower East Side, and the tenements — and this is important, too, because what the Finns did is created a model for working class immigrants to live in their own, owned homes; to be free of rapacious landlords or crowded in unlivable conditions, but also a model which was sustainable for the community.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Right, these buildings were non-profit housing coops, which meant when a member who lived in Alku, or Alku Toinen, or any other Finnish co-op, was ready to move on — they would be selling that membership back to the corporation for what they put in, and the co-op who would then sell that membership another owner. 

Esther Wang There was a really rich kind of Leftist, Socialist tradition among the Finnish immigrant community in the United States in the early 1900s. 

Adwoa Adusei This is Esther Wang, a writer in NYC who, a few years ago, received a fellowship from the Asian American Writers Workshop to cover Sunset Park. She wrote about the Finns in Sunset Park in an article titled “Bread and Butter Socialism: A History of Finnish-American Co-ops.” We’ll put a link to that in our shownotes.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras According to Esther, the Finnish version of socialism was all about supporting fellow immigrants.

Esther Wang It was about how can we support our families? How can we support our community? And the way that they did it was through the co-op model. Today, we kind of see co-op models as an alternative, right, and one that people are really interested in. Can we apply the co-op model to create sort of these newer economies that are less exploitative, that support communities that they're in, that support workers, right. And it was really interesting to me that this model had already been done and quite successfully by groups of immigrants to the United States from Europe, not just Fiinland, right, bur from many different European countries. And, it just made me think, what can we learn from what they did?

Adwoa Adusei The reality is that today, the co-ops that the Finns built — and co-ops across the city, are no longer a reliable option for working class immigrants who are looking to buy homes. They’re too expensive.

Esther Wang Market forces have just dramatically transformed what's possible in New York City and in most urban spaces for working class families. I just out of curiosity, today I looked up the cost of apartments in the first Alku building, the first building that was built by this immigrant community. And the most recent apartment that sold, I think it was a three bedroom, one bath and sold for more than $600,000. I can't imagine many working class immigrant families being able to to make that happen, right. Being able to afford that. What I kind of took away from my research and from writing the story is that the exact model that they employed probably wouldn't work today. But, the fact that they were able to do it, kind of, it made me think -- if we just are creative, right, if we have the vision, you know, there are ways to make truly affordable housing happen for people of all income levels. We just have to have the will and the idea.

Adwoa Adusei There are still co-operative grocery stores and other co-operative organizations that work for immigrants in New York City by keeping costs down and encouraging neighbors to help each other. Just look at the numbers of mutual aid groups in the city that popped up during the pandemic. A challenge we have for our listeners is to do a little research on whether there’s a neighborhood group near you, or a community bank, co-operative store, or lending system that encourages neighbors to support each other. See if there’s a way you can help your neighbors.

[Music]

Adwoa Adusei But, to finish the story of the Finns…. as with many immigrant communities, after a few generations, they moved on from Sunset Park. Here’s Robert again. 

Robert Saasto And this was taking place in the '80s. They were either dying off, moving to Florida or the young were going away and not coming back.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Today, there are communities of Finnish people, some of them still speaking Finnish, in Florida and the Midwest, but they’re mostly gone from Brooklyn. Robert is trying to make sure that people living in Sunset Park today know a bit about the history of the Finns and their co-operative lifestyle. Recently, we plaques  going up on some of the buildings in my neighborhood.

Robert Saasto And I have been amazed at the positive response I have gotten from all the buildings, from the old Finn co-ops. All the people, particularly the young people, so appreciate the history and the significance. 

Adwoa Adusei I think there is a trend toward people wanting to know more about their neighborhoods and the people who built it.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Yes, exactly. And I think that’s part of what I love about this story. The Finnish legacy can still be found here today, not only in the physical buildings, but in this community spirit, and the co-operation that made it possible for an immigrant community to survive and flourish. It’s something Esther Wang mentioned, too — that Sunset Park is still a place with very strong and very active immigrant communities.

Esther Wang No matter if you come from Finland, right, or you come from mainland China or Hong Kong, you know, there are places where you can move and you can establish yourself, which is not to say they're not without their faults. You know, Sunset Park for decades has been that place for successive waves of immigrant communities, and I think that's a beautiful thing, and I hope that never changes.

[Music]

Adwoa Adusei "Building Brooklyn" is a mini-series from Brooklyn Public Library’s Borrowed podcast. It’s produced by Virginia Marshall, with help from Fritzi Bodenheimer, Jennifer Proffitt, Meryl Friedman, and Robin Lester Kenton. This episode was written by Krissa Corbett Cavouras. Our music composer is Billy Libby.  

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Borrowed is brought to you by Brooklyn Public Library and is hosted by me, and Adwoa Adusei. You can find a transcript of this episode at our website. Special thanks to Robert Saasto, Esther Wang, and Joanna Chopp at the Finnish American Heritage Center at Finlandia University. 

Adwoa Adusei Sound in this episode came from Blue Dot Sessions and the BBC Sound Effects Library. Be sure to check back next week for the final episode of Building Brooklyn: the story of another neighborhood, told in reverse: Canarsie.

Carlyle Price When I got to school there, I think I was a month or two in when someone told me a Black family had tried to move in to Canarsie and had gotten burned out a year or two before. For me it was like okay, watch yourself out here. I didn't want to be out ther after dark.

Adwoa Adusei That’s next time, on "Building Brooklyn."

What does Sunset Park look like today? We sent out a call for Brooklyn teen photographers to go out and take pictures of the four neighborhoods in our "Building Brooklyn" mini-series. Evan Thurman's photo was one of two entries that won the category for Sunset Park.

About the photo, from Evan Thurman, 15: I have been living around the edges of Park Slope, Gowanus, and Sunset Park my entire life. Over the past year or so I have become more interested in photography, and I think this area has very unique structures and subjects. This photo is demonstrative of how much of the back half of Sunset Park has been left to deteriorate; although population and interest in the area is beginning to pick up, much of it is still abandoned or ignored.