Greenpoint Is Ridiculous

Sometimes! I also occasionally hate the Best Bakery in America

Greenpoint — the neighborhood in Brooklyn where I live — wasn’t cool, necessarily, when Girls, the late great HBO show that’s aging into what seemed like an ur-text for being a millennial striver in the 2010s, was filming there. It was a Polish neighborhood with good apartment deals and a beautiful location across from Manhattan on the East River, and it had been serving as an incubator for legitimate artistic scenes for awhile, as the industrial rot on the waterfront meant that there was space — big empty lofts that could be filled with artists, or, at the least, people willing to live cheaply while they were becoming whoever they were meant to be.

(You google “Girls HBO Croissant” you get this. You also get many scenes of Hannah Horvath eating, thank you for actually having a character eating on TV, Lena Dunham.)

But while I thought Greenpoint was uncool-ish in 2012, starting to tip from artists to millennial strivers, the sort of people with vaguely artistic aims and their Boomer parents’ money, my god, Greenpoint in 2025 is a nightmare. There’s a random Scandinavian farm-fresh place that costs maybe 300 dollars and the chefs spend a month cooking and then a month working as a waiter. There’s a restaurant devoted to buckwheat soba, made by the chef who is the world’s expert in buckwheat soba.

(To be fair, I had a chance to go to the soba restaurant - gluten free! - with my celiac husband and the place itself is cool, and the food was good in theory but a disappointment on my plate in that way that you’re like oh I don’t think they have the energy to make this incredible, but that’s because we were the only people there on a Thursday night at nine and I highly doubt if it’s around in a year.)

But faintly ridiculous niche places like the aforementioned aren’t for locals. When it comes to Greenpoint places that should be for locals, well, its food scene, if there was one, has changed from locals only to TikTok-fueled long-line nightmares, with one idiosyncratic and glorious holdout: Archestratus, the cookbook store and event space.

Now when it comes to TikTok nightmares, here’s one example: since Radio Bakery opened in Greenpoint, Brooklyn in 2023, it’s had a viral pastry (the tomato croissant), countless citations from the New York Times (best sandwiches, best bakeries in America, the latter blurb reading hilariously haggard, something like “while I hate actually traveling to Greenpoint, this bakery is so good you should probably go to Greenpoint”), and while technically open until 3:30, it closes early — quite often during the week — when it’s sold out of food, from five dollar regular croissants (maybe they’re still priced that?) to seven-to-nine dollar specials with chocolate and pistachio. On the weekends, it’s impossible to get anything from the bakery, as the line can easily stretch down its block of India Street, 60 people deep.

Funny enough, Radio Bakery sits on the same street that served as the exterior for Hannah Horvath’s apartment on Girls. Feels kind of right, because it’s like this sign of the evolution of Greenpoint in about the span of a decade. In execution, it’s getting the faint stench of Murray Hill, with it being legit impossible to get anything locally because places are getting crowded out by tourists and the boring fratty people with money wearing the clothes of being vaguely hip and idiosyncratic. There’s a lot of Balenciaga-clad fin-tech bores in black perching at coffee shops doing some vague job these days.

These places are attracting people who are busy, bustling little consumers whose mere existence is making the price of living in Greenpoint worse and worse. They have no discernible personality, they don’t make any effort to talk in these lines or to give you a nod if they recognize you, and they don’t pick up after their stupid, tiny little dogs who are stuck and anxious in soulless new-build apartments that have no character. The park I live near, that I love? It used to have grass, green and verdant, despite being on the briny edge of the East River. Thanks to the explosion of tiny dogs post-covid and a particularly noxious brand of entitled dog owner, the park is merely a dust bowl.

Honestly, these days I’m starting to think that New York, the New York of your dreams, the one where you were going to move there to become a name, to have your name read somewhere, is a constant mirage. It’s a little like Saturday Night Live — the best era of the show, the era that you thought was funny, was the era when you were twelve and staying up late had a bad boy frisson so of course your memories of your particular cast are frozen in amber and funny as shit. Whereas if you look at, let’s say … Andy Samberg’s time on the show? He was in so many wretched sketches along with the sometimes-consistent Lonely Island bits.

So like the way that SNL is never as good as your memories of it at 12, New York City proper, as a place to move to as someone with ambitions, most frequently in media or entertainment or something along those lines, well, the last time it was good was literally just before you got there. You always just missed the (nan) golden era. It’s why — and I find this to be absolutely crazy — the New York City era of Girls, the one mixed up in my brain with a Greenpoint that had some possibility, is starting to be seen in amber, idealized by the kids, which feels horrifying. (The kids who have LCD Soundsystem¹ tribute acts like The Dare doing their thing now.) It wasn’t that cool then, but it didn’t have that air of money and boredom that it has now.

For better or worse, Greenpoint is my home. I’ve lived here for a decade. I’ve been deeply traumatized and depressed here. I spent the pandemic here². And I think Greenpoint today is lacking in the infinite possibilities, thanks to walls being put up made of money, walls that become visible every time a local place becomes an untenable inherent line-based trend. It’s all a drag, and I remain here in Greenpoint, pinned like a butterfly on the wall.

1. I will always resent LCD Soundsystem for playing a bunch of shows that definitely led to the Omnicron Covid outbreak starting in Greenpoint and affecting my toddler.

2. Which I think makes me sensitive … but truly, another essay entirely.