On the Sunday closest to May 17, a few thousand people in Norwegian flag colours still walk up 5th Avenue in Bay Ridge. School bands play. Children in bunad wave miniature flags. The parade has happened every year since 1952, even as the community that built it has moved away.
A few blocks east, the basketball courts in Leif Ericson Park are still called the Valhalla Courts. On 8th Avenue, where Norwegian bakeries once filled twenty straight blocks, the signs are now in Arabic and Mandarin. The Norwegians in Bay Ridge are not entirely gone. But they are mostly somewhere else.
Bay Ridge, The Place
Bay Ridge sits at the southwest tip of Brooklyn, where the borough meets the Narrows and the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge arcs across to Staten Island. The R train runs down its spine on 4th Avenue, terminating at 95th Street. The housing is mostly limestone rowhouses, brick semi-detached homes, and prewar apartment buildings, with a strip of waterfront park that looks straight at the bridge.
It is a residential neighbourhood with two long commercial avenues, 3rd and 5th, and a quieter middle along 8th. For most of the twentieth century, those streets were the spine of Norwegian New York.
How Bay Ridge Became Norwegian
Before the Norwegians
Before it was Norwegian, Bay Ridge was farms. Dutch families with names like Bergen and Cortelyou worked the land south of Brooklyn’s old city limits from the seventeenth century onward. The shoreline was orchards and country estates well into the 1880s, when the Brooklyn elite built summer villas along what is now Shore Road.
The first big wave of newcomers was Irish, drawn by construction work on the docks and the streetcar lines pushing south from downtown Brooklyn. English and Scottish families followed. The neighbourhood became briefly fashionable, then suburban, then ready to absorb something else.
The Norwegians Arrive
The first Norwegian to land in New York is sometimes named as Hans Hansen Bergen, who arrived from Bergen via Holland in 1633. For the next two centuries, the trickle stayed thin. Then, in 1825, the sloop Restauration sailed from Stavanger with fifty-three passengers bound for America, and organised Norwegian emigration began.
By the late nineteenth century, Norway was sending sailors to every port that mattered, and New York mattered most. Brooklyn’s working waterfront ran from Red Hook through the Erie Basin to Bush Terminal in Sunset Park, and Norwegian crews jumped ship in numbers that quietly built a city within the city.
The earliest Norwegian community formed in Red Hook, clustered around the Norwegian Seamen’s Church (Sjømannskirken), which opened on William Street, now Pioneer Street, in 1878. It offered a Norwegian-language service, a Norwegian-language bulletin board, and a meal that tasted like home.
In 1883, a deaconess from western Norway named Sister Elizabeth Fedde arrived in Brooklyn at the request of local Norwegian pastors. She was thirty-three, recently retired from nursing in Tromsø, and she found Red Hook’s Norwegian sailors and dockworkers sick, broke, and far from any institution that spoke their language.
Within nine days she had founded the Voluntary Relief Society for the Sick and Poor among the Norwegians of Brooklyn and New York. Within two years she had a nine-bed hospital. By 1890 it had moved to 4520 Fourth Avenue and become the Norwegian Lutheran Deaconess’ Home and Hospital. That hospital is still there. Today it is NYU Langone Hospital, Brooklyn.
Bay Ridge at Its Peak
By the 1920s, the Norwegians had moved south. The waterfront still gave them work, but Bay Ridge gave them a yard, an attic, and a Lutheran church on the corner. They built churches, bakeries, social clubs, and a Norwegian Christian Home for the Aged on 67th Street in 1903, which is still operating today.
The geographic centre of Norwegian Bay Ridge sat on 8th Avenue between roughly 45th Street and 60th Street, which technically straddles Bay Ridge and what is now called Sunset Park. The locals had a name for it. They called it Lapskaus Boulevard, after the brown beef stew that Norwegian mothers cooked on a Sunday.
For four decades, that avenue ran on Norwegian rhythms. Bakeries sold julekake at Christmas and kringle on Saturdays. Delicatessens hung rullepølse in the windows. The Atlantic Restaurant at 8th and 54th served kjøttkaker to dockworkers off the late shift.
In 1940, the U.S. Census counted nearly 35,000 Norwegians or people of Norwegian descent in Brooklyn. By the early 1970s, community estimates put the figure at 55,000, most of them in Bay Ridge and Sunset Park.
Norwegian-language church services drew full congregations at Bay Ridge Lutheran, at Trinity Lutheran, at the 59th Street Lutheran Church, and at the Bethelship Norwegian Methodist Church, which had moved up from Red Hook to 4th Avenue and 56th Street in 1949. The Norwegian-language daily Nordisk Tidende, founded by Emil Nilsen in Brooklyn on January 3, 1891, ran out of an office in the neighbourhood and reached subscribers across the country.
By the time Crown Prince Olav, later King Olav V, dedicated the Leif Ericson monument at 4th Avenue and 67th Street in 1939, Bay Ridge was being called the fourth-largest Norwegian city in the world, after Oslo, Bergen, and Trondheim. The claim was always slightly mythic. The underlying truth was real.
The Change
The decline was not sudden. It was the kind of slow erosion that only looks dramatic in hindsight.
The shipping industry that brought the Norwegians stopped recruiting after the Second World War. American maritime work shifted to non-Brooklyn ports and to flagged-out crews. The second generation, born in Bay Ridge and educated through the local Lutheran schools, took white-collar jobs that did not require living near the docks.
Then came the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. By the time it opened in November 1964, around 800 homes in Bay Ridge had been demolished and roughly 7,000 residents displaced to clear the approach. The Norwegian families who were not directly evicted often took the moment as a signal.
Many followed neighbours to Staten Island, which the bridge had suddenly opened up, and then on to New Jersey towns like Middletown and Brick, and to suburbs across Long Island. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act ended the country-of-origin quotas that had favoured northern European arrivals, and Norwegian immigration slowed to a trickle. Norway itself, by the 1970s, was becoming a wealthier country than the United States.
By the 2000 Census, the broader Norwegian-American population in Brooklyn had fallen below 3,000. The bakeries were closing. The community had not died. It had simply moved.
The Landmarks of Norwegian Bay Ridge
The Norwegian Christian Home and Health Center (1250 67th Street) has been caring for Norwegian-American elders since 1903, when it opened as a small home for elderly women. It is the oldest continuously operating Norwegian institution in Bay Ridge, still on its original block, still serving an ageing community that now arrives from across the region.
NYU Langone Hospital, Brooklyn (4th Avenue at 55th Street) is the descendant of the Norwegian Lutheran Deaconess’ Home and Hospital that Sister Elizabeth Fedde founded in 1883. It has been Norwegian, then Lutheran, then absorbed by NYU. Most patients have no idea that the institution began with a thirty-three-year-old woman from Flekkefjord who could not stand to see Norwegian sailors die alone.
Leif Ericson Park and the Valhalla Courts (between 66th and 67th Streets, from 4th Avenue to Fort Hamilton Parkway) was named for the Viking explorer at the request of the Norwegian community in 1925, and laid out under Robert Moses in the 1930s. Crown Prince Olav unveiled a runestone monument here in 1939, modelled on the Tune stone in Norway. The basketball courts inside the park are still called the Valhalla Courts. The parade ends here every May.
The Bethelship Norwegian United Methodist Church (4th Avenue and 56th Street) is the descendant of a literal ship, the Henry Leeds, that Scandinavian Methodists bought and consecrated in 1844 as a floating chapel for sailors. It moved to its current building in 1949. Today its congregation is largely from India, the result of Methodist missionary work in the twentieth century. The building remembers the Norwegians who built it.
Sons of Norway Lodge Brooklyn 3-243 (Færder Hall, 9104 4th Avenue) was founded on November 22, 1923, and is still meeting on the second Friday of each month. It celebrated its hundredth anniversary in 2023. Færder Lodge, a separate Sons of Norway chapter, meets nearby. They are smaller than they were, but they are there.
Leske’s Scandinavian Bakery (588 5th Avenue) opened in 1961, run by Hans Leske and his Italian wife Ella, and became the place Bay Ridge Norwegians went for kransekake at Christmas and kringle on Saturdays. It closed in 2011 when the customer base finally dropped below survival level. A new ownership reopened it in 2012 to serve a Brooklyn that wanted the Scandinavian flavours back. Whether it is open on any given day now is a question Bay Ridge regulars know to check.
The Norwegian Seamen’s Church (Sjømannskirken) is the ghost that started everything. Founded in Brooklyn at 111 William Street in 1878, it moved to Carroll Gardens in 1928, and then in the 1980s, following its congregation, it crossed the river to 317 East 52nd Street in Manhattan, where it still operates today. It is no longer in Brooklyn at all. But it is the reason the rest of this story exists.
Where the Bay Ridge Norwegians Came From
Bay Ridge’s Norwegians came overwhelmingly from the western coast, the part of Norway that faces the North Sea and lives by the water. Stavanger sent the first organised wave aboard the Restauration in 1825 and kept sending sailors for the next century. Bergen, the old Hanseatic port, sent maritime families who already knew how to live by shipping routes. Ålesund and the Sunnmøre coast contributed deck hands and fishermen.
Further north, the Lofoten Islands and the rest of Nordland sent the children of cod fishermen who saw a wider ocean and took it. Smaller numbers came from inland valleys in Telemark and Hardanger, but Bay Ridge was always a coastal Norwegian neighbourhood at its core. The people who built it grew up watching their fathers walk down to harbours, and they recreated that life with Brooklyn’s Erie Basin in place of the Bergen waterfront.
Sister Elizabeth Fedde herself came from Feda, a small fjord village near Flekkefjord on the southwest coast. Emil Nilsen, who founded Nordisk Tidende, came from the Oslofjord region. The names that recur in Bay Ridge parish records are Hansen, Olsen, Pettersen, Larsen, Andersen, Bergen, the standard Norwegian surnames of a coastal country sending its sons across an ocean.
Bay Ridge Today
The parade still walks. On the Sunday nearest May 17, the 17th of May Parade Committee assembles bunad-wearing children and brass bands on 5th Avenue, and they march about a mile to Leif Ericson Park. It is the longest-running ethnic parade in Brooklyn. The committee is small and the crowd older than it used to be, but the parade has not missed a year since 1952 except during the pandemic.
The Norwegian Christian Home is still admitting residents. The Sjømannskirken in Manhattan still serves visiting Norwegians and the small remaining diaspora. Sons of Norway Lodge Brooklyn still meets at Færder Hall. Norwegian-American families still come back for the parade from Staten Island, New Jersey, and Long Island.
Everything else in Bay Ridge has changed. Lapskaus Boulevard now runs through one of the largest Chinatowns in New York. The blocks above it are now home to a substantial Arab-American community, the largest in New York City, with Lebanese, Syrian, Egyptian, Palestinian, and Yemeni families anchoring 5th Avenue. Italian-American and Irish-American families remain from earlier waves.
This is what a heritage neighbourhood looks like in its third act. The community has not vanished. It has dispersed, kept its institutions, and made the parade a pilgrimage instead of a parish event. Sister Fedde’s hospital remains, with a different name and a different mission. The Bay Ridge Norwegians are not exactly here anymore. But they are not exactly gone, either.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Norwegians settle in Bay Ridge?
The Norwegians in Bay Ridge came initially for maritime work on Brooklyn’s waterfront, especially the docks at the Erie Basin in Red Hook and Bush Terminal in Sunset Park. As they prospered they moved south to Bay Ridge for better housing, and the community pulled in more arrivals through chain migration from coastal Norway.
Are there still Norwegians in Bay Ridge today?
Yes, but in small numbers. The Norwegian-American population of Bay Ridge peaked at around 55,000 in the early 1970s and has fallen to a few thousand today. The Norwegian Christian Home, Sons of Norway Lodge Brooklyn, and the annual Syttende Mai parade still operate, and many Norwegian-American families return from Staten Island, New Jersey, and Long Island to take part.
What are the most famous Norwegian landmarks in Bay Ridge?
The most important surviving Norwegian landmarks in Bay Ridge are the Norwegian Christian Home and Health Center on 67th Street, Leif Ericson Park with its 1939 runestone monument and Valhalla Courts, the Bethelship Norwegian United Methodist Church on 4th Avenue, and Sons of Norway Lodge Brooklyn at Færder Hall on 4th Avenue. The original Norwegian Lutheran Deaconess Hospital, founded by Sister Elizabeth Fedde in 1883, lives on as NYU Langone Hospital, Brooklyn.
Where in Norway did the Bay Ridge Norwegians come from?
The Bay Ridge Norwegians came overwhelmingly from the western coast of Norway, especially Stavanger, Bergen, Ålesund, and the Sunnmøre region, with a significant northern contingent from the Lofoten Islands and Nordland. Smaller numbers came from inland Telemark and Hardanger, but coastal shipping and fishing communities were the heart of the migration.
When did Norwegians first arrive in Bay Ridge?
Norwegian sailors had been settling in Brooklyn since the 1633 arrival of Hans Hansen Bergen, but the first significant wave came after the sloop Restauration sailed from Stavanger in 1825. The Bay Ridge concentration formed between the 1880s and the 1920s, as the Norwegian community moved south from Red Hook in pursuit of better housing while keeping its maritime jobs on the waterfront.
If your family’s story passed through Bay Ridge, or any of the places the Norwegians made home, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a fjord village near Stavanger or Bergen, to Lapskaus Boulevard, to wherever you are now.