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Spotlight on Immigration
The following article has been made available for the website with the permission of the American Scandinavian Foundation.
Norway’s Presence in New York City
By Lars Nilsen
NOWADAYS WHEN YOU THINK OF NORWEGIANS IN NEW York it’s the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn that first comes to mind. This area was certainly the center of the Scandinavian “colony” when its population peaked through the 1930s to the 1960s. But while Bay Ridge still hosts the well-attended festivities surrounding the 17th-of-May Parade, celebrating Norwegian Independence Day, the Nordics, not inclined to form lasting ghettos, have largely fled farther afield and melded into the fabric of their adopted country. A closer look at their history in New York reveals that Norwegians gathered in a succession of areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn going way back.
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Feeling Welcomed and At Home In Hjelle
By Megan Hjelle, Miss Norway of Greater New York, 2009
I stood there recollecting the 23 years I spent dreading the moment someone would try to pronounce my last name – “Helly?”; “Ha-Jelly?”; “Hell?” – And there, on an old farm’s crumbling foundation atop an otherwise nameless hill in Ulnes, I stood in the very spot where, generations ago, my family worked the land and earned my name: Hjelle. There I was in a country where everyone could pronounce my name! Going to Norway, seeing old and new generations of family, seeing the places they left when they came to the U.S., seeing what they left behind and recognizing what they had brought with them was the most miraculous culmination of an already amazing few months as Miss Norway 2009.
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