28 MAY 2018 I LIC COURIER I www.qns.com
BY ANGELA MATUA
Brooklyn-based artist Hank Linhart
stumbled upon a Queens neighborhood
in the late 1980s that continues to fas-cinate
him today.
Now, 160 hours of raw footage later,
Linhart’s docu-poem “Blissville…An In-vestigation”
explores the neighborhood’s
history through a series of interviews and
footage captured from 1989 through
2017.
“I went over the Greenpoint Avenue
bridge one day and just found this little
pocket of a neighborhood and it felt so
isolated and peculiar in its isolation,” he
said. “I saw a woman in the Calvary
Cemetery picking fruit from a tree and
eating, and I was curious to talk to her.
She ran away.”
But Linhart didn’t give up on the
neighborhood, which is technically in
Long Island City and bordered by the
cemetery, Newtown Creek and the
Long Island Expressway. He visited a
local deli and saw a photo hanging up
on the wall of a store called Blissville
Market. He learned from the owner
that the building used to be the deli
in the 1930s.
The name intrigued him and Linhart
set out to find out more about the neigh-borhood.
“I was like, ‘Wow, the name Blissville.
Why did they name it that?'” he said. “I
started to explore and found these kind
of interesting industries there.”
From 1989 to 1996, Linhart visited
the neighborhood constantly, speaking
to residents about its history. He found
that the neighborhood was home to
the largest fortune cookie factory,
a factory that owned the exclusive
rights to make replicate figures of the
State of Liberty, a sushi factory and
an Afghan bakery.
The different industries also attracted
a variety of people from China, Japan,
South America, eastern Europe and
more.
“That really attracted me to the whole
thing, there was a mix of ethnic groups
and nationalities that was just kind of
astonishing to me,” he said.
The neighborhood has a long indus-trial
history. Neziah Bliss, an inventor
Art
Blissville Backstory
It has documentary elements
but it also has visuals that I just
found interesting and sometimes I
felt some of those visuals rhymed
with other visuals later on in the
video.
HANK LINHART
Brooklyn-based artist
Photos courtesy of Hank Linhart
Screenshots via “Blissville…An Investigation” trailer
/www.qns.com
