Art
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and shipbuilder who owned most of the
land in the mid-1800s, founded Novelty
Iron Works, a company that supplied
steamboat engines. He completed much
of his work in Greenpoint but also was
responsible for building a turnpike to
connect Brooklyn and Queens.
“Blissville…An Investigation” is split
into 10 chapters, and the beginning of
the project details the neighborhood’s
fascinating history in the 1930s.
“Two women came out of their houses
when I was taking pictures of a church
on Review Avenue,” he said. “They said,
‘That’s the church where the Gypsy got
married.' They told me about the Gypsy
village. It was the largest settlement of
Gypsies in the country. More than 2,000
people lived there in the 1930s.”
Linhart did extensive research and
found that Romani, also known as Gyp-sies,
settled in Blissville and created
their own shantytown in the area. He
even managed to track down a woman
in Williamsburg who had lived in the
makeshift homes in the Roma village
with her family.
“I admire that they lived through the
depression and they built a village,” he
said. “I think it’s amazing that they put
this together.”
When Robert Moses was building
structures for the 1939 World’s Fair, he
built a roadway that cut through the vil-lage,
which was referred to as the Gypsy
Ellis Island, essentially destroying it.
“I show that there’s lots of movement
to close the village because of sanitation
and all sorts of things,” he said. “It just
seemed clear they didn’t want to see
Gypsies on the way to the World’s Fair.”
For seven years, Linhart visited the
neighborhood and interviewed resi-dents,
amassing hours and hours of
film. But the birth of his daughter and
other projects, including a position at
the Pratt Institute and an experimental
documentary on the deadliest ship disas-ter
in New York City in 1904, pulled him
away. Years later, Linhart found himself
drawn to Blissville again.
“The whole interruption was about 14
years,” he said. “Around 2012 I said, ‘Let
me see if there’s anything there, if this
is worth completing.’ I realized I was the
only one that saw all these elements.
They wouldn’t have the interviews I had.”
Linhart completed more interviews,
decided to break down the one-hour
film into chapters and spent a lot of
time choosing the music for the project.
Though some may be tempted to call
this a documentary, Linhart calls his
project a docu-poem.
“It has documentary elements but it
also has visuals that I just found interest-ing
and sometimes I felt some of those
visuals rhymed with other visuals later
on in the video,” he said.
The reception from Blissville resi-dents
has been warm, he said, and the
film had had 47 screenings including in
locations in upstate New York, libraries,
historical societies and even a state
prison in the Adirondacks.
“The state prison screening was in-credible
because they were prisoners
from Queens,” he said. “They were an
amazingly attentive audience desperate
to see any news about Queens. They
were really asking lots of questions.”
The project is popular among Bliss-ville
residents who are interested in
the neighborhood’s history, especially
because of the city’s decision to house
homeless families and men in several
hotels in the area, Linhart said. The plan
has been met with heavy resistance
because the number of homeless people
will outnumber the amount of Blissville
residents once it is finalized.
The docu-poem was screened in
Queens twice in April: once at the Sun-nyside
Library, and later at the Woodside
Library. In the future, Linhart may make
the film available to people through
DVDs or online through on demand.
In the process of advertising the
project, Linhart has created a website,
blissvillestories.org, that has become
more of a community.
“The website is a big part of all of this
because it calls for interactions,” he said.
“There’s a section called other stories where
I ask people to post stories about their
own experiences growing up in pictures
or videos, their own version of Blissville.”
People from towns all over New York
like Nyack, Potsdam, Belfast and Ca-noga
have submitted photos, stories and
poems. A former resident of Holmsburg,
Pennsylvania, even submitted a short
description, video and photos of the
town where she grew up.
“I expect to keep that going for a
good while,” he said.
Blissville Backstory
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