New York was the first place many immigrants arrived, and a significant number chose to stay there. This also applied to Norwegians, who especially gathered in the Brooklyn district. At most there were around 60,000 Norwegian immigrants there, and Brooklyn was referred to as "Norway's third largest city". While the traditional Norwegian emigration was directed towards the agricultural areas on the prairie, many traveled to New York to find work in more urban areas. Today, there are few traces left of the large Norwegian colony, but you can find a few Norwegian or Nordic shops, pubs and club premises.
Desert Sur in Brooklyn
There were also many Norwegian sailors who stayed in New York for shorter or longer periods. A special area was Ørkenen Sur, where in the 1920s and 1930s many unemployed Norwegian sailors lived in simple sheds on a rubbish dump.
The Sur desert was a squatter colony in Brooklyn in interwar New York City - one of many so-called Hoovervilles, after US President Herbert Hoover, who in 1928 wrongly predicted that poverty in the US would soon be eradicated.
The colony consisted mostly of single, migrant men at a time when Norway was poor and Norwegians sought to improve their living conditions. It is about seafaring, emigration, alcoholism, unemployment, missionary work and the Depression-era USA and Norway; an often bone-chilling, non-stop toil and often more "than the struggle for daily bread".