N.Y. Finns Receive Help From Homeland

While immigrants typically send dollars to their impoverished countries, a dwindling community of Finns in Brooklyn hangs on with the help of money and experts from the homeland.

Once bustling with Finnish cafes and steam baths, the streets of Sunset Park are now lined with bodegas and Chinese takeout restaurants. Only a little-used Finnish cultural center and a Finnish-language newspaper remain as testimony to “Finntown’s” glorious past.

One hundred years after the Finns erected Imatra Hall in southwest Brooklyn, the society’s president, Viekko Laiho, has planned a yearlong series of events to mark the anniversary. Instead of the young immigrants who once flocked to the center for companionship and entertainment, Finnish government dignitaries now come to pay homage to the past. And the dancing young couples of 50 years ago who decorate Imatra’s walls in faded black-and-white photographs won’t join Laiho in celebration.

“Most of them have moved to Florida,” said Laiho, a Finnish citizen who came to America to study music. As the Finnish population of Brooklyn has plummeted from 10,000 in the early part of the century to 200 today, the Finnish government has poured more than $100,000 into repairs for the aging center.

“It’s a miracle this place is still here,” said Anne-Marie Asmann, one of the few third-generation Finns who have stayed in Sunset Park. According to Raili Laitinen, vice chairman of the Finland Society in Helsinki, the Finnish government sends financial support abroad in order to help promote the Finnish culture and language worldwide.

The Finland Society, in connection with the Ministry of Education, also funds language scholarships for American-born Finns. “Finns are very proud of their country’s independence,” Asmann said.

Maintaining a cultural outpost in New York helps to bolster the small country’s national pride, she added. The first Finnish immigrants flooded into southwest Brooklyn after crop failures hit Scandinavia in the late 19th Century. Shipbuilders and carpenters, the Finns worked on the docks and built America’s first cooperative apartment buildings in Sunset Park.

While many Finns settled in Brooklyn, others pressed on to Minnesota and Michigan. Immigration slowed after 1920, and as Brooklyn’s population began to age after World War II, many older Finns began an exodus to the West Palm Beach area of Florida, while their offspring moved to New Jersey and Long Island with other immigrant children.

The Finns were replaced by a large Latino population in the neatly arranged row houses of Sunset Park. Most recently, immigrants from the Canton region of China have arrived, taking the N train from Manhattan’s Chinatown.

“For the Hispanics and the Chinese, the money flows back to the homeland,” said Louis Winnick, a New York author who has written a book chronicling the ethnic transformation of the neighborhood. “We see an odd reversal of the usual pattern with the Finnish community.”

Another vestige of Finntown, the New Yorkin Uutiset (New York News), continues to print news of American Finns. One of only four Finnish newspapers in the United States, which all receive Finnish government funding, New Yorkin Uutiset has survived with the help of an annual $15,000 grant.

“The paper couldn’t survive on its own right now,” said its editor, Anne Leirola, who was sent from Finland five years ago to help revitalize the struggling paper. While the circulation soared to 15,000 in the 1920s and 30s, fewer than 2,000 now receive the paper. And most readers live far from the home office, in Florida, the Midwest and even Finland.