ROY EDROSO

Manhattan Avenue, Greenpoint, Brooklyn

"Yes?"

The short old guy with thin white hair, white goatee, loose-fitting clothes, hard-looking paunch, and bolo tie rummages around on a cluttered sideboard in the even more cluttered offices of the Greenpoint Gazette on Manhattan Avenue.

"I'm looking for back issues of the Greenpoint Gazette from, say, ten years ago."

He turns his head to me. "You think I'm gonna go digging around in the basement to get you an old newspaper? Whattaya need it for?"

"I'm doing an article for Alicubi--"

"What's that?"

"A Web magazine."

"Who reads it?"

"Anybody who goes to the site and looks at it."

"Awright, I'll see what I can do. Tell you what, you wanna write about something, you should write about the Greenpoint flag."

Ralph Carrano has been running the Greenpoint Gazette for over thirty years. When I first saw the Gazette in the early 1980s, it looked as if it were composed with Letraset transfers and printed with watered ink. Its few foolscap pages were filled with ads for local merchants, coverage of Polish community events, hazy snapshots, and wonderfully windy, intemperate letters from longtime residents who couldn't understand why people were picking on Bernie Goetz. ("Sure they say they are nice boys but then why the screwdrivers?") It charmed me, and thereafter I read it every week. It cost a quarter.

The current edition also costs a quarter. The photos--of cute local youngsters, the Greenpoint Civic Council Christmas Party, and St. Cecilia's All Saints Day and Christmas Pageant--are still faint, the articles still community-oriented, and the ads (including one for an oral surgeon who poses, for some reason, with a Siberian husky) still take up most of the twenty-four pages. Regrettably, there are no letters ("Don't worry, they'll be in next week," says Carrano, "they're not gone with the wind"), but there is a front-page editorial (not labelled as such) by "Dr. Nadrowski, 50th A.D. Republican District Leader and Kings County Republican Party Public Relations Co-Chairman," consisting largely of "recommendations" for education reform taken from "a Daily News editorial which most New Yorkers concur."

Carrano is aware that there have been some changes in Greenpoint and adjoining Williamsburg ("They got them paying thirty thousand for an apartment down the block here." "For a one-bedroom?" "No! For an apartment!" "Thirty thousand to buy it?" "No! Where do you think we are, Pennsylvania? Thirty thousand--wait, it's thirty-five hundred.") But in the Gazette, there is little space for the trendy. A few hipsters may scan the Gazette for apartment rentals or laughs, but it is really pitched at the people who care what goes on at the Lion's Club, who belong to the Polish and Slavic Federal Credit Union, who eat at Socrates Retaurant ("Cakes Baked on Premises"), who lived here before they put in the fancy bars and clubs, and whose children will likely live here after the hipsters have moved on.

The Gazette does all right, but Carrano has other things going, too. He's a Notary Public. He prints business cards. In a pinch he'll make copies. A harried-looking Chinese man interrupts us with a restaurant menu. "Twenty copy," he says. "I can't do twenty," says Carrano, "I gotta change the toner. Maybe I can make ten." The Chinese man stares blankly at him, so Carrano repeats himself, louder. "The TONER," he adds, "The POWDER that MAKES the COPIES." He makes ten copies and tells the man to come back later. "I'm telling this man a story."

"We were the first community in the whole country to have a flag," he says proudly. "I organized the whole thing in 1967. We were in a coffee shop, me and these other fellows. One of 'em wanted to be district leader for the Democratic Party, and he said, things are boring here, we have to do something to stir the people up. I said, why don't we have a community flag?"

I suggest that nowadays you'd have to offer them a community center, not a community flag.

"You gotta sell it to them. I could sell ice to the Eskimos. Lemme tell you how I would sell it. I gotta make it a story. I go to Alaska with a Jeep, because a Jeep belongs in Alaska. And I see an Eskimo and I stop him. I say, what's the name of that Eskimo who lives in that icebox over there? He says, 'Nanook.' I bring him a big chunk of ice on a silver tray. I say, 'Hello, sir, you're Nanook? I think this is your lucky day. There must be some kind of energy going on here--I tried to turn, but my Jeep brought me to your house, so I was meant to be here. This ice, sir, was in the middle of a 24-hour prayer circle by religious ladies. This is spiritual healing ice."

A young fellow comes in from the back and makes for the door.

"This man is interviewing me for a story," says Carrano, "about the Greenpoint flag."

"If he's talking to you," says the young fellow, "he's been talking all day," and leaves.

"That's Bob Haines," says Carrano. "His father worked here. Now he's in Lancaster."

Carrano goes on about the flag. The phone rings now and then--this is Friday, his "slow day." He answers each call by the second ring ("Who's this? Michaelangelo? Where are you, Italy?"). But he doesn't lose his train of thought, such as it is. He tells me how he and several other eminent locals ran a contest for the design of the flag, "with the politicans and businessmen the judges, you understand me? We had sixty judges. Understand?" Out of the flood of designs, most of which "were no good," there were three the judges liked equally well. "You understand me?" So they held a run-off contest in the pages of the now-defunct Greenpoint Weekly Star. "It was the most famous paper in the area. Understand?"

I understand. This was no half-assed operation. This was a Ralph Carrano media circus.

Finally the readers of the Star picked a design: a crest picturing local factory and residential buildings and the iron ship the USS Monitor ("That was built here in Greenpoint!") floating in the East River, surrounded by laurel leaves and the legend "GREENPOINT: THE GARDEN SPOT." The flag was fabricated and, thanks to the various eminents involved, it was arranged that Mayor Lindsay would give the dedication at a ceremony in what is now Jerzy Popieluszo Square.

"What was Popieluszo Square called back then?"

"Nothing! It was just where the flagpole was!"

Carrano worried about that flagpole. "Back then the pole had no box, no lock, and people used to steal the rope. So all night before the ceremony I sat in my car and watched it. I wanted to make sure there was no sabotage. I'm a Gemini. Geminis are very organized."

"Really?" I ask, looking around the place. Thousands of papers, many of them yellow and sere, are strewn in rough heaps.

"Well," he says, "They collect everything. I gotta always check things before I throw them away."

"Anyway. We have all those politicians and Lindsay is there and every TV channel is there, and I go home that night thinking this is going to be big news. And you know what day that was? June 7, 1967. You know what happened then?"

I shrug.

"Israel went to war with Egypt! The Six-Day War! The news was all about the war. We got nothing--no papers, no TV. Complete sabotage."

Turns out that the old flag isn't used much anymore. The pole at Popieluszo Square flies only Old Glory. The Greenpoint Bank still has the Flag up in one of its rooms, and George Pataki was recently photographed with it. "A chiropractor ordered the flag for his office," Carrano tells me. "Someone stole it."

Carrano is nowhere near out of steam, but I have to leave. He gives me some papers about the flag, wishes me luck. I head down Manhattan, then Bedford Avenue, and pause at Popieluszo Square to imagine the day when a Mayor of New York and crowds of Greenpoint residents gathered and cheered for their new flag.

Then I open one of the papers Carrano had given me. It's a photocopy of a 1999 New York Times article about the Greenpoint flag, generously studded with quotes from Ralph Carrano, publisher of the Greenpoint Gazette.

The sonofabitch had sold me a tray of ice.