A mugging can’t cool her ardor for Greenpoint
Daily News March 21, 1980
By James Harney
If ever anyone had a love affair with her neighborhood, Lillian Giandolfo has one with Greenpoint.
Folks in the area call her “Greenpoint’s public relations person”. Small wonder, she’s lived there for most of her 47 years and she never stops boosting the place.
Tell her about the decaying waterfront and the abandoned firetrap factories at the northern end and she’ll tell you about the area’s historic churches, or wheat residents are doing to spruce up Winthrop Park.
Point out the urban blight on Freeman and Eagle Streets and she’ll describe the “brownstone renaissance” going on just a few blocks south on Kent Street.
THE BLOCK ASSOCIATION, the civic association, the community theater group, you name it, Lillian Giandolfo is involved with it. One of her latest projects is an effort to generate more dialogue between the Polish and Italian communities below Greenpoint Ave. and the predominantly Hispanic area above it.
“Greenpoint does not end at Greenpoint Ave” she says, “all of us have to reach out for each other and work together to help rediscover and rebuild what’s decaying in Greenpoint.”
In fact, she was supposed to meet with Hispanic community leaders and Polish and Italian merchants in the northern end the other night to discuss that rebuilding.
She never made the meeting. Her doctor ordered her to stay home because her blood pressure was up.
It was up because she’d been mugged the day before on North Henry St. in front of her home by a “Hispanic male in his early 20’s”.
“It was about 10:45 a.m. it was a sunny morning and there was a hint of spring in the air.” Giandolfo recalled. “I had just stepped out of the house on my way to the Greenpoint Gazette (she’s a regular freelance contributor.
She was about 20 steps from her door when a young man “well-dressed in a sports jacket, dark pants and a light colored shirt, open at the neck” stopped her and asked directions to Meeker Ave.
“I told him it was about two blocks in the opposite direction, and he asked me to point the way.” Giandolfo remember. “When I raised my arm he grabbed my pocketbook, shoved me to the ground and ran. I looked up and saw him run to a dark blue car, where another young man was waiting at the whell. They sped off going the wrong way down Engert Ave.”
You can imagine her anger, her frustration, as she lay on the ground, her glasses knocked off, her gloves lying in the gutter.
“I was more shocked than hurt, and at that moment, I was angry” she said. “Then I did something I shouldn’t have done, I picked myself up and I ran after the car, knowing I couldn’t catch it, but running anyway. It was that exertion that drove my blood pressure up.”
In the purse was “about $63, including money I had withdrawn earlier that day to get us through the week”, credit cards, important papers and things like that.
“But it’s not the money that bothered me” she said. “What really broke my heart was to lose a book of phone numbers of contacts that took years to compile. That and losing the postcard.”
The “postcard” is one of 3,000 bearing a photo of the Angel of Victory statue that stands in Greenpoint’s Winthrop Park. Giandolfo had them made up as part of her “Rediscover Greenpoint” campaign.
“They’re a big thing with me, we plan to send them throughout the country and abroad to spread the message that we have a wonderful community right here in Brooklyn” she said. “I was taking the ceremonial ‘first postcard’ to the Gazette when I was mugged.”
After she calmed down, Giandolfo went with detectives to the Meserole Ave. precut to look at mug shots. She didn’t see her attacker’s picture and to date no one has been arrested, and her possessions have not been found. Is she bitter?
No. If anything it’s going to make me work much hard to reach out to the Hispanic community. If we’re going to turn thing around in Greenpoint, we’ve all got to work together, you can abandon buildings, but you can’t abandon dreams.