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Monday, October 10, 2011

Swedish Church in Manhattan

The Swedish presence in New York is not very significant. There is a Scandanavian Center on Park Avenue, and at one time Bay Ridge in Brooklyn had a sizable Norwegian population ( with a church that had services in Norwegian as well as English)....

Just see if there is anything notable on internet--well, this from a blog called Mr. NY City:

The Swedish government is threatening to close its consulate's office here in NYC. (I guess the economic hard times is hitting Scandinavia as well.) According to this piece by Clyde Haberman in The New York Times, this has the 30,000 Swedes who live in this town "irked."

Who knew there were that many Swedes in this town?
But since NYC is the ultimate melting pot, this doesn't come as much of a surprise.

And Haberman points out an interesting historical tidbit about Swedes and NYC: The Bronx was named after a Swedish farmer named Jonas Bronck (if you want proof of NYC being the ultimate American melting pot, just look at who and what inspired our boroughs' names: The Bronx was named after a Swedish guy, Manhattan was the name of an Algonquian
Indian tribe, Queens was after the British monarchy, and Brooklyn and Staten Island have their names in Dutch roots: Brooklyn was named after a Dutch town called Breukelen, and Staten Island comes from Staaten Eylandt after the Staten-Generaal, the Dutch parliament. Go figure.)

And of course Sweden has given us such wonderful cultural imports as Ingmar Bergman movies, Ikea, and Swedish meatballs.

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