Pepe Montero remembers when Atlantic Avenue was full of Scandinavians.

“It was endless Danes and Norwegians,” he said. The Brooklyn waterfront was “like a U.N.”

“Every country in the world docked down here,  he said. "Bringing products in and out.”

Standing with a glass of red wine at the bar at Montero's, the saloon at Atlantic Avenue and Hicks Street that his family has owned since the 1940s, Pepe recalls the crowds of seamen from the days when the port was still thriving. Montero’s was especially popular with Danes. One day in the 1950s, the King of Denmark stopped in on his way to the United Nations. It was 12-year-old Pepe who took his order.

Like other Brooklyn seamen’s bars, Montero’s saw its fair share of Norwegians, too. Large numbers of Norwegian seamen and longshoremen first began showing up in this part of Brooklyn in the mid-to-late 19^th century. The original center of their community was Hamilton Avenue, which was lined with shops selling food, books and newspapers from their home country. There were also boarding houses, many of which — according to Lars Nilsen, co-chair of the Norwegian Immigration Association and a Norwegian-American who grew up in Bay Ridge — were brothels.

Talks with historians like Nilsen and neighborhood residents like Montero help reveal a time when the culture of Brooklyn's waterfront was heavily Norwegian. The Norwegian Immigration Association's museum-style Heritage Hall exhibit in the lobby of the Norwegian Christian Home and Health Center, a Bay Ridge nursing home, also contains valuable information on the subject.

Neighborhood bars also catered to Norwegians. Nilsen said that the watering hole at the corner of Court Street and Fourth Place, now P.J. Hanley’s, was originally a Norwegian saloon built in the 1870s.

The waterfront culture of drinking and vice created an opening for an abundance of religious and civic groups, which Victoria Hofmo, president of the Scandinavian East Coast Museum in Bay Ridge, credits partly to an ingrained Norwegian sense of service. An article on the Norwegian embassy website describes how a group in Bergen, Norway called the Seamen’s Mission sent a pastor to South Brooklyn, Ole Bugge Asperheim, who founded the Norwegian Seamen’s Church in 1878. The congregation used a church on William Street (now Pioneer Street) in Red Hook until 1928, when it moved into a large Romanesque church that still stands at the corner of Clinton Street and First Place.

The Bethelship Norwegian Methodist Episcopal Church began in the mid-19^th century as a floating church that ministered to sailors while docked in the harbor. In later years it moved onshore, first to a spot right on the waterfront at the corner of President and Van Brunt streets, then further inland to Carroll Street between Smith and Hoyt streets, according to the American Guild of Organists, which compiles information on the history of New York churches. A walk through the neighborhood today reveals that both those church buildings are now gone.

Editions of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle Almanac from the 1890s list numerous Norwegian societies in the neighborhood, including a Norwegian-American Seamen’s Association at Court and Union and a Norwegian Women’s Association at Carroll and Columbia. 

A striking Greek Revival-style mansion at the corner of Clinton and Carroll streets housed the Scandinavian Sailor’s Home, which provided sailors with food, lodging and help finding work, said Nilsen. The building is now the site of the Guido Funeral Home.

Elizabeth Fedde, a Lutheran deaconess from Flekkefjord, Norway, established a small relief society in 1883 on William Street in Red Hook that continues today as the Lutheran Medical Center, a hospital in Sunset Park.

“They kept adapting their mission for what was necessary,” said Hofmo of the Scandinavian East Coast Museum.

Norwegian churches and charitable groups shifted their focus over time, from ministering to wayward sailors to aiding the poor and sick among the community in the South Brooklyn/Red Hook area. During the Depression years of the 1930s, the Norwegian Seamen’s Church at Clinton Street and First Place provided food and English lessons and organized a chorus for unemployed sailors, the Heritage Hall exhibit noted. During that time, a local “Hooverville,” or shantytown, included several hundred Norwegian seamen living in makeshift dwellings. The homes were later demolished to make way for the Red Hook ball fields, Nilsen said. 

Norwegians began moving out of the neighborhood in the early decades of the 20^th Century, as they became successful enough to leave the crowded waterfront for the comparatively open spaces of Bay Ridge and present-day Sunset Park. In 1949, the Bethelship Church at Carroll and Hoyt moved to 56^th Street and Fourth Avenue in Sunset Park. The Norwegian Seamen’s Church remained, drawing in congregants from Bay Ridge and what remained of the neighborhood’s sailor population, until moving in 1983 to a Manhattan brownstone at 49^th Street and 2^nd Avenue, according to the Norwegian Embassy. (It later moved into a pair of brownstones on 52^nd Street.) The Clinton Street church building has since been converted into apartments.

In the 1950s and 60s, as the harbor remained active, Norwegian sailors continued to be a presence in the neighborhood, drinking at waterfront saloons like Montero’s and the many other Spanish bars that lined Atlantic Avenue in those days. Another popular destination, Nilsen mentioned, was the now-closed Otto’s Scandinavian Bar at Kane and Columbia streets, which was used as a location in the film version of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.

But the sailors’ numbers dwindled as the switch to container ships decreased crew sizes, and over time the transfer of the shipping industry to New Jersey all but ended the South Brooklyn waterfront’s use as an active port.

Today, there is almost no physical evidence of the neighborhood that was once referred to as Little Norway. One of the few visible signs is the building across Court Street from Carroll Park that houses the Eileen Dugan Senior Citizens Center, which long ago contained the headquarters of a charitable group. Carved into the building near the roof is “Frelsesarmeen,” the Norwegian word for Salvation Army.

Even among the small Norwegian-American community remaining in Bay Ridge and Sunset Park, Nilsen said, there is little memory of the Norwegian presence in South Brooklyn back in the 19^th and early 20^th Centuries.

“The Norwegians played a big part in that particular area for this period,” he said. “That was what helped build the city of New York, this part of New York.”