Profiles in Preservation: Victoria Hofmo
From The New York Times. Victoria is a Board member of HDC.
July 27, 2008
The Voice
When Brooklyn Was Norway
As told to JENNIFER BLEYER
VICTORIA HOFMO, a native of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, who has long blond hair and sky blue eyes, grew up only vaguely aware of her Scandinavian background.
At Christmas, her family used to eat a Norwegian rice porridge called risgrot; the person who found the almond hidden inside got a special gift. Ms. Hofmo’s grandmother, who died when she was 13, spoke Norwegian. And with the city’s Scandinavian population traditionally concentrated in Bay Ridge, Sunset Park and Dyker Heights, many of her classmates were of Scandinavian origin.
But her interest in her heritage was awakened in college, and in 1996, Ms. Hofmo, who is in her 40s, founded the Scandinavian East Coast Museum. The museum maintains an archive of thousands of items, like the dues collection box from a local Norwegian war veterans club and metal printing plates from a local Finnish newspaper, in the basement of the parsonage at her church, Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Bay Ridge. It also orchestrates events like the spring Viking Fest, a celebration of Scandinavian culture with choral music and a replica of a Viking ship.
Ms. Hofmo, whose day job is serving as the director of the after-school program and summer camp at Bethlehem Lutheran, has long searched for a home for her museum. One recent candidate is a boat docked at Veterans Memorial Pier on the Bay Ridge waterfront.
On a recent windy afternoon at the pier, as freighters crept along the bay, Ms. Hofmo talked about her late-blooming Scandinavian identity, her passion for the museum, and why a boat might be its most suitable home. JENNIFER BLEYER
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My parents were born in Bay Ridge. My grandparents on my paternal side were both from Norway. My mother’s side is Danish, one from Copenhagen and one from Bornholm, an island in the Baltic that’s part of Denmark. They came here around 1900.
Scandinavians, mostly Norwegians, were up and down the whole waterfront. Eighth Avenue was called Lapskaus Boulevard, after a kind of stew. They used to call the R train that ran through the area the Norwegian-American line.
I remember being a child and watching the Norwegian Day Parade on Eighth Avenue. I was very upset about not having a costume, which is called a bunad and is a traditional outfit. The one that people generally wear is red and black, but my family is from Oslo and they wear blue. I never told my family that I wished I’d had one to wear.
Scandinavians are like a forgotten group, but they were the backbone of the colony of New Amsterdam. They first came here along with the Dutch in the 1600s. The majority came as sailors, then often became carpenters and went into the building trades.
It doesn’t matter if there are, like, three Norwegians left, because what they contributed still exists. The Lutheran Medical Center was started by Norwegians. They also started old-age homes, social institutions and churches.
I didn’t really think about my background until I was in college at Sarah Lawrence and I wrote a paper about the Norwegians in Bay Ridge. I realized that information about them was very scattered, and I thought, wouldn’t it be good if there were a central place to do research?
I tried to put an archive together, but nobody wanted to house it. Eight or nine years later, the Norwegian Seamen’s Church in Manhattan said, “We have no space for an archive, but we can get you an exhibition.” I did an exhibition and people gave me things. That’s how it started.
Now we have thousands of artifacts in the basement of the parsonage at my church. We have books in Norwegian, records from the Norwegian war, photographs from the Viking junior band, a music band for kids. We have a handwritten menu from a Norwegian restaurant on Eighth Avenue offering fish cakes and dumplings for 5 cents. Somebody gave us a book of anti-German songs from when Norway was occupied.
We have a beautiful photograph, that looks very innocent, of a woman in her Norwegian costume with a flag, but it’s a radical, nationalistic picture because it’s the “clean flag.” They used to call the Norwegian flag combined with the Swedish one the “dirty flag” because they’d been under Swedish rule for 100 years and they wanted their independence. They gained it peacefully in 1905.
We’ve looked at different spaces for the archive. One idea was to get a boat because the waterfront was very much part of the story. For example, the different shipping companies used to have lifeboat races right past here, I think until the ’60s, and Norwegians won a lot. As for a home for the museum, I’m open to whatever makes sense. We started looking into houseboat possibilities. Somebody recommended a barge. If the boat doesn’t work out, we’re looking at other spaces because I can’t wait.
There’s this thing in Scandinavian culture called janteloven. It means that you’re not better than anyone else. “We don’t brag. We’re humble.”
I think it’s part of the reason Scandinavians haven’t been documented so well. When I first started going around collecting things, people would say, “Is my stuff good enough?” I’m like, “All the stuff is a story, and of course your story is important.” I can toot their horn because I don’t have that same sense. I think it’s O.K. to be proud.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company