Ørkenen Sur: A Forgotten Norwegian Settlement in Brooklyn
- Marla Peterson
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
“The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.” — Joseph Conrad
In the early decades of the twentieth century, thousands of Norwegian sailors passed through New York Harbor. Some signed on to new ships. Others stayed longer than planned.
A small number never left.
Along the Brooklyn waterfront, on a landfill beside a railway yard in what is now Red Hook, a makeshift settlement emerged during the 1920s. Built from scrap metal, tar paper, wooden boards, and flattened oil drums, it became known among Norwegians as Ørkenen Sur.
In English, it was called Tin City.
At its height, as many as 500 unhoused men lived there. Most were Norwegian sailors without work or contracts. Others were Swedish or from neighboring countries. All lived on the margins of American society, stranded by economic collapse, distance, and silence.
Stories like Ørkenen Sur tend to disappear because they sit outside the stories of migration we most often tell.
Nothing of the settlement remains today. What endures is the record.
Tin City (Documentary)
Embedded below is the hour-long documentary Tin City – Norwegians in a Brooklyn Shantytown, directed by Dan Korneli and produced by Livar Hølland.
Drawing on archival material, historical sources, and personal stories, the film reconstructs the lives of the men who lived in Ørkenen Sur and restores a little-known chapter of Norwegian emigration history.
This documentary serves as the primary historical record for this Field Note.
Norwegians in New York
Norwegians had been part of New York’s fabric for centuries before Ørkenen Sur took shape. They first arrived in New Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, and by the late nineteenth century, the city’s booming maritime industry drew thousands more.
By 1869, roughly 6,000 Norwegians lived in New York, most of them in Brooklyn. By 1940, that number had grown to approximately 55,000 first- and second-generation Norwegian Americans. Sailors, dockworkers, and maritime trades formed the backbone of this community, alongside churches, social clubs, and businesses.
Ørkenen Sur existed within this larger Norwegian presence, yet remained largely invisible to it. The men who lived there occupied the edges of an otherwise established immigrant world.
Norwegian Sailors and the Interwar Collapse
Norway has long been a seafaring nation. By the early twentieth century, Norwegian sailors were among the most mobile workers in the world, crewing merchant ships that connected Europe and North America.
After the First World War, global shipping declined sharply. Vessels were laid up. Jobs disappeared. Sailors were discharged in foreign ports with little pay and few prospects.
For those already in New York, returning home was not always possible. Passage cost money. Pride played a role. Letters home carried expectations of success, and for many men, admitting failure felt unbearable.
Ørkenen Sur emerged at the intersection of economic collapse, migration, and silence.
Life on the Dump
"I am only waiting for hell to open its door, so I can enter. At least I won’t be alone there.” - Tin City resident
Ørkenen Sur was located on a garbage dump along the Brooklyn waterfront, on a site known as Smoke Loten. Men built small shelters from whatever materials could be salvaged on site: tar paper, scrap wood, flattened oil drums, sheets of metal, large pipes, and refuse from the dump itself. Fires burned for warmth. Smoke and the smell of waste shaped daily life.
Despite these conditions, Ørkenen Sur developed into something more than a collection of shelters. Residents organized a small, informal society. The settlement had its own internal structure, including a self-appointed mayor and named streets. These gestures toward order and belonging mattered. They created a sense of dignity and mutual responsibility in a place defined by instability.
Afraid of being recognized, many avoided using their real names. Instead, they went by nicknames like 'The Captain', 'The Mayor', 'The Fireman', 'The Engineer' -- a quiet way of preserving dignity while keeping parts of themselves hidden.
Daily life was shaped by scarcity: searching for work, sharing food when possible, gathering around fires at night. Illness, alcohol use, and death were part of the reality, but Ørkenen Sur was not only a place of despair. It was also a community.
Men looked out for one another. They shared news from home. They argued, laughed, boxed, waited.
Several accounts focus on letters sent back to Norway, carefully written to conceal hardship and preserve dignity. Shame runs quietly through these stories, not as spectacle, but as an undercurrent. Despite hunger and hardship, accounts suggest that humor and self-irony endured.
Karl Holm and the Naming of Ørkenen Sur
Between 1926 and 1934, Karl Holm, a Norwegian city missionary from Rogaland, made repeated visits to the settlement. Over eight years, he visited Ørkenen Sur more than 300 times, bringing food, practical assistance, and support to the men living there.
Holm also organized fundraising efforts in Norway on their behalf and wrote about the settlement. It was he who gave the colony its name.
Ørkenen Sur refers to the Israelites’ sorrowful wandering in the desert. The name captured both hardship and endurance, situating the men’s experience within a longer story of displacement and survival.
Outside the Official Story
Norwegian emigration is often remembered through success stories: farms settled, communities built, prosperity earned through perseverance and work.
Ørkenen Sur complicates that narrative.
The men who lived there did not fit the arc of arrival and achievement. Many never returned home. Few left records of their own. Their lives unfolded between systems: between nations, between labor markets, between belonging and erasure.
That liminal existence helps explain why Ørkenen Sur remained largely absent from official histories for decades.
The End of Ørkenen Sur
Conditions worsened after the stock market crash of 1929, as unemployment deepened and more men were pushed into destitution.
After Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, relief measures began to reach those living in the settlement. Residents were registered and provided with modest financial assistance, enabling many to move into more stable housing.
In 1934, Ørkenen Sur was dismantled. The shacks were torn down, and the site was redeveloped into park and sports facilities.
Brooklyn continued to change. The shoreline was reshaped. Tin City disappeared from the landscape.
What Remains
Nothing of Ørkenen Sur stands today. What remains are fragments: photographs, letters, newspaper accounts, and the lives pieced back together through documentary and historical research.
The site itself has been repurposed and landscaped, its earlier history largely unmarked. People pass through without knowing what once stood there.
Tin City survives not as a place, but as a record. A reminder that history is shaped not only by those who arrived and prospered, but also by those whose journeys did not follow the story we are most comfortable telling.
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