Wed, 28 May 2025 12:23:26 -0700
marlon from private IP, post #13736492

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once-dominant Poles find themselves outnumbered

https://www.freep.com/story/news/columnists/john-carlisle/2025/05/28/in-hamtramck-once-dominant-poles-outnumbered/78512767007/

In Hamtramck, once-dominant Poles find themselves outnumbered
For a century, Hamtramck was known as 'Little Poland.' Then Muslim immigrants poured into town, changing everything.
Chris Wilk, 78, of Hamtramck, takes a smoke break as Hamtramck Academy students walk past the activities building at Our Lady Queen of Apostles on their way to
recess on Monday, Sept. 16, 2025.
By John Carlisle. Visuals by Ryan GarzaDetroit Free Press

Columnist John Carlisle and photojournalist Ryan Garza spent a year exploring the cultural evolution of Hamtramck.
Hamtramck, a town of about 2 square miles, sits like an island in the middle of Detroit.

Six hours to go.

The morning light shone through the windows and illuminated the crucifix on the wall. Frank Zacharias was sitting at his dining room table. His hands were
resting on the arms of his wheelchair as he stared outside.

“I got good neighbors on both sides of me,” the 86-year-old said. “The city’s been good, the crime rate is very low, the neighborhood is nice and clean.
I really can’t complain.”

Zacharias has lived the typical life of a Hamtramck Pole — a hard worker, a church usher, a family man, a veteran. His parents emigrated from Poland and
raised 14 kids in this very house where he and his wife, Marge, 90, still live.


“I was born and raised here, and I’ll be here until I die,” he said. “I don’t plan on going no place.”

The same can’t be said for his old friends and neighbors, most of whom moved away or died. This town used to be almost entirely Polish. Instead, it’s become
the most Muslim city in America. Now, he’s one of the few Poles left on the block.

A book he called “the History of Frank” sat before him on the dining room table, a scrapbook biography of sorts that his sister made for his 80th birthday.
It held his birth certificate, commendations from his years as a mail carrier in this neighborhood and photos of his big Polish family — dozens of siblings
and cousins lined up to pose for milestones, all of which took place in Hamtramck, where all of them lived.

Frank Zacharias, center, 86, of Hamtramck, talks with Stan Bloch, 85, as seniors arrive to play games during a weekly social gathering at Our Lady Queen of
Apostles Catholic church in Hamtramck on Sept. 16, 2024.

“That was me making my communion,” he said, slowly turning the pages. “That’s the deed to the house. This is my Army discharge papers. This is all my
family when I got married. And this is me as an altar boy when my sister got married.”

Diabetes took his legs a couple of years ago, consigning him to a wheelchair. What a frustrating difference this is from the old days, when he walked these
streets as a mailman, and ushered at Tiger Stadium during baseball games, and drove senior citizens all over the country on his vacation bus trips for his
years-old church club, the St. Ladislaus Rainbow Seniors, until times changed and somebody said to him, “You know what that word means now?” And out went
the word “Rainbow.”

His routine is limited these days. Mass at his new Polish Catholic church on Sunday, now that the Archdiocese of Detroit closed his old one after a century for
lack of parishioners. Senior lunch and games at the church activity center on Monday. Breakfast most mornings at the Albanian diner across the main road, where
his meal is routinely interrupted by well-wishers approaching to say hi. “He’s like a celebrity here in town,” said Julie Zacharias, his 52-year-old
daughter. After a lifetime in the community, everyone knows him.

But not the Muslim immigrants who’ve poured into town. They mostly keep to themselves. And he was trying to change that.

He looked at the clock. Six hours to go.


Hamtramck was rural farmland when the Dodge brothers opened an auto plant in 1910 on the city’s south side. Before that, barely 3,500 residents lived here.
Within a decade, the population exploded to 48,000 people. By 1930, it was a staggering 56,000, most of them from Poland.

For a century, every single mayor of Hamtramck was Polish, and the City Council was almost uniformly so. Back then, Hamtramck was a self-sustaining world, an
ethnic island in the middle of Detroit that nobody ever had to leave. There were hundreds of Polish restaurants, grocery stores and bakeries, along with Polish
social clubs and dance troupes and churches — and a town of neighbors just like each other. There was even an annual Polish Day Parade to showcase the city's
defining ethnicity.

It was so Polish that when Zacharias would shovel the neighbors’ sidewalks, he’d be paid in kielbasa or pierogi, or buckets of smelt. It was so insular that
kids born here spoke with a Polish accent even though they’d never set foot in Poland and couldn’t speak a word of the language; they picked up the accent
secondhand from their immigrant parents. “Little Poland,” people called the city.

“Even going to the credit union, going to the bank, going to the stores, people would say ‘hello’ in both Polish and English because they didn’t know
which one you spoke,” said Julie Zacharias, who recently moved back to Hamtramck, her birthplace.

Then the old Poles left or died, the houses were sold and unfamiliar faces began moving in. Despite how culturally different they were, a lot of the Poles
remembered how tough it was for their relatives emigrating from the old country and welcomed the newcomers. That ethos persists to this day.

“Has Hamtramck changed? Of course it has,” said Tina Nowakowski, 73. She was sitting at the Polish League of American Veterans Post No. 10 one evening,
watching her grandchildren take Polish folk dancing lessons in the ballroom upstairs. She spent a career teaching in Hamtramck schools, where she saw firsthand
the town's shifting demographics. “But the families that I had then, whether they were from Yemen or Pakistan or Bangladesh, it didn’t matter. They all
wanted the same things I wanted for my kids, and they would say that. They wanted a good life, they wanted to be happy, they wanted to be safe. Every single one
of them.”

Downstairs in the bar, waiting with the other parents, Maggie Srodek echoed her sentiments. “Hamtramck’s roots are pretty Polish, but it’s not anymore,”
said the 41-year-old, whose family owns Srodek’s Campau Quality Sausage Company, a mainstay in this town for generations. Her daughter was upstairs learning
dances of her family's homeland with the other kids, whose wood-floor dance steps creaked through the old ceiling above.

“Hamtramck’s always been an immigrant city. It was never designated and deemed to be one ethnic group’s city. It’s always been a transition city for new
ethnicities coming in, getting on their feet, establishing a place to live, jobs, education, whatever it may be; a stepping stone for those to move elsewhere.
Everything changes. Every city changes.”

Across town, Joe Karpinski sat on a barstool inside the Polish Sea League, a private club that dates back almost a century. “I got a Bengali living on one
side of me and a Yemeni on the other,” said the bar’s 62-year-old owner, drinking Polish vodka cut with sweet tea. “I got no beef with them, no
complaints. They’re great neighbors. They’re hard workers. The town, it’s just changed. Definitely changed. But Hamtramck is still cool. We’re still
here, still surviving. We’re just trying to make heads or tails out of what’s going on, you know?”


The dim light seeped through the yellowed shades drawn tight over the windows.

“I’m not prejudiced,” Alice Dembowski snarled in a Pall Mall rasp. “But I ain’t a fan of these new people we got, I tell you. I want to get out of
here because of it. The town is going. It used to be pleasant. Everybody was friends. Now you see we have nothing but Arabics and crackheads. And why did they
change our street names? What gives them the right?”

Alice Dembowski, 88, of sits at her kitchen table inside her Hamtramck home on Friday, Nov. 1, 2024.
The 88-year-old was sitting inside her giant Hamtramck home, where she’s lived for 60 years. It was once a boarding house, with a dozen bedrooms on two
levels. She used to rent out the rooms until, she said, the caliber of her tenants declined as the city did, and here came some derelict who infested the whole
place with bedbugs, and she had to throw everything away and get the place fumigated. Those renters were almost as bad as the transients she hires for odd jobs
who keep finding new ways to rip her off, like the one who grossly overcharged her for a shabby paint job on her garage, or the one who bragged to her how much
money he got for scrapping a box of metal he found in her garage. And who the hell, she asks, stole her underwear from the clothesline outside?


As Hamtramck underwent a cultural transformation over the past three decades, many of the Polish residents who hadn’t already left years ago finally followed
the migration of their neighbors to the suburbs. Of those who stayed behind, feelings were mixed about how their town so quickly changed. Some accepted it,
grudgingly or otherwise. Others grew bitter as the world they knew disappeared.

“When we were little, we were brought up right,” Dembowski said angrily. “When we’d walk down the street and there were elderly people walking down the
street, we were taught you step aside and you let the elderly people go by. Now, I walk down the street and these Ay-rab women walk three across, and they
ain’t moving for nobody.”

Dembowski was born here, got married for a few years, gave birth to a daughter and now has a granddaughter and a great-grandson, all of whom live elsewhere. She
owned a dry cleaner in the city for years, then worked for the school district in the lunch program. Now she’s retired, living alone, an easy target. She
scowls when she talks, but her eyes betray worry.

Alice Dembowski, 88, stands in the entryway of her Hamtramck home, flanked by family portraits, on Friday, Nov. 1, 2024.
Of all the cultural differences practiced by the new arrivals, she says the traditional role of females drives her crazy: The women she sees walking several
paces behind the men on the street. How she sees most of them are covered in black robes. How, she says, the Yemeni man across the street comes home from work
and makes his wife and kids go outside for a while so he can have alone time.

“One of the kids in school was getting married, said, ‘Miss Alice, will you come to my wedding?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ I go up to the house, knock on the
front door, the guy tells me, ‘Oh no, you have to go around the back in the basement. That’s where the women go.’ I thought, 'Oh, this is not my cup of
tea.' So I go around the back, some lady’s standing at the back, opens the door, says, ‘Take your shoes off.’ I said, ‘I ain’t taking my shoes off for
nobody.’ Then the mother come and said, ‘I’ll bring you a plate, but I gotta feed the men first.’ I said, ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ I see
them walking down the street and I talk to the kids and I say, ‘I’ll be damned if I’m gonna walk behind you. I don’t need to walk behind you because
I’m just as good as you are.’ ”

Her sofas and chairs were covered in protective cloth so her great-grandson can play with messy abandon when he comes over. She smiles when she talks about his
visits, those infrequent interruptions of her loneliness. A whole bedroom filled with toys awaits him. So does an old doll that sits propped up in a chair in
the living room.

“I had a whole thing full of dolls for my daughter, and he said, ‘Gammy, I want one.’ So he picked this one out, and I said, ‘What we’ll do, we’ll
keep this one at my house, and this is my buddy and your buddy; he’s our buddy. That’s his name — Buddy.' He’s in the chair because he keeps me
company.”

Like a lot of seniors living alone, Dembowski’s a target for those who prey upon the elderly, like the skid row handymen who pester her for odd jobs, or the
telemarketers who call her landline all day.

The phone rang. She stood up, unfolded her aching knees and walked over to answer. It was someone with an accent, running a scam. “I have everything I
need,” she barked, then hung up.

A few minutes later, the phone rang again. It was a foreign voice telling her she’d won a sweepstakes that she doesn’t remember entering. She just needs to
send them the tax money first, he told her.

Alice Dembowski, 88, parks her mobility scooter in the backyard of her home on Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2024.
She hung up the phone and sat back down at her kitchen table, where she spends her days smoking and fending off the nuisance calls, and fighting the city for
demanding she clean up the graffiti in the alley alongside her house despite her weak condition, and seething about the newcomers who show her disrespect —
indignities that she says never used to happen in the old days, before everything in Hamtramck changed, except her.

“Like I tell these foreigners, ‘I don’t go for your thing,’ ” she growled. “You’re here; you should adapt to us, not us to you.’ I’m friendly
with all of them, but they want me to change all my ways. I’m not changing for nobody.”

In the name of the Father and of the Son, they began the day. But then they said several Hail Marys in a row, because this place belongs to her.  

It was early Monday morning inside the activities center at Our Lady Queen of Apostles Catholic church. For just $7, seniors can spend a few hours every week
playing games of chance and eating lunch with their neighbors, a tradition that’s lasted half a century. Every year, there’s a Christmas party here, and
everyone’s birthday is celebrated with cookies or cake.

“It’s just something that gives them something to do during the course of a week,” said Stan Bloch, the day’s 85-year-old host, who was born in
Hamtramck and spent most of a lifetime here. He sat at a table at the front of the hall, where he began the day with a few prayers and the Pledge of Allegiance.
On the wall behind him were framed photos of Mary, Jesus and Pope Francis arranged in a triangle, looking out lovingly on the room. “You can come in here and
play games and chit chat and have a little lunch. It sort of breaks up the week for them.”

Our Lady Queen of Apostles was founded in 1917 after nearby St. Florian’s 2,000-seat church couldn’t handle the sheer numbers of Poles flooding the area at
the time. The new church first held Masses in a house, then spent decades sharing a two-story building with the church’s elementary school before the
congregation built an astonishing stone edifice on the border with Detroit in 1952.

“Hamtramck’s changed a lot, primarily with the Islamic population coming,” Bloch said. “It really affects the church a lot, because the people coming in
don’t go to the Catholic churches, so we're losing out.”

Stan Bloch, 85, of Hamtramck, from the hymnal during an All Saints Day Mass at Our Lady Queen of Apostles Catholic church in Hamtramck on Friday, Nov. 1, 2024.
There were about two dozen people here to play games, about a quarter the number who attend Sunday Masses now. Most of the church’s Polish parishioners moved
away long ago, and the neighborhood surrounding it is now almost entirely Muslim.

“Ninety-nine percent, everything’s great,” said Stella Szczesny, 76, a longtime parishioner and lifelong Hamtramckan who cooks the lunches for the seniors
every week. “But some of the new people want to be like, ‘It’s gonna be our way or the highway,’ and you can’t do that. You gotta work together. When
we had the Labor Day Festival, they said, ‘If we don’t like it we’re gonna shut it down.’ No, you don’t do that. And they put that right in the city
council minutes. No, you gotta be accepting of everybody. It’s a community, and that’s what you gotta respect.”

Szczesny is executive vice president of the Polish American Congress, a member of the Polish National Alliance and a former manager of the Polish-American
Central Citizens Committee. She and her Polish husband adopted their two children from Poland. “I’m proud of my Polish heritage,” she explained. “My
grandparents came from Poland. I grew up in a bilingual household. At one time, I was with a Polish dance group. I grew up in Hamtramck, and it was always
Polish, and you were proud of being Polish.”

But she’s grown to accept that Hamtramck is barely Polish at all anymore. The residents aren’t the only ones that left; the city is down to three Polish
churches, two Polish restaurants and a lone Polish bakery.

“Things are changing, but everything changes,” Szczesny said. “Nothing stays the same. But the thing is, we’ve got great neighbors. In fact, I was
outside one day and a little Arabic man was in his car, and he says, ‘You don’t worry — I get off work at midnight, I ride around until 6 o’clock, I
check everything.’ He would ride around the city for like six hours making sure nothing would happen.”

Her friend, Chris Wilk, was outside on a cigarette break. “You want one?” asked the 78-year-old. She and her husband own the last funeral home in town. Just
across the parking lot from where she stood was the parish’s old elementary school. The Archdiocese closed it long ago. Now it’s a charter school where the
children of Middle Eastern immigrants were being taught in classes separated by gender.

“It’s mostly Muslim here now,” Wilk said. “The whole council is Muslim, the police chief is Muslim. But it never bothered me. A lot of them are very
nice. You know, some of my friends who used to live here, they all moved to the suburbs. They’ll go, ‘Aren’t you afraid to live there? It’s changed so
much,’ and I’ll think, ‘It’s your fault. You’re the one who sold your house ‘cause you wanted to get away.’ ”

Chris Wilk, 78, laughs as she prepares a weekly lunch for seniors with Stella Szczesny, 76, both of Hamtramck, inside the activities building at Our Lady Queen
of Apostles Catholic church in Hamtramck on Monday, Sept. 16, 2025.
The newcomers are friendly, with the exception of the Yemeni teenage boys who, she said, are often aggressive and rude. “I’ll tell you, the young guys,
they’ll give you the finger without any hesitation. They’re terrible. I think it’s the whole ‘the women are nothing’ thing, you know?’ You could be
driving down the street, they’ll stop in the middle of the street and if you toot the horn they’ll give you the finger.”

It was early fall, and classes were in session. The doors of the school suddenly opened, and a stream of excited little kids ran toward recess on the
playground. They wore the uniforms of a private school and the gleeful expressions of kids everywhere released from a classroom. But the girls also wore hijabs.
The boys wore the Middle Eastern features and dark, curly hair of their immigrant fathers.

“Hamtramck’s changed a lot,” Bloch said. “It’s been going on for so long that you get kind of used to it. But this whole country has changed from what
it was. I talk to many people and they say the country is not the same as it was when we were growing up. It’s just different.”




Wed, 28 May 2025 12:41:23 -0700
TribalBarConnection from private IP
Reply #15152261

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Yeah, the white ethnics have been replaced there by Arabs. 


Wed, 28 May 2025 12:41:24 -0700
TribalBarConnection from private IP
Reply #17767701

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Yeah, the white ethnics have been replaced there by Arabs. 


Thu, 29 May 2025 08:09:59 -0700
whiteguyinchina from private IP
Reply #10435942

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Chicago is similar although it has turned into a Hispanic neighborhood

Makes sense since Hispanic are the new hardworking immigrants

Little Italy in new York is almost Chinatown now

Foreigner street in Shanghai is now delivery pizza shops and empty Greek restaurants 

And so it goes


Thu, 29 May 2025 22:00:32 -0700
zerosugar from private IP
Reply #11085650

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Come to Chicago. It’s Polish heaven here in my neck of the woods. 

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