Grzegorz Kirchner was born in Poland in 1949. The Kirchner family came to the United States in 1960.
They first settled in Redford Township before eventually moving to Hamtramck at mother’s request. Grzegorz Kirchner graduated from Wayne State University in Detroit with a degree in physics. After graduation, he assumed leadership of the Polish section in the Polish-African American Project, a study of the relations between Polish expatriates and the Afro-American community in Hamtramck.
Up until 1971, with a camera in hand, he documented the social and cultural life of Polish expats in his hometown, sending his photos to local newspapers. 1975 was the year Grzegorz Kirchner became a businessman. His first venture, the Continental Baking Company, was based in Detroit.
He was interviewed by Anna Muller on 17 August 2015 in Hamtramck.
My mum had heard that you could get by with just Polish in Hamtramck, that she wouldn’t have to learn English. That you could get everywhere on foot, you see. “I want to live in Hamtramck”, “I don’t”, because back in Redford Township there weren’t even any footpaths. The closest shop... it was an entire shopping centre of sorts, actually. It was half a mile and to walk there... You could just go on foot to that shop, but to walk there and then buy something, it wasn’t that easy, and mum couldn’t drive. Father couldn’t drive yet back then. So father would just take the bus because he had to learn English here and find a different job seeing as he couldn’t become an accountant here. He couldn’t get all the certificates which he could have got in Poland to work as one. Eventually though, after we had bought a car, only father would drive it, mum would never drive. We rented a flat and eventually bought a house here in Hamtramck. Both were only half a block away from the church, because mum always had to go to the church, to the bank, to the shop at 8 in the morning. Everything was close, it was a 2 minute walk everywhere.
My mum never learned any English because she was always surrounded by other Poles. There was a Polish newspaper that came out every day, a Polish radio station playing for some 6 hours a day, banks, shops, everything was in Polish. Then my mum brought her sister here, one more niece, her brother moved here over from New York. He came to visit us one Christmas and mom said “Well, why won’t you move here? We could all be together here and so on”. And he said “Ah, you know, moving is a really big deal. It isn’t easy to just leave my job”. He had a garage so to close up shop, the flat, everything, it would take time. Here it would take a year, two. And I said, “Uncle, I’ll take a week off and help you move”. I was a student back then and it so happened that we had time off between Christmas and 7 or 10 January, so he budged and said, “alright, alright, OK. Alright, if you can, do it”. He thought I wouldn’t. I hired a truck, mom’s younger sister, uncle and I went over to New York and dealt with everything in 4 or 5 days, loaded his entire garage, furniture, everything onto the truck over that one week, see. And we returned here with everything. And when he... when we finally arrived, he couldn’t believe he actually moved here. And when his wife became paraplegic, she would become angry at everything, so he would run away from home because he did not want an argument, etc. and where would he go? To his friends, who could usually be found in a local bar, see, and he would sit there till like 11 or 12 and then come home to sleep and that was it. Whenever she would start shouting at him, he would leave and sit there. Because of all that, his son fell in with some bad company, so my mom brought his son here and he lived here with us for two years when uncle was back there all alone. And he would hang out with me more after that, to distance himself from those people. Later, after uncle moved, I got him a job the very next day. He was an expert at building gearboxes, which wasn’t difficult, because when I went with him to the garage that was hiring and they asked what he could do, he answered all of their questions so that they knew he was good at that stuff. So this is how it all came to be, that the family gathered here.
I had a job lined up for me after graduation, a type of project – the relations between black people and Poles, as Detroit was 40% Black and 20% Polish back then. At the time, those two groups, if they were to work together, they would have political control over the region, so the Detroit Archdiocese and Congress [Unintelligible] and Study Center for Ethnic Affairs from Washington paid money to determine, over the course of a year, what the relations between the two groups were like, and if the two groups would come together to eventually assume political control in the region. Anyway, that one-year project was extended to two years, and Hamtramck turned out to be at the centre of it all. And Hamtramck was virtually 90% Polish at the time, but there were also many expats to the south of Hamtramck, same with Hamtramck Poletown, they pretty much shared a border with blacks. And there was that Polish House back there and four Polish Churches. And then the problems between the Poles and the blacks started, so the idea was to see how they could be minimised. And, to a degree, we started organised groups containing Blacks who lived near Polish buildings, who would turn on the lights and sit on their porches whenever Poles were gathered in their churches or houses, to watch for burglars and such. They started to help one another, it was a very small percentage that committed the crimes, and most of the blacks were very good people and suffered a lot themselves because of that, you see. Unfortunately though, the Poles would rather move away from those areas than work together and simply build some safer places to live.
