Originally farmland—many of the farm owners' family names, such as Meserole (Messerole) and Calyer, are current street names—the residential core of Greenpoint was built on parcels divided during the Industrial Revolution and late 19th century, with rope factories and lumber yards lining the East River to the west, while the northeastern section along the Newtown Creek through East Williamsburg became an industrial maritime area.

There have also been efforts to reclaim the rezoned East River waterfront for recreational use and also to extend a continuous promenade into the Newtown Creek area.

[9] Contemporary accounts describe the area as remarkably verdant and beautiful, with Jack pine and oak forest, meadows, fresh water creeks and briny marshes.

European settlers originally used the "Greenpoint" name to refer to a small bluff of land jutting into the East River at what is now the westernmost end of Freeman Street, but eventually it came to describe the whole peninsula.

The first recorded European settler of what is now Greenpoint was Dirck Volckertsen (Batavianized from Holgerssøn), a Norwegian immigrant who in 1645 built a 1+1⁄2-story farmhouse there with the help of two Dutch carpenters.

Volckertsen received title to the land after prevailing in court one year earlier over a Jan De Pree, who had a rival claim.

He initially commuted to his farm by boat and may not have moved into the house full time until after 1655, when the small nearby settlement of Boswyck was established, on the charter of which Volckertsen was listed along with 22 other families.

Starting in the early 1650s, he began selling and leasing his property to Dutch colonists, among them Jacob Haie (Hay) in 1653, who built a home in northern Greenpoint that was burned down by Indians two years later.

[12] Jan Meserole established a farm in 1663; his farmhouse at what is now 723 Manhattan Avenue stood until 1919 and last served as a Young Women's Hebrew Association.

[14] The Hay property and other holdings came into the possession of Pieter Praa, a captain in the local militia, who established a farm near present-day Freeman Street and McGuinness Boulevard, and went on to own most of Greenpoint.

[15] Greenpoint first began to change significantly when entrepreneur Neziah Bliss married into the Meserole family in the early 1830s after purchasing land from them.

Long a site of shipbuilding, the neighborhood's dockyards were used to build the USS Monitor, the Union Army's first ironclad fighting ship built during the American Civil War.

[28] Greenpoint community residents and activists have periodically banded together, sometimes with the aid of their local representatives, to fight highly polluting facilities and practices in the neighborhood.

[29] In the late 1980s, after an increasing series of highly odorous releases from the Sewage Treatment Plant which served a good portion of Lower Manhattan, a local group formed calling itself GASP (Greenpointers Against Smell Pollution) that compelled the city to control the outflows and to plan a vastly expanded facility that took 20 years to build.

[31] On October 20, 2005, residents near the oil recovery operation, which is located in the predominantly commercial/industrial eastern section of Greenpoint near the East Williamsburg Industrial Park, filed a lawsuit against ExxonMobil, BP and Chevron Corporation in Brooklyn State Supreme Court, alleging they have suffered adverse health consequences.

[34] The same EPA study said, "A review of the data collected by the NYSDEC shows that, in general, chemicals were detected at all locations in each home, but not in a pattern that would typically represent a vapor intrusion phenomenon.

Included in its requirements are provisions for a promenade along the East River, built piecemeal by the developers of existing waterfront lots.

[39] The community's plan does not cheat the future by neglecting to provide provisions for schools, daycare, recreational outdoor sports, and pleasant facilities for those things.

The community's plan does not violate the existing scale of the community, nor does it insult the visual and economic advantages of neighborhoods that are precisely of the kind that demonstrably attract artists and other live-work craftsmen... [but] the proposal put before you by city staff is an ambush containing all those destructive consequences.Other organizations, including the city government and various advocacy groups such as the Manhattan Institute, argued that residential construction in underused manufacturing zones is essential to meet growing housing demand.

[42] The zoning plan was modified on March 2, 2006, to include anti-harassment provisions for tenants and add height limits in portions of upland Williamsburg.

[44] One of the largest developments to be built after the rezoning was Greenpoint Landing, which includes ten residential towers containing 5,500 units, a public elementary and middle school, and 4 acres (1.6 ha) of parkland.

[45] Greenpoint's population is largely working class and multi-generational; it is common to find three generations of family members living in the community.

The neighborhood is sometimes referred to as "Little Poland" due to its large population of Polish immigrants and Polish-Americans, reportedly the second largest concentration in the United States after Chicago.

[49]: 14 The concentration of fine particulate matter, the deadliest type of air pollutant, in Greenpoint and Williamsburg is 0.0096 milligrams per cubic metre (9.6×10−9 oz/cu ft), higher than the citywide and boroughwide averages.

[86] There are plans to build the Brooklyn–Queens Connector (BQX), a light rail system that would run along the waterfront from Red Hook through Greenpoint to Astoria in Queens.

[89][90] This system persists today with a few exceptions: Ash, Box, Clay, Dupont, Eagle, Freeman, Green, Huron, India, Java, Kent, Greenpoint (Avenue), Milton, Noble, Oak, Calyer, and Quay Streets.

A commercial building called Keramos Hall, on Manhattan Avenue, was restored and won a Lucy G. Moses Preservation Award from the New York Landmarks Conservancy in 2013.

The conservancy wrote: "Picturesque features had been hidden under asbestos shingles for decades, but when owners discovered a vintage photograph, they began putting funds aside for this work.

Now, the revelation of the Stick Style façade, Italianate roof tower, and Swiss Chalet brackets stops passersby in their tracks.

"[96] The Kickstarter headquarters, located in Greenpoint, is housed in the former Eberhart Faber Pencil Factory on Kent Street, which was renovated in 2013–2014.