The World in a City: Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York Read online

  And it is not just Middle Easterners and North Africans who are changing the neighborhood's personality. Those settling in Astoria in the past decade or two include Bangladeshis, Serbians, Bosnians, Ecuadorians, and, yes, even increasingly young Manhattan professionals drawn by the neighborhood's modest rents, cosmopolitan flavors, and short commute to midtown Manhattan. More vibrant than them all seem to be the Brazilians, who have brought samba nightclubs and bikini-waxing salons to streets that once held moussaka joints. When Brazil won the World Cup in 2002, Astoria's streets were turned into an all-night party, and when the team lost in 2006, the streets were leaden with mourning.

  New York can be viewed as an archipelago, like Indonesia a collection of distinctive islands, in its case its villagelike neighborhoods. Each island has its own way of doing things, its own flavor, fragrance, and indelible characters. But, as a result of the roiling tides of migration and the unquenchable human restlessness and hunger for something better and grander, most of these neighborhoods are in constant, ineluctable flux. Some transform with astonishing swiftness as if hit by a flood; a few suffer erosion that is scarcely detectable until one day its inhabitants realize that what was there is gone.

  Astoria was an appropriate jumping-off point for my three-year-long ramble around the city because it is a classic New York neighborhood, a place that has long had a sharply defined character and a distinct place in the city's landscape, but one that has been turned into a Babel of cultures by the waves of immigration set off by the 1965 law. When New Yorkers dropped the name Astoria, it was understood they were talking about an enclave where Greek was spoken and Greek folkways were observed. So it was striking to me as I walked the streets how much of that accent had faded. Astoria's Greek population has been cut by a third in the past two decades, by some unofficial estimates, to 30,000 from 45,000, with official, if undercounted, census figures even gloomier, putting the number of people who claimed Greek ancestry at just 18,217, or 8.6 percent of the neighborhood's residents.

  The decline of the Greeks can be seen as an old New York story, no different from the shrinking of the Jewish population on the Lower East Side or the number of Italians along Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. As immigrants of one nationality make it, they forsake the jostling streets, and newer immigrants, hoping to make their fortunes, move in. “It's an upward mobility kind of thing,” said Robert Stephanopoulos, dean of Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral on East Seventy-fourth Street and father of George (Bill Clinton's press secretary and now an ABC broadcaster). But the fact that it is an oft-told story is scant consolation for longtime Greek residents who have tried to rekindle the old country in this new one. They find a bittersweet quality to the changeover. On the one hand, it affirms their community's upswing; on the other, their village in New York is withering.

  “In New York everything turns around,” Peter Figetakis, forty-eight, a Greek-born film director who has lived in Astoria since the 1970s, told me. “Now the Hindus and Arabs, it's their time.”

  For the newer residents, the mood is expansive. On a two-block stretch of Steinway between Twenty-eighth Avenue and Astoria Boulevard, there is a veritable souk, with shops selling halal meat, Syrian pastries, airplane tickets to Morocco, driving lessons in Arabic, Korans and other Muslim books, and robes in styles such as the caftan, the abaya, the hooded djellaba, and the chador, which covers the body from head to toe, including much of the face. Indeed, a common street sight is a woman in ankle-length robe and head scarf—hijab—surrounded by small children. Laziza of New York Pastry, a Jordanian bakery, may have baklava superior to that made by the neighborhood's Greeks. With two dozen such Arabic shops, the Steinway strip outpaces the city's most famous Middle Eastern thoroughfare, Brooklyn's Atlantic Avenue, which was started by Lebanese and Syrian Christians, not Muslims. In cafés and restaurants once owned by Greeks and Italians, television shows from Cairo and news from Qatar-based Al Jazeera are beamed in on flat-screen televisions. Some cafés are open round-the-clock so taxi drivers can stop in and have their sheeshah and an espresso.

  Noureddine Daouaou, a taxi driver from Casablanca who has lived in the United States for more than twenty years, said he prefers Astoria to other places in New York where Arabs cluster because the neighborhood has a cosmopolitan mix of peoples. “You don't feel homesick,” he said. “You find peace somehow. You find people try to get along. We can understand each other in one language.”

  The number of Arab speakers in the neighborhood the city designates as Queens Community Board 1 (the city is broken into fifty-nine community boards that offer advice on land-use and budget issues) rose from 2,265 in 1990 to 4,097 in 2000, an 80 percent increase, and will be far larger in the next census. For the Middle Easterners, the attraction to Astoria seems to be the congenial Mediterranean accent: foods that overlap with such Greek delicacies as kebab, okra, lentils, and honey-coated pastries, and cultural harmonies such as men idling with one another in cafés. “They feel more comfortable with Greeks,” George Mohamed Oumous, a forty-five-year-old Moroccan computer programmer, said of his fellow Arabs. “We've been near each other for centuries. You listen to Greek music, you think you could be listening to Egyptian music.”

  Ali El Sayed, who is Steinway's Sidney Greenstreet, the man aware of this mini-Casablanca's secrets, was a pioneer. A broad-shouldered Alexandrian with a shaved head like a genie, Sayed moved to Steinway Street in the late 1980s to open the Kabab Café, a narrow six-table cranny filled with Egyptian bric-a-brac, stained glass, and a hookah or two. It sells a tasty hummus and falafel plate. “How's the food, folks?” he'll sometimes ask, displaying his American slang. “I'm just an insecure guy, so I need to ask.” He found Astoria congenial because it was easy to shop for foods, such as hummus and okra, that he uses in his cooking. Within a few years the neighborhood had enough Arabs and other Muslims to support its first mosque, which was opened in a onetime pool hall on Twenty-eighth Avenue.

  Sayed told me that Egyptians in Astoria are proud to be Americans, proud to blend into American society. Indeed, Egyptians and other Arabs and Muslims are assimilating in the United States with as much enthusiasm as earlier immigrant groups. In London, Paris, and Hamburg, there is far more ambivalence. Even two and three generations after they began settling in those cities, the Muslim underclass tends to remain outside the mainstream, whether by choice or because of the hostility they encounter from their long-rooted European neighbors. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, those communities have been fertile soil for homegrown terrorists. But in American cities such as New York, Muslims have been “pretty much immune to the jihadist virus,” according to an assessment by Daniel Benjamin, a former National Security Council official quoted in The Atlantic on the fifth anniversary of September 11. Across the United States, Arab immigrants have a median income higher than the overall American one and a larger proportion of graduate degrees, something that is not true in France, Germany, and Britain. Moreover, Arabs and other Muslims are pouring into the United States in larger numbers than ever, despite the dip in the first years after 9/11, searching for jobs and personal freedom just as immigrants have always done. In 2005, for example, there were almost 5,000 Egyptians admitted as legal permanent residents, more than in the years before 9/11.

  But assimilation can be a Trojan horse, a gift full of dangers, and those perils are appreciated in Arab Astoria. Many of the neighborhood's Egyptians and other younger Middle Easterners are marrying non–Middle Easterners. Sayed is married to an Argentinian, and his seven-year-old son, Esmaeel, speaks English and Spanish, not Arabic. “There are lots of fears that their culture is getting destroyed,” Sayed said.

  Though in many patches of Astoria, Arabs are supplanting Greeks, the transition, by most accounts, has been without overt bitterness or conflict. George Delis, district manager of Community Board 1, said, “I get complaints from Greeks that the streets are dirtier, the properties not as well kept. I say to them, ‘When you came to this country, the Italians
and Irish were saying there goes the neighborhood.’ And that's how I feel. This is a community of immigrants.” Indeed, Oumous, the Moroccan computer programmer, said there was some suspiciousness after September 11 and landlords were likely to inquire more scrupulously into newcomers' backgrounds, but generally there has been no antagonism.

  I HEARD AN ENTIRELY different beat just ten blocks south—the samba sound of the Brazilians. The Brazilians stand out in the smorgasbord of New York Latinos, who generally come here poor, half educated, and willing to spirit across borders. Brazilians in New York more often tend to come from bourgeois backgrounds; they are well schooled, and many held professional, managerial, or highly skilled jobs before they left their homeland. The 2000 census revealed that 30.8 percent of the city's Brazilians had degrees from colleges or graduate schools, triple the number for some other nationalities from Latin America, such as Mexicans or Ecuadorians. Brazilians can afford to fly here legally on tourist visas, which require proof of jobs and savings accounts, then intentionally overstay them. Unable to transfer their credentials here, they work as housekeepers, shoeshine guys, go-go dancers, and limousine drivers, hoping to legalize themselves but knowing that in the meantime they will make far more money here than they could have as white-collar workers in Brazil.

  “In Brazil you have quality of life, but here you have financial security,” explained Jamiel Ramalho de Almeida, the neatly bearded owner of the Ipanema Beauty Salon on Thirty-sixth Avenue who holds a teaching degree from a Brazilian college. “When you get a taste of the good life, it's hard to go back to what you had before.”

  At least since Carmen Miranda, with a fruit bowl for a hat, chicachica-boomed audiences out of some of their stodginess, Brazil has had a distinct mystique among Americans. Samba and bossa nova rhythms have shaped the music of Frank Sinatra and Manhattan's dance clubs. Movies such as Black Orpheus, with its alternately haunting, rollicking score, and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, with its antic story of the erotic pull of a dead husband for a remarried widow, have mixed magic, lust, and a Brazilian love of revelry to relax American restraints. Pelé ignited a romance with soccer that has become a ritual of suburban autumn weekends.

  But the mystique has always been felt at arm's length. Very few Brazilians actually settled here. That has been changing. Brazil's often inflationary economy and unemployment that perennially hovers near 10 percent have driven professionals and merchants to find their fortunes elsewhere. The New York area—not just Astoria, but Newark's Ironbound and Danbury, Connecticut—has been a galvanic destination. Although the 2000 census counted 13,000 New York City residents of Brazilian ancestry, with 3,372 of them in Astoria, the Brazilian consulate thinks those are gross undercounts. José Alfredo Graça Lima, the consul general in New York, doubled those numbers, and Astoria officials believe there may be 15,000 Brazilians in the area.

  So many, in fact, that Tatiana Pacheco told me, “I feel like I'm in a different Brazilian town instead of ten thousand miles away.” She is a slender twenty-eight-year-old woman with long brown hair who in many ways typifies the Brazilian New Yorker. She went to college in Brazil, then came here in the late 1990s and took a job as an au pair. By the time I met her she was working as a counselor to immigrants from all over the world, not just Brazil, at Immigration Advocacy Services, a nonprofit group near the mosque on Steinway Street.

  The Brazilians are scattered among Astoria's not always charming apartment buildings and row houses, with the most visible concentration on Thirty-sixth Avenue near the Thirty-first Street N train line. There Brazilians can have a compatriot cut their hair or wax their legs and crotch bikini style. They can buy Brazilian mango juice and the smoked pork parts used for feijoada, a fatty bean stew so heavy that it is typically followed by a nap. On Friday and Saturday nights, Brazilians, who seem to have a national joie de vivre, crowd several nightclubs to dance and drink and seduce. The Malagueta restaurant on Thirty-sixth Avenue at Twenty-eighth Street was one of thirteen Queens restaurants chosen for inclusion in the first Michelin restaurant guide for New York. There is also a smaller cluster of Braziliana on Thirtieth Avenue, with two restaurants, Sabor Tropical and Churrascaria Tropical, specializing in rodizio, the juicy grilled meats brought to the table on a skewer.

  Astoria has supplanted Manhattan's Little Brazil—Forty-sixth Street between Fifth and Seventh avenues—as the center of Brazilian life. The two midtown blocks once had 100 Brazilian shops that sold electronic goods to tourists at cheaper prices than in Brazil. When import taxes were reduced, the shops went out of business, and João de Matos, who organizes the annual Brazilian Day that draws hundreds of thousands to a carnival around Forty-sixth Street, said the street is down to three restaurants and three shops, including one that sells the string bikinis Brazilians call fio dental (dental floss).

  Eloah Teixeira, a sixty-year-old woman who managed a light-fixtures shop in Porto Alegre in southern Brazil, has weathered the decline in status that comes with cleaning houses for many of her twenty years in America. She lives in a ground-floor apartment and exults in being able to afford tickets for musicals such as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and sampling restaurants such as Malagueta. But housecleaning, she adds, “is a hard job, especially when you're sixty.” The owner of Malagueta, Herbet Gomes, has a degree from a two-year Brazilian technical college and in Brazil was a skilled mechanic who repaired mining machines. But he earned just $700 a month in 1990 and dreaded losing a finger to a machine. He risked immigration and found work as a dishwasher.

  “It was a shame considering what I did in Brazil,” he said. “All these years I work to be a dishwasher? Wow, what have I done wrong? After two weeks, I loosen up.”

  He worked his way up to the position of cook at other restaurants, and, in 1999, married another Brazilian, Alda Teixeira, who worked as a housekeeper. Four years ago, they opened Malagueta, a fourteen-table spot serving shrimp stew and pudim de leite (flan). Not surprisingly, one waitress, Monica Araújo, has a bachelor's degree in international relations from Pontificia Universidade Católica in Rio de Janeiro.

  Even the Brazilian shoe shiners around Grand Central are slumming in New York. Ricardo Stefano spends eleven hours a day, five days a week, brushing the scuffed oxfords and dusty loafers of businessmen near Grand Central Terminal, something he has been doing since arriving from Brazil fifteen years ago. Shining shoes was a step down from fixing glasses in his father's eyeglass shop, particularly for someone with a year of college. But trailblazing compatriots told him he could make far more money shining shoes in New York than he could fixing glasses in Brazil, and the rumors turned out to be true. At age forty-three, he makes $500 a week, half of which he sends back to his estranged wife and three children in the state of Minas Gerais. He has not seen his children since he left. But Stefano does not regret his decision.

  “When you come to this country, you know what kind of job you will find—because you don't have language, you don't have papers,” he told me as he polished a pair of shoes someone had left. “That's the price you pay.”

  The price he and other Brazilians pay for their supposedly enhanced life is even higher than Stefano admits. Dr. Maxine L. Margolis, a professor of anthropology at the University of Florida in Gainesville who has studied New York's Brazilians, told me most Brazilians have an incurable case of saudades, the longing for home, and so come to the United States as sojourners, not settlers, intending to return someday. Most of the Brazilians I interviewed told me wistfully of plans to retire there or return once they had made their fortune. Araújo, the Malagueta waitress, spoke of pining for a place where she is surrounded by the Brazilian zest for life.

  “Here, you just think about your job, about making money,” she said. “You don't think about life.”

  THE GREEKS, WHO JUST a decade ago made up half of Astoria's population, are leaving for other places. Many immigrants made enough money in coffee shops, diners, and construction to afford homes in more spacious Bayside and Whitestone in Queens or
Roslyn on Long Island. Children who grew up in Astoria did so well in the area's schools that many now work as lawyers and engineers, and they too are seeking fresher terrain. “What's happening is what happened to every other immigrant group,” said Harilaos Daskalothanassis, managing editor of the Greek-language newspaper The National Herald, which has a tristate circulation of 40,000. “They came here and found jobs and inexpensive homes and eventually they wanted bigger houses and yards. Now their children or they themselves when they make some more money want houses in less urban areas—and new immigrants move into their space.”

  But these new immigrants are no longer Greeks. Greece is such a prospering member of the European Union that Greeks no longer feel the need to leave their homeland, as they did in the late 1960s and 1970s, when they came to the United States at a rate of 15,000 a year and a neighborhood like Astoria could support a movie theater, the Ditmars, that showed only Greek movies. “Greece is not a poor country,” Harry, as everybody calls him, put it. Until two decades ago, Greeks stayed put in Astoria, preferring its two-family brick houses (sometimes with three families inside them) to taller apartment houses. “Nobody really moved,” said Tina Kiamos, the executive assistant at the Hellenic American Neighborhood Action Committee, a social service agency, who grew up near Thirtieth Avenue and Thirty-seventh Street in the 1950s but left Astoria thirty-five years ago for Bayside. They liked visiting a doctor who spoke Greek on Astoria's “Doctors' Row” on Thirty-sixth Street at Thirtieth Avenue. They were proud of St. Demetrios School, whose uniforms of blue jackets and gray trousers or skirts were marks of prestige and where one year thirty-nine of its forty-one graduates passed the tests for selective Stuyvesant and Bronx Science high schools. These children of furriers and street vendors would hang out on corners, or go to dances at the church or at their parents' Hellenic societies, or, when they were older, to the nightclubs that featured the springing, foot-dragging circle dances popularized by Zorba the Greek. “The guys always had cars, the girls didn't, and the girls always tried to get the guys to take them to a dance,” Kiamos remembered.