If such flirtations led to marriage, the couple expected to live in an Astoria row house. But somewhere along the way, the guys started dating girls who weren't Greek and the girls started going out with guys who weren't Greek. Many had already stopped going to after-school programs that taught them Greek, so they stopped speaking Greek to one another as adults. Unlike their parents, they chose to go to college, to campuses such as St. John's or Queens College. If they became professionals, the next stop was not Astoria but perhaps Manhasset on Long Island. And if they married and had a “big fat Greek wedding,” complete with clueless non-Greek in-laws, they seldom returned to Astoria.
At seventy-five-year-old St. Demetrios Cathedral, the heart of the parish, adorned with Orthodox saints in radiant gold halos, I spoke in 2002 with Father Panagiotis Lekkas, an Athenian, who told me that there were 374 baptisms in 1981 but just 160 in 2001; 150 weddings in 1981 but just 88 in 2001. Perhaps three out of four of Astoria's weddings are between Greeks and non-Greeks, according to Stephanopoulos, whose son is married to a non-Greek. Delis, the manager of Community Board 1, a wiry native of Salonika who has wavy black hair and a mustache and who smokes slim cigars, pointed out with a Groucho Marx impishness that some of the Greeks are hitching up with Latin American women. “Off the record, Latin girls are very cute,” he said. Tom Kourtesis, who runs Hellas Radio, told me that “the old, old-fashioned Greeks, they are very mad” about the intermarriages. “Some-times the first few months they don't even talk to the kids.”
The losses have left the remaining Greeks with a sense of, to use a word of Greek origin, melancholy, an emptiness that aches beneath the traditional bravado. They miss the intimacy of a neighborhood where everyone speaks the same language. Fotini Kessissoglou and her husband, Stavros, moved to Astoria from Athens in 1986 and within two months opened Kesso Foods on Twenty-first Avenue, which sells a thick, tart, strained Greek yogurt that they top with cherry preserves or stewed fruit and must be what the ambrosia of the Greek gods tasted like. “We didn't like the yogurts here,” Mrs. Kessissoglou said. “Stavros is picky. He wants to make everything perfect. This is what we argue about.” The couple was delighted to live in a bustling city near the sea, just like Athens. But the joy of their success has been tempered by the Greek decline. “When I first came I said to myself, ‘The Greeks are very clever. They choose the best places to live,’” said Mrs. Kessissoglou. “So I am sad when I see all the Greeks go to other places.”
The decline should not be overblown. Astoria, named after the fur merchant John Jacob Astor, whose farm embraced the neighborhood, may still have the largest Greek population in one spot outside Greece, and there is still a robust Greek accent in the stretch between Ditmars Boulevard and Broadway. The sidewalks are dotted with more than 100 social clubs, where Cretans, Cypriots, Minoans, Thessalians, Ithacans, Macedonians, Cycladians, and émigrés from other regions in Greece play cards, eat Greek delicacies, and talk exuberantly late into the night. Athens Square Park, with statues of Socrates and Athena and three ionic columns, is a lively new social center. Ditmars Boulevard, one of three main drags, has shops that trumpet Greek gods and heroes— Venus Jewelry, Hermes Laundromat, and Hippocrates Health Center— and nooks sell Greek CDs, newspapers, ikons, and jewelry. Even the Amtrak overpasses are painted blue and white.
The Greeks still conduct their ceremonies the old way. On my visit to Astoria I had a lunch of lamb and potatoes at Stamatis on Twenty-third Avenue. Most of the restaurant was occupied by a long table of mourners who had just come from a funeral. Almost all the women were dressed in black, some with black lace over their hair. Many men were in black too, and when they stood, all seemed to hold their shoulders squared, their heads high, their feet planted firmly on the ground. It seemed a way of carrying themselves that bespoke their confidence in their manhood, a Mediterranean affectation. Although they had just buried a relative and friend, the mourners were avidly consuming a sizable feast—succulent roasted baby lamb, lemon-infused potatoes, moussaka, hummus, grilled octopus, and skordalia (a garlic and potato dip). The talk became loud and excited. There was even laughter. I could only guess that the person who died had been very old.
George Alexiou joined me for lunch. He is a short, sinewy realtor who came in 1972 to follow a brother studying hotel management, obeying an impulse for wandering the earth that he suggests is wired into Greek genes. “We Greeks are always with two suitcases, like the Jews,” he said. His résumé reads like those of many Greeks, with sweaty jobs in restaurants and hotels followed by work as a manager at the St. Moritz Hotel and a captain at Maxwell's Plum, then his own coffee shop on the Upper East Side. “I worked seven days a week, fifteen hours a day,” he said. He saved his money to buy houses, owning so many that he is president of the Greek-American Homeowners Association, which lobbies for lower taxes. Astoria's Greeks, he told me, still own many of the row houses rented by newer immigrants, but they are now splurging on grander $500,000 houses for themselves in more suburban locales in Queens. “They work hard; they deserve it,” he said, as if I had questioned their right to such comfort. “The problem is we don't have new blood. The problem is Greeks are well off, they don't come over here.”
And then the Greeks here are to blame as well, he said, with a touch of prideful irony. “They make their money in diners and coffee shops, but they want their sons and daughters to get a degree—that's a fact.” He knows the neighborhood's trends because he rents apartments to young Manhattanites attracted by Astoria's polyglot character. These young people like jogging in Astoria Park and using its swimming pool, the city's biggest. “They love the variety,” he said. “They want Greek, they want Balkan, they want Chinese. They love it.” Our conversation continued blithely along these lines, and then there was that stunning moment that shatters a reporter's detachment. Alexiou revealed that his twenty-two-year-old son had been killed in a car accident. “Life stinks sometimes,” he said. “You make money and then you lose the thing you love most.”
After we paid the bill, Alexiou drove me around and we stopped at the shop of Philippos Markakis, a grizzled poet who sports a flamboyant handlebar mustache that virtually merges with his bushy sideburns. He claims to have written 4,000 poems about “love, work, sadness, nature, the sea.” But that's not how he makes his living. He operates perhaps the only combination coin laundry and barbershop in creation, cutting hair on one side of a partition for $8 and letting people do their laundry on the other side. He sometimes laments the neighborhood changes.
“People, when they say hello, they don't understand each other and they're more a little apart,” he said in accented English that testifies to his odyssey almost fifty years ago from the Aegean island of Fournoi. “Among Greeks you walk up, you say hello, and everybody knows each other. These new people you keep your hands at your side. They're nice people, but they have different habits.”
Still, he said, “I'm going to die here because I love Astoria.”
There is a sprinkling of young Greeks who choose to live in Astoria, and one is Amalia Kalogridakis, a staff writer for Hellas Radio. She moved to Astoria from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, in 2002 when she was twenty-four. What she likes about Astoria is that she can talk the night away—sometimes until 3 a.m.—and then go home and feel safe and surrounded by her compatriots. “Greeks and late nights are the same words,” she said.
The neighborhood, after all, includes some of the city's tastiest Greek restaurants, such as Elias Corner, which is a few blocks from Stamatis below the shadows of the el on Thirty-first Street. At Elias, you can pick out your red snapper or sea bass at the counter on your left as you enter and then eat it grilled, its skin crisp, in the back or on an outdoor patio. Hangouts such as Lefkos Pirgos on Thirty-first Street and Omonia and Galaxy on Broadway serve the city's best baklava and galaktobourekos. Markets such as Mediterranean Foods and Titan Foods on Thirty-first Street offer a half dozen kinds of feta cheese marinating in a barrel of salt water, a dozen varieties of black and gree
n olives, the flaky spinach pies known as spanakopita, the Greek salami called aero, and the small metal pots for brewing Greek coffee. Kalogridakis notices that Greeks who have left for other neighborhoods return every few months to stock up on stuffed grape leaves. “They come back to Astoria when they need their Greek dose,” is the way she puts it.
On one of my visits, I joined members of the Minos Club, natives of Crete, three of them owners of suburban diners, for a lavish lunch under a lush grape arbor with the sun glinting through. We ate grilled red snapper, stewed lamb, and tomatoes with basil flown in from Crete, and drank a homemade brown Cretan wine. They stared eagerly, waiting for my reaction, whether I too felt their Greek specialties were unrivaled. As we drank more of the wine, the president, Aristides Garganourakis, a spirited man with a thick mustache, reminisced about coming to America in 1974 to work as a dishwasher. “We came here because we had no choice,” he said. “We had to survive.” He learned the restaurant trade, then opened a coffee shop in East Harlem, a pizza shop in Yonkers, and finally a diner in Dobbs Ferry, where he now lives. His children helped out but are now forsaking the business. “We put them to work, twelve, thirteen years old, and they say good-bye.” His son John is studying medicine at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Garganourakis hopes that John will still come to Astoria to nourish his Cretan roots, so the Minos Club works hard to make sure their children sustain their culture, providing lessons in Greek language and folk dances. Unlike other Hellenic societies, they still have a substantial membership of young people—142. With John they are succeeding; he travels to Greece every summer and he comes to Minos Society dances.
But the likelihood that the children will live in Astoria is increasingly far-fetched. Alexiou, the realtor, put it hauntingly to me: “Little by little, if we don't have new blood coming in, it's starting to die.”
ASTORIA
WHERE TO GO
Al-Iman Mosque (ASTORIA'S LARGEST MUSLIM HOUSE OF WORSHIP) 24-30 STEINWAY STREET; (718) 626-6633
Kaufman Astoria Studios (WHERE SESAME STREET AND OTHER PRODUCTIONS ARE MADE) 34-12 36TH STREET; (718) 392-5600
Museum of the Moving Image (EXHIBITS ON ART, HISTORY, AND TECHNOLOGY OF FILM AND TELEVISION) 35TH AVENUE AT THE CORNER OF 36TH STREET; WWW.MOVINGIMAGE.US
St. Demetrios Cathedral (GREEK ORTHODOX) 30-11 30TH DRIVE; (718) 728-1718
Steinway & Sons (FACTORY OFFERS TOURS OF HOW PIANOS ARE MADE) 1 STEINWAY PLACE; (718) 721-2600
WHERE TO EAT
Churrascaria Tropical (BRAZILIAN) 36-08 30TH AVENUE; (718) 777-8171
Elias Corner (GREEK SEAFOOD) 24-02 31ST STREET; (718) 932-1510
Kabab Café (EGYPTIAN RESTAURANT) 25-12 STEINWAY STREET; (718) 728-9858
Kesso Foods (GREEK YOGURT SHOP) 77-20 21ST AVENUE; (718) 777-5 303
Laziza of New York (JORDANIAN BAKERY, SPECIALIZING IN KONAFA, A WARM CHEESE PIE RICH WITH SWEET SYRUP AND PISTACHIOS) 25-78 STEINWAY STREET; (718) 777-7676
Malagueta (BRAZILIAN RESTAURANT) 25-35 36TH AVENUE; (718) 937-4821
Mombar (SOUTHERN EGYPTIAN CUISINE) 25-22 STEINWAY STREET; (718) 726-2356
Stamatis Restaurant (GREEK) 29-12 23RD AVENUE; (718) 932-8596
Taverna Kyclades (GREEK SEAFOOD) 33-07 DITMARS BOULEVARD; (718) 545-8666
Chapter 2
Melting Together in Ditmas Park
ASTORIA, AND OTHER NEIGHBORHOODS LIKE IT, WHERE GREEKS cluster in one section, Brazilians in another, and Arabs in a third, illustrate the mosaic theory of ethnic integration. New York, that theory holds, is really an arrangement of different-colored ethnic tiles often coexisting amicably but separated by the sturdy grout of chauvinism and suspicion. And so, the theory continues, the fabled melting pot is a fanciful myth, never true for the immigrant Jews, Italians, and Irish in its own time and even less true since the ethnic identity movement of the 1960s made ethnic aloofness a virtue.
But in some places in New York City cultures do seem to melt into one another, suggesting ever so tentatively that Americans are more ready to get along today than ever before. Indeed, in New York the amount of actual mingling that now takes place in so many places is striking. Perhaps no neighborhood better showed me this quite radical shift than Brooklyn's Ditmas Park. Even many seasoned New Yorkers have never heard of it, at best confusing it with the rest of Flatbush, but it is there, among the graceful Victorian houses and stout apartment blocks south of Prospect Park, that I saw the new face of New York taking shape.
Whites, blacks, Asians, and Latinos share this softly shaded patch, and no one ethnic or racial group is dominant. Moreover, the neighborhood's population of 8,243 is not cut up into discrete ethnic swatches but is significantly interwoven. Residents such as Fred Siegel, urban affairs professor at Cooper Union, like to stand on their verandas and proudly reel off the races and nationalities that flank their porches and backyards.
“The people two doors down are Guyanese Indian,” Siegel told me when I visited. “The woman diagonally behind us is from Grenada. The people in that brown house are from Yugoslavia. There's a family nearby that are Moroccan Jews from Israel. Then we have a former ambassador from Grenada four or five houses down.”
The variety of ethnic groups and economic classes is immediately evident on a stroll down Cortelyou Road, the shopping spine, where within seconds I passed a black man with cornrows, a Muslim woman with a head scarf, a white mother in Birkenstocks, and a man wearing a skullcap. The street's car service is Mex Express, but the nail salon promises a European pedicure. The canopy at R & R Meats advertises “Productos Mexicanos” as well as “West Indian Products.” The Associated supermarket, owned by a Polish Jew, has a heaping Mexican section. Cinco de Mayo is a restaurant where diners include not only yuppie and boomer foodies but lots of actual Mexican construction workers as well. The neighborhood tavern, the Cornerstone, is rough-and-tumble, but its blue-collar regulars are black and white. “We generally all get along,” said Matthew McLean, a neighborhood resident and teacher at Edward R. Murrow High School. Vladimir Popov, the sixty-seven-year-old clerk at the video store, can wax effusive on the varying tastes in film of his West Indian, Chinese, Russian, and southern black customers, even if his generalizations—for example, which ethnic groups prefer triple-X-rated films—should be taken with a grain of salt.
I rambled the well-shaded side streets with evocative English names such as Westminster, Argyle, Buckingham, Rugby, and Marlborough roads and saw lovely gabled Victorians and Queen Annes, some with colonnaded porches, looking especially beautiful on a spring day when fallen cherry blossoms dusted the ground and crimson and yellow tulips were blossoming in front yards. Here and there were also sturdy white-and redbrick apartment buildings. Westminster Road could have been a street in an old Westchester suburb like Pelham. But immediately I was struck by how many different kinds of faces I saw. There were young Chinese men playing basketball at a driveway hoop, a blond woman talking to her Pakistani neighbor, and Professor Siegel.
As I talked to residents, I was struck not just by how many different cultures were living in those houses and apartments but also by how many cross-cultural friendships there were, so many that they had become run-of-the-mill, suggesting that the diversity was not merely cosmetic. A prime example was Mavis Theodore and Hynda Lessman Schneiweiss, apartment dwellers who have been friends for more than ten years, though their backgrounds could not be more dissimilar. Schneiweiss, a woman in her early eighties, is a Chicago-born Jew, the daughter of a men's pattern maker who lost his job in the Depression and was forced to move to Brooklyn for work. Until she retired she was an engineering assistant at the company that sold heating and cooling equipment to the World Trade Center. She has lived in the neighborhood since 1942, for many years with her husband, Saul, a handball player and swimmer, on East Eighteenth Street. Theodore, who is single and in her fifties, is a black Trinidadian, the daughter of a builder who taught her the importance of community service by helping village women earn money selling their crocheting and po
ttery. A single woman, she moved into the neighborhood twenty-five years ago and since 2001 has worked at Wiley, the publisher, granting licenses to colleges and hospitals for online access to the company's scientific and medical journals.
Schneiweiss and Theodore met through community work. When muggings and drug dealing sent many old-timers packing, Schneiweiss stayed put. “I always had hope,” she said. “I wasn't going to move. I don't like to be pushed, and I pushed back.” She joined the Seventieth Precinct Council and the community board and forcefully let the police know crime was eroding the neighborhood's viability. When the city finally appointed police commissioners who deployed patrols effectively, the neighborhood reaped the benefits. “Crime in this neighborhood has gone down to practically nothing,” she said.
The World in a City: Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York Page 3