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

by Joseph Berger

  “In the early nineties, this neighborhood was going to go,” said Siegel. “A stolen car was dumped right in front. A guy came and stripped the car and then vultures came for the cheaper items, and you were afraid they would try your house. A Russian woman was mugged. Someone told her, ‘What do you expect if you live in a neighborhood like this?’”

  But things began to turn around, and Siegel believes much of the credit belongs to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's commitment to stronger enforcement. Siegel was a policy adviser for Giuliani's 1993 election campaign and wrote a book about his administration called Prince of the City. Throughout the period, parents worked with the local school board to maintain classroom quality and fought successfully against a plan to eliminate gifted programs. They cajoled the parks department to turn a burned-out lot on Cortelyou into a playground called the Cortelyou Totlot that became an ethnic meeting ground. Black, white, and Asian families grew close in the process.

  Siegel's wife, Jan Rosenberg, a sociologist at Long Island University and local real estate broker, deserves credit for helping revive seven-block-long Cortelyou Road by attracting restaurants—a decade ago it didn't have a single sit-down spot—and upscale shops such as Cortelyou Vintage, an antiques store with mid-twentieth-century furniture. In 2006, the Farm on Adderley restaurant, started by a South African, opened and received a warm review from The Times. Rosenberg is still trying to attract a bank. She's also sponsored events for getting cultures to know one another such as “Cortelyou Is Cooking,” where residents from Mexico, Pakistan, China, Israel, and the Caribbean sample one another's cuisines.

  The patchwork of efforts has been so successful that artists with children from gentrifying Greenpoint and Williamsburg are turning to this once-genteel and bourgeois corner of Brooklyn, stimulated by its variety. “It's always artists and liberals who are drawn to these communities,” said Beckman. But now, with prices of some homes surpassing $1 million, Beckman and people like her fear that only well-heeled buyers will consider the neighborhood and that Ditmas Park's multicultural character could dissolve—meaning that in a decade the neighborhood's snapshot may be very different.

  “What's scary,” Beckman said, “is that it could change.”

  DITMAS PARK

  WHERE TO GO

  Pink Palace (SITE OF SOPHIE'S CHOICE) 101 RUGBY ROAD

  Victorian and Queen Anne houses (ONE OF GREATEST CONCENTRATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES) WESTMINSTER, BUCKINGHAM, ARGYLE, RUGBY, AND MARLBOROUGH ROADS

  Vox Pop (BOOKSTORE, COFFEEHOUSE, AND BOHEMIAN GATHERING SPOT) 1022 CORTELYOU ROAD; (718) 940-2084

  WHERE TO EAT

  Cinco de Mayo (MEXICAN) 1202 CORTELYOU ROAD; (718) 693-1022

  The Farm on Adderley (AMERICAN BISTRO) 1108 CORTELYOU ROAD; (718) 287-3101

  Picket Fence (ECLECTIC) 1310 CORTELYOU ROAD; (718) 282-6661

  Chapter 3

  Clinging and Rebounding in East Harlem

  FOR FIFTY-SEVEN YEARS, CLAUDIO CAPONIGRO HAS WATCHED through the window of his barbershop as Italian Harlem has changed around him, but he and his shop have hardly changed at all. He still has the same three barber's chairs of peppermint green porcelain and faded brown leather that he had when he came to work in the shop in 1950 as a young greenhorn from the south of Italy.

  “If I got this chair and it's a good chair and it can last one hundred years, why I got to put up another chair?” was his matter-of-fact explanation when I dropped in one day.

  When hygiene codes demanded he use disposable razors, he submitted. But he still has his straightedge and a worn leather strop dangling from the arm of a chair, “just in case” (his euphemism for when health authorities aren't looking). Dusty bottles of Jeris Hair Tonic and Pinaud Eau de Portugal and pictures of his three daughters and two grandchildren guard the mirrored counter, but there is no telephone. Caponigro has never seen a need to have one, and customers cannot call him to make appointments. If there is an emergency, his wife has to call the bread bakery down the block.

  “When you have a telephone, people, they call you,” he explained, with the slightest edge of a complaint. “So-and-so call, ‘Is Petey there? Could you see if he's outside?’ Then I got to leave the customer. That's no good.”

  He takes customers in the order they walk in, and even regulars wait their turn silently, in shabby armchairs patched together with masking tape, while he lets those in the barber's chair—and with his lusty baritone, those waiting as well—know his thoughts about the Old World values he holds dear, values such as loyalty and respect. All the while, he takes slow, tender snips at each customer's hair, surveying his handiwork for balance and composition like an artist. You go to him not just for the haircut but for the world seen through one deeply experienced man's eyes, a man who has you imprisoned in a chair for fifteen minutes and knows there's not much else for you to do but listen. But you also go to Caponigro because he is a relic of a neighborhood that is hardly there anymore.

  I came across Caponigro because I was looking for remnants of the old Italian neighborhood in East Harlem the way some Jews go back to the Bronx looking for the telltale Stars of David on Pentecostal churches. They want to remind themselves of the flourishing neighborhood they once lived in. In East Harlem, a neighborhood I first visited as a young man in the 1960s, I was surprised not by how little Italian flavor was left but that there was any left at all. The enclave in which Caponigro lived for his first two decades in this country and in which he still works had 80,000 Italians into the 1930s, extending from the famous—Fiorello H. La Guardia—to the infamous—mobster Frank Costello—but mostly embracing the carpenters, bakers, doctors, undertakers, housewives, and grandmothers who keep a culture vital. The neighborhood, which extends from Third Avenue to the East River between Ninety-sixth and 120th streets, shrunk dramatically after World War II, although an Italian village still thrived along the East River into the 1970s, surrounded on three sides by the neighborhood Puerto Ricans call El Barrio, their heartland.

  But largely as a result of New York City's accelerating ethnic mobility, Italian East Harlem is down to a relative handful of Italians, a sprinkling of Italian stores, and a Roman Catholic Church, Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Ask one of the worshipers, Gena Bolino, a woman who was born in the neighborhood, how many Italians are left, and she will respond with exasperated simplicity: “You can count them.”

  Now that all the Italians of means and vigor have left, Italian East Harlem is in its slowly decaying finale, a hospice phase where those who loved the neighborhood gather round and wait for it to breathe its last breath. Claudio's Barber Shop, in its tumbledown shack on 116th Street near First Avenue, is thus an artifact of a bygone civilization, its fusty customs and etiquette a Rosetta stone to a place that barely can be said to exist, with Caponigro the cicerone who can serve as a guide to this vanishing civilization.

  I was also taken with the crusty, charming, tenacious Caponigro because he exemplifies another theme of contemporary New York, what the journalist Pete Hamill observed in a recent book is the “New York version of nostalgia”: “an almost fatalistic acceptance of the permanent presence of loss.” In the rapid changes of the twenty-first century, Caponigro and veteran New Yorkers like him cling even more fiercely to simpler memories of the way we were, and that yields a set of bittersweet, paradoxical emotions.

  “You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now,” the novelist Colson Whitehead has famously written, and ethnic wistfulness makes up a large part of that longing. Caponigro has watched as Italian East Harlem has been replaced by a new Spanish Harlem, filled not just with longtime Puerto Rican residents, who settled mainly after World War II, but increasingly with Mexicans and Dominicans, and, as I discovered, a whole new breed of middle-class Puerto Ricans. Puerto Ricans have been here so long they have seen compatriots leave for greener pastures—in the suburbs; Orlando, Florida; and Puerto Rico itself—and feel their turf imperiled. During the 1990s, the number of Puerto Ricans i
n East Harlem dropped to 34,626 from 42,816. They are now only 31.6 percent of the neighborhood compared to 45.3 percent in 1960. Mexicans have climbed to 9.4 percent and increasingly own the bodegas and have replaced cuchifritos luncheonettes with taco stands.

  Yet the wonder of restless, protean New York is that, as many Puerto Ricans are leaving, others are returning. Puerto Ricans who grew up in the tenements and housing projects of El Barrio but moved away during the 1970s and 1980s, when crime, drugs, and housing abandonment were rampant, are moving back, now as professionals, artists, and intellectuals drawn by an authenticity they miss. They are moving in among the busboys and housekeepers and speak of down-at-the-heels East Harlem with the fervor of the early Zionists who dreamed of a Jewish restoration in Palestine. Their movement, the returnees say, is a philosophical crusade to keep Spanish Harlem Puerto Rican.

  “Puerto Ricans are coming back to the neighborhood,” said Dylcia Pagán, an esteemed Puerto Rican nationalist whom I met at a local artists' hangout. She grew up on 110th Street in the 1950s, and became such a champion of Puerto Rican independence that she was convicted in a bombing plot and spent nineteen years in federal prison. She was granted clemency by President Bill Clinton and now works in information technology in San Juan. When I met her, she was in the neighborhood to look at a brownstone she wanted to buy. “Many of us got our education, got better jobs, and now are saying we want to come back to our community,” she told me.

  YOU GO TO CLAUDIO CAPONIGRO, as Peter Guaragno, eighty-five years old, has once a week for half a century (as long as there are no horse races that day), because life goes on in his shop the way it always has, retaining its appeal to those who shrug off the siren songs of modernity. “He's the only one I trust,” says Guaragno.

  Caponigro is a tall, sturdily built silver-haired man who wears gold-rimmed bifocals for his nearsightedness. “I was born with a smile,” he told me. He is so devoted to those whose hair he cuts that he keeps two hundred mass cards for the funerals of dead customers he has attended. He charges his customers $8 a haircut even though one mile south, on the Upper East Side, prices of $30 are common. I took one of his $8 haircuts.

  “I believe that eight dollars for this neighborhood is plenty,” Caponigro said as he trimmed my hair. “A lot of people here are on SSI, government assistance. They poor people. How can I charge more? Those guys charge twenty or thirty dollars; today they're here, tomorrow they're out of business. Me, a reasonable price, I'm still here.”

  For the same survival reasons, he never discusses politics. “You want to stay in business all your life, one thing you cannot talk about is politics or religion, because before you know it you get into an argument,” he said. But he nevertheless told me stories about the politicians whose hair he cut, or didn't cut—Carmine DeSapio, the legendary Tammany Hall leader (“a great, great, great gentleman”), and Vito Marcantonio, the legendary left-wing congressman who represented Italian Harlem for seven terms between 1934 and 1950. Marcantonio used another barber, but Caponigro's ethics are such that he never held it against him.

  “He was my friend, but he was not my customer,” Caponigro said. “Because he never double-crossed his barber on Second Avenue. He was loyal to Mr. Louie Lambarelli. I was proud of him that he was loyal. Couple of people say he was this and that. He was a socialist. He was a communist. To me, he was a lovely man, especially for the poor people. He died broke. He was generous. He couldn't see people suffer.”

  Only once, he said, did he make an exception to his rule that customers wait their turn. Frank G. Rossetti, another Tammany Hall leader, was in Mount Sinai Medical Center and needed a shave and a haircut. Caponigro kept six customers waiting while he hurried to the hospital to tend to the old boss. As a result, Rossetti's son Frank S. Rossetti, now a State Supreme Court justice, has a special regard for the last barber of East 116th Street. “The son always have respect for me,” Caponigro said proudly.

  As East Harlem's Italians told me of the rueful ache they feel at seeing the sepia-tinted neighborhood of their childhood fade into oblivion, I recognized their emotions as familiar. I lived on the Grand Concourse a few blocks north of Yankee Stadium from the mid-1950s through the late 1960s, from the age of ten until I was twenty-one, and I saw the streets off that boulevard transformed seemingly overnight. During the years I grew up there, the Concourse neighborhood was a sharply defined swath of New York where the rituals of life seemed immutable. Jewish, Irish, and Italian children played punchball in the alleyways squeezed between the Art Deco and redbrick apartment houses. On Sunday mornings, families dispatched couriers to the neighborhood's bakeries to pick up rye breads and Danishes for breakfasts that assumed the sacredness of a Communion meal. On any sunny day, gray-haired and middle-aged idlers sat out on aluminum beach chairs sizing up the comings and goings of their buildings' residents with the understandable condescension of those newly arrived in the middle class toward those—the immigrants—who hadn't yet made it. On weekend mornings, fathers and mothers in their best off-the-rack suits and dresses wheeled baby carriages and dragged small children on the way to synagogue or church for some spiritual refreshment.

  There were colorful barbers in that neighborhood too who, like Claudio Caponigro, stayed long after their ethnic brethren had fled. In my gossamer memories, there were two refugees named Bernie and Boris, with Bernie the good-humored bear to Boris' more dour wraith. It was always a deep pleasure to go into their shop, the air sweet and sharp with the fragrance of hair tonics and aftershave, the sunlight fragmented by the talcum powder dust, the hubbub of kibitzing customers certifying that you had been admitted into a male sanctum sanctorum. Bernie and Boris would spend at least a quarter hour tending with efficiency but tenderness to the confidential needs of your scalp. High-spirited Bernie was something of a gallant and had a smiling, carefree, open-armed way of shrugging off the world's problems. Boris was quieter, more dyspeptic and turmoiled. His plump, peroxide-blond wife would sometimes come into the shop and sit on the plastic-backed chairs with the waiting kibitzers in what seemed to a young boy a violation of the shop's decorum. But whatever their foibles, both Bernie and Boris knew what synagogue and schools you went to and how well you were doing in school. They asked whether you were diligently studying for your bar mitzvah or had decided on a college—a question not many neighborhood tradesmen asked. Your father was their customer too, after all, and they knew all that he had gone through during the European war they shared.

  Many years later, I passed the shop; Bernie had died, but Boris was still there. He seemed to have gained a whole new spring of confidence in his step, was more talkative than I remembered. He was his own man now in his own shop. But I could see by the dingy, cracked walls that the shop was going to seed. Only a handful of his aging Jewish customers remained, and he was giving haircuts mostly to black and Puerto Rican men. Without Bernie and his old customers, Boris, it seemed, would not keep the shop open much longer. He showed me the heavy lock he now had to keep on his shop so local thieves wouldn't break in and a metal cylinder he slipped over his candy-striped barber's pole so malicious teenagers wouldn't crack its glass. What a contrast he was to the optimistic Caponigro.

  In Caponigro's shop, it was nice to be surrounded by such an Old World Italian paragon and his friends and their throwback mannerisms— the gesturing hand with the uplifted palm, the repeated allusions to loyalty, the unambiguous opinions, the undeniable warmth. But the longer I got to know his shop, the more apparent it became that most of Caponigro's respectfully silent customers, when they spoke, spoke Spanish. And that was as it should be. Puerto Ricans, seeking better futures than they could hope for in the chronically ailing economy of their hardscrabble island, began moving into East Harlem in significant numbers in the 1920s, when most of the neighborhood was Jewish and Italian; then in the late 1940s, another economic crisis on the island and the lure of postwar jobs here brought a major stream of migrants and Puerto Ricans.

  One reason was that the It
alians were forsaking the neighborhood's tenement and brownstone apartments. The Italians had started immigrating to the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, built the subways and skyscrapers, and moved to Harlem because it was a step up from the seedy congestion of the Lower East Side. But now they were departing East Harlem for sweeter prospects, ready to live on the leafier fringes of Brooklyn and Queens or in suburban homes with patches of grass, two-car garages, and driveways with basketball nets. And they could afford to do so now that they held jobs that required more brains than brawn. As a result, the neighborhood is down to a few Italian outposts. These include the 115-year-old Morrone Bakery, makers of a superbly crusty-on-the-outside and chewy-on-the-inside loaf of sesame-sprinkled bread; the hyperexclusive Rao's restaurant, which draws the limousines of the city's power brokers as long as they are steady friends of the owner; Patsy's pizza parlor, where lines of blue-collar aficionados wait to pick up its thin, spicy pizzas; three funeral homes; and Our Lady of Mount Carmel, where a few elderly neighborhood residents go to say their novenas.

  I asked Rosa Morrone, an Italian immigrant who is the wife of the owner of the eponymous bakery, what happened to the Italians, and she told me as she showed me her timeworn dough-mixing machine. “My kids married; they all live on Long Island, except one son who's not married, he lives with us,” she said. “They don't want to live on this street; they want to live on Long Island. I don't like Long Island. I like this place. I like to walk to all the stores. I don't drive. Where am I going to go?”

  BY THE 1950'S PUERTO RICANS began to put their stamp on the flavor and beat of the gritty neighborhood, with their bodegas and botanicas, sidewalk domino players and blaring salsa rhythms. The neighborhood became known more as Spanish Harlem, certified as that by the 1961 Ben E. King song, written by two Jewish guys, Jerry Leiber and Phil Spector, both enchanted and unsettled by the novel, slightly dangerous, no longer sedately European culture arriving at New York City's doorstep.