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

by Joseph Berger

  Much of that community is now Mexican and Dominican. Still, Puerto Ricans are coming back because they have tasted suburban life, found it a touch too bland, and sought to regain something remembered they could not let go of. Like many Puerto Rican strivers, David and Betty Cutié had forsaken the jostling streets of Spanish Harlem for the suburbs fifteen years ago, settling in a split-level ranch in Rockland County. But when their daughter, Nina, was grown and they were thinking about retirement, the Cutiés—David was a principal, Betty a guidance counselor—realized they missed the sounds and smells of the old neighborhood. Several years ago, they moved back, fixing up a brown-stone on East 118th Street and finding that the streets retained much of the coarse, festive mix they cherished: gaudy murals, coconut-ice vendors, hole-in-the-wall luncheonettes with Tito Puente rhythms, ragged tenements next to fussed-over gardens. The neighborhood was on an up-swing, with much less of the crime and drug dealing that had driven them out. But the upswing also meant that this quintessential Latino quarter was gradually losing the accent and influence that had defined it. Besides contributing the sheer enhancing presence of his family, David Cutié serves on Community Board 11, which plays an advisory role in city zoning, housing, and budgetary policies. “We felt the neighborhood needed us, that we had things we could contribute,” he told me.

  Puerto Rican exiles are pumping new life into the neighborhood, sprucing up once-decaying buildings and enlivening the area's cultural life with art galleries and theater troupes. The city and the city's big landlords, however political or mercenary their motives, are pitching in. Starting in the mid-1980s, the city sponsored the construction or rehabilitation of at least 10,000 homes, and town houses and apartment buildings are blossoming where there were empty lots, often right next door to the mammoth housing projects built for the neighborhood's poor. As a result of these relatively upscale returning Puerto Ricans, the median income for Hispanics in the neighborhood grew by almost 18 percent during the 1990s to $18,313.

  Many of those who return are coming back as a result of calculated efforts by individuals and organizations that are trying to sustain a cultural Puerto Rican core in East Harlem. One such organization is the Taller Boricua Gallery, which collects and exhibits contemporary Puerto Rican art but also helps artists buy neighborhood properties. The neighborhood, according to Fernando Salicrup, the gallery's director, now counts more than 1,000 artists and theater people, including many with international reputations, among them José Morales, Diógenes Ballester, and Antonio Martorell (whose works have been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial and who lives at 106th Street and Lexington Avenue). Together, these homecomers have introduced an upscale Puerto Rican spice that belies stereotypes of superintendents and doormen. On Thursday nights, the Taller Boricua Gallery holds Julia's Jam—a chance for Puerto Rican poets and short-story writers, for musicians who play the folk music of bombas and plenas, to strut their stuff.

  One of the resident writers is Nicholasa Mohr, who capered on the streets of East Harlem of the 1940s. “No matter where you lived, even if people lived in Brooklyn or the Bronx, they always came here,” she said. “They came to La Marqueta [the legendary market under the Metro-North tracks that at its peak was home to 200 vendors selling avocados, yucca, plantains, and folk remedies but has shrunken to a handful of merchants], or they would come to see relatives, or go to church at St. Cecilia's. This was the capital, the heart of the Puerto Rican community.”

  In 2001, Mohr, by then a successful writer of novels for adults and teenagers about life as a Nuyorican—a New York–reared son or daughter of Puerto Rican parents—decided to return to her childhood streets. She bought a duplex condo in a converted school on East 108th Street. It is a breathtaking two-level loft furnished in elegant bohemian, with tastefully spaced shelves of books and an eclectic collection of eye-catching paintings. But the chance to live in the handsome apartment is not entirely what drew her back to El Barrio. The rough-edged streets had more to do with her decision. “It's very pleasant being in a Latino community,” she said. “There's a warmth I'd forgotten about. There's a warmth about being greeted in the morning and hearing both English and Spanish being spoken.”

  Another charter member of the art community, Mario César Romero, a freelance curator who never quite left the neighborhood, tried to give me a sense of why these streets are so revered by walking me around the blocks off 106th Street. On our tour, he took pride in what he called the carnival street scene—the colorful semi-illegal community gardens, the Mexican flower sellers, and the flamboyant murals that in some places strike a visitor as folk art but in other places seem more like malicious graffiti. Salsa, he reminded me, was born in El Barrio. Don Pedro Albizu Campos, the thwarted Simón Bolívar of Puerto Rican independence, came to El Barrio when he was released from jail. He called the neighborhood the “symbol of the Puerto Rican diaspora.”

  Romero is a gregarious man, and his wit barely conceals the anger born of seeing people who came here brimming with hope only to find themselves diminished. “When Puerto Ricans come here they bring all of their politeness and humility,” he said. “We call it ‘always bent.’ They come to New York and get their asses kicked one at a time. Our people have changed and become more aggressive because it's the only way to exist.”

  The returning Puerto Ricans are actually the vanguard of a wider gentrification that is changing the face of East Harlem just as it has changed Harlem to the west and Fort Greene, Bushwick, and East New York in Brooklyn. Whites and Asians too, mostly singles, are crossing the once Berlin Wall–like demarcation of East Ninety-sixth Street and taking up apartments next to housing projects and bodegas, drawn by cheaper housing prices. Tall apartment buildings are replacing tenements and rubble-strewn lots above Ninety-sixth Street. Voguish restaurants and cafés have popped up on ramshackle blocks, including La Fonda Boricua, Dinerbar, and, briefly but significantly, SpaHa (a SoHo-like coinage for Spanish Harlem). This once-bedraggled neighborhood now has a Blockbuster and a Duane Reade pharmacy. Two-bedroom apartments that might have been had in the mid-1990s for $600 a month were going for triple and quadruple that amount a decade later. Brownstones that in the 1960s could be purchased for $10,000 were going for $500,000. Brokers underplay the Spanish Harlem name and casually speak of the neighborhood as the Upper Upper East Side or Upper Yorkville. And the truth is, as a result of the influx of Puerto Rican professionals and young whites and Asians, the neighborhood's median household income climbed almost 10 percent during the 1990s, and will probably rise even more sharply in this new century.

  Among the white pioneers I met were the tenants in Esther Sirol's two renovated rooming houses on 101st Street. Sirol bought the buildings in 1995 when they were filled with welfare families and has spent hundreds of thousands restoring the buildings' original early-twentieth-century touches. She has installed antiques throughout, as well as a whirlpool and sauna. Her buildings have the feel of country inns. Among her sixteen tenants, she boasts doctors from Mount Sinai Medical Center, directly on the other side of the Metro-North tracks, professors at nearby Columbia University, a vice president at Morgan Stanley, and some lawyers. One tenant I met was Julie Feuerstein, the daughter of Lutheran missionaries from the Midwest. Another was Muriel Sainato, a twenty-six-year-old actress from Florida whose two children are being taken care of by her former mother-in-law. “I was afraid you couldn't walk down the road without someone shouting a vulgarity, but it's been fine,” Sainato told me.

  Not for everybody, however, because pioneering requires the grit to wait out the rough early years. Ian Bell, a twentysomething publicist, moved with his friend Jackie Fritz, a twenty-two-year-old choreographer from St. Louis, from a cramped one-bedroom in Chelsea into a two-bedroom loft on East 108th Street for which they paid $2,000 a month. But the apartment is in the middle of East Harlem, directly across the street from a low-income housing project. They thought they could conquer their fears about safety by taking taxis at night. “We figured that the amo
unt of money we spent on taxis would equal our rent in Chelsea,” he said. But when I ran into them one year later they told me it was hard to find fresh fruits and vegetables, hard to see a movie, hard to get friends to visit them, and a longer commute. They've had an unpleasant encounter—some young men said to them, “Look at you silly white people.” When we last spoke, they were moving out.

  Aurora Flores, a journalist, counts herself as one of the pioneers in the Puerto Rican homecoming movement, having moved fifteen years ago from the Upper West Side to an apartment on 107th Street off Fifth Avenue when fellow Puerto Ricans—those who had been the first in their families to go to college and get decent jobs—were leaving. “They acquired a middle-class status for themselves and the first thing they did was move out of El Barrio,” she said. While she grew up on the Lower East Side, she had always been enchanted by Spanish Harlem as a young girl when her mother did her shopping there. By the time she was in high school, she was drawing up posters and writing screeds for the Young Lords, the sometimes feared Puerto Rican street gang that turned into a revolutionary cadre until it fizzled out in the 1970s under police attack and its own infighting. As a single mother, she now runs a public relations business that centers on Spanish Harlem and promotes Latin concerts, including the weekly Julia's Jam.

  She explained her decision to move in by a desire to firm up her son's ethnic pride, telling about an incident that happened when her son, Abran, was a student at highly selective Hunter College Elementary School on the Upper East Side. Classmates had been urging him to quit speaking Spanish because, in Flores' account, that was the language of the “people who clean their houses.” She decided she would “not let my son get whitewashed when he has these deep roots,” and she transplanted herself to Spanish Harlem.

  In 1996, Tanya Torres, who was born in Puerto Rico and lived as a teenager in Queens, decided with her teacher husband, Carlos, to buy a four-story row house on Lexington Avenue for $118,000. The building had recently housed a brothel. “We used to receive customers for a year afterward,” Torres told me. “People had keys to the front door. Finally we changed the locks.” On the ground floor she and her husband set up the Mixta Gallery, whose paintings and sculptures have drawn mainstream reviewers. During our talk, she told me of drug addicts in a tenantless building nearby, the taint of sidewalk garbage, and the cluster of drunks hanging out to loud music across the street.

  “It's dirty, and it's not the most beautiful place in the world,” she said. “Yet, there's a real sense of community. People know what's going on in your life, and you kind of know what's going on in their lives. We get so involved in everything here we forget there's a world outside there. Sometimes we used to go out and say, ‘We can breathe again!’ because we had not been outside of the Barrio for a month.”

  The epicenter of the Puerto Rican resurgence is 106th Street, a corridor that roughly connects several pivotal institutions, including the nationally known El Museo del Barrio on Fifth Avenue and the Julia de Burgos Cultural Center on Lexington Avenue, a former school building named after the Puerto Rican poetess and nationalist who died on the streets of East Harlem. The center now houses the Taller Boricua Gallery as well as theater and dance organizations. On that block too is the movement's Rick's Café, La Fonda Boricua, a restaurant started by a City University–trained psychologist, Jorge Ayala, and his brother Roberto. It is known both for authentic home-cooked chicken and goat curry, each served with rice and beans and fried sweet bananas, as well as for its walls displaying works by the neighborhood's artists. One night a week, the owner jams on a small stage with jazz musicians. La Fonda is where the Latino professionals meet to make deals and connections— people such as Pagán, the Puerto Rican nationalist, and Romero, who grew up in East Harlem and has become something of its informal promoter. “There is an intelligentsia, a bohemia that has moved in,” Romero told me.

  But he also voiced a theme that is trembling just under the surface of the hopeful changes—that the skyrocketing rents will drive out the low-wage earners: cooks, busboys, and housekeepers, many of them Puerto Rican but also Mexicans and Ecuadorians. “There is an incredible renaissance here,” Romero said. “On the one hand it's a blessing, but on the other hand a lot of Puerto Ricans are forced to move. Sometimes the political leaders don't fight hard enough for the poor. I don't object to charging more rent, but not at the expense of people who have historically lived in the community.”

  Some returnees worry that the neighborhood will get so prettified that the very flavors that drew them back will fade. Salicrup, the gallery director, is not one of the worried ones. “What protects this area are the housing projects,” he said. “If you're thinking of moving to El Barrio, you might end up with a project next to you. The poor are always going to be there.”

  ONE CAN ARGUE that a saving remnant of Italians will also always be there. Beyond Caponigro, a few lingering Italians have learned to accommodate to the neighborhood's shifting ethnicity. They illuminate another everlasting theme about New York, one that is the flip side of its mutability—its adaptability. In a stately former bank building not too many doors down 116th Street from Claudio's Barber Shop is Farenga Brothers funeral home. It dates back to the turn of the century and at its peak performed 200 Italian funerals a year. It might be wistful to think that Salvatore Farenga is keeping the business founded by his great-grandfather going until the last of his compatriots die, but he cannot afford to be that sentimental. He has been able to stay in business by learning how to accommodate Puerto Ricans and other Latinos. Farenga, a decorous, silver-haired man in his mid-fifties, tried to explain to me how different the business was when he was a youngster. “In those days, it was an ethnic business,” he said. “The Irish went to the Irish funeral home, the blacks to the blacks, the Sicilians went to the Sicilians, and the Calabrese went to the Calabrese. There was loyalty to your fellow townsmen. You wanted them to do well.”

  But with New York's increasingly shifting ethnic boundaries, he predicted that the funeral industry would shift “from ethnicity to service and location, and I was right.” Yes, he does get the odd Italian suburbanites who when death strikes like to return to the old neighborhood, to the streets where their kin played stickball, worshiped, fell in love, brought up children, and made the old friends who now will mourn them. But 90 percent of Farenga's funerals are for Puerto Ricans and other Spanish speakers. Farenga Brothers has had to learn that the floral arrangements at Latino funerals need ribbons adorned with the names of the givers, and that a grieving family likes the funeral home to collect the ribbons so it can express its thanks. And while many Italian families put family photographs inside the coffin, Latinos consider doing so akin to a curse. Italians like to see the coffin aboveground when they leave the cemetery; Latino families like to have the coffin lowered while everybody is still at the graveside.

  Caponigro, the barber, never saw a need to adapt, even though his customers are increasingly Spanish speaking. I got a glimpse into why when he told me his life story—one that took so many bounces when he was younger that keeping his life as steady as possible became essential. He was born in 1931 into a family of barbers in the town of Campania in the province of Salerno. His father and his brother Emilio were barbers. He was in the Salerno area when the Nazis seized power from Mussolini's Fascists. He saw Jews being rounded up for deportation and later saw American bombs falling on his town. “I saw the whole battle, saw people die in front of me with the bombing,” he said. “What I saw in that war, forget about it.” At war's end, at just fourteen, he started his own barbershop, but by twenty he was so wearied by the oppressive poverty around him that he took an opportunity to travel to New York. (Three of his sisters still live in Italy and so did his mother until she died a few years ago.) “I find a lot of pleasure, a lot of beautiful people in this neighborhood,” he told me. “I find a second Salerno here.”

  In his early days, he remembers, perhaps through the distorting lens of nostalgia, doctors
, lawyers, and politicians occupied the handsome brownstones, with small green awnings over each window along 116th Street, and there were two or three barbers on every commercial block. The gravel-voiced comedian Jimmy Durante, a compadre from Salerno, used to drop in at his shop. “It was a pleasure just when he opened his mouth,” Caponigro remembered. He used to say to me, ‘Hey, Claudio.’” Frank Rossetti, the future judge, and Guy J. Velella, the future state senator, played ball on the block.

  When the Italian population began declining as the younger generation sought homes in the suburbs, and crime and drugs lapped at the streets, Caponigro stayed put. He even shunned extra security contraptions. “Everybody's got a rolling gate,” he said. “I don't need a rolling gate. I don't have no enemies. Everybody's got respect.”

  Instead, he let his shop accumulate an attic's load of tchotchkes—a bullhorn, a bicycle with one large wheel and one small wheel, pictures of John Wayne and Durante, a 110-year-old shoeshine box. So charmingly quaint was his ramshackle shop that Jennifer Lopez made a music video there. With shifting cultures, he grew into something of an Italian chauvinist. A sign in his store says the following:

  MICHELANGELO, DANTE, VIRGIL, DAVINCI, GALILEO, RAPHAEL, VERDI, FERMI, BOTTICELLI, TOSCANINI, CELLINI, BOCCACCIO, CICERO, CARUSO, MARCONI, VESPUCCI, BERNINI, MARCO POLO, TITIAN, THOMAS AQUINAS, VIVALDI, PETRARCH, AND COLUMBUS. NO OTHER PEOPLE CAN MAKE THAT STATEMENT.

  He lived for many years right across the street; then, when the neighborhood got rougher around 1969, he moved his wife and three daughters to the Bronx. But he saw no need to move his shop. Puerto Rican and Mexican men do not need their hair trimmed all that differently from Italians, so he continued to make a living. And over the years, he has learned enough Spanish to converse with gusto. “You pick up a little today, a little tomorrow, soon you speaking the language,” he said.