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

by Joseph Berger

  He caters to many Puerto Rican families whose hair he has cut for three generations. Fifty-eight-year-old Frank Estrada was waiting patiently one day for his turn under the scissors, and recalled his years as Caponigro's customer. “I brought my son when he was small,” Estrada said. “Now he brings his children here.” Caponigro takes pride in such pedigree. “Three generations, they sit on that chair,” he told me, pointing to one of the peppermint green chairs. “The grandfather, the father, the baby.”

  Now that there are glimmers of new affluence, Caponigro, who might have once worried about losing his shop to the waves of surrounding poverty, should probably be worried about losing his shop to developers. The last time I looked, land had been cleared a block or two to the east along the East River for a Home Depot and a Costco. But Caponigro seems to have shrugged off both the forces of decline and those of resurgence.

  “If I got to go away from here, I retire,” Caponigro told me. “I don't be a barber no more. The Spanish people, they say, ‘Claudio, you got to stay forever.’ There was a lovely, beautiful girl with three kids. I told her she have to wait, but she said, ‘I don't go to another barber. There's only one Claudio.’ She makes me proud when she said there's only one Claudio. Those words I never forget.”

  EAST HARLEM

  WHERE TO GO

  Claudio's Barber Shop (NO TELEPHONE, NO RESERVATIONS) 360 EAST 116TH STREET

  Farenga Brothers Funeral Home (MULTICULTURAL FAREWELLS) 204 EAST 116TH STREET; (212) 5 34-3700

  El Museo del Barrio (THE MET OF PUERTO RICAN ART AND CULTURE) 1230 FIFTH AVENUE; (212) 831-7272; www.elmuseo.org

  La Marqueta (A FORLORN ETHNIC MARKET UNDER THE COMMUTER TRACKS) 116TH STREET AND PARK AVENUE

  National Museum of Catholic Art and History (ECLECTIC EXHIBITS ON CATHOLIC HISTORY AND CULTURE) 443 EAST 115TH STREET; (212) 828-5209; www.nmcah.org

  Our Lady of Mount Carmel (120-YEAR-OLD CENTER OF ITALIAN COMMUNITY, WITH A SHRINE TO THE VIRGIN THAT HAS BEEN BLESSED BY PAPAL AUTHORITY AND A FEAST ON JULY 16) 448 EAST 166TH STREET; (212) 534-0681

  Taller Boricua at the Julia De Burgos Latino Cultural Center (CONTEMPORARY PUERTO RICAN ART, MUSIC, AND POETRY) 1680 LEXINGTON AVENUE; (212) 831-4333

  WHERE TO EAT

  Dinerbar (AMERICAN RESTAURANT) 1569 LEXINGTON AVENUE; (212) 348-0200

  La Fonda Boricua (PUERTO RICAN RESTAURANT) 169 east 106TH STREET; (212) 410-7292

  Morrone Bakery (ITALIAN) 324 EAST 116TH STREET; (212) 722-2972

  Patsy ‘s (THE ORIGINAL, WITH THIN, COAL-FIRED PIZZA) 2287-91 FIRST AVENUE; (212) 5 34-9783

  Rao's (SOUTHERN ITALIAN RESTAURANT, BUT RESERVATIONS ONLY FOR THE WELL CONNECTED) 455 EAST 114TH STREET; (212) 722-6709

  Chapter 4

  The Cobbler of Chinatown

  AMONG THE CHURNING SIDEWALKS OF CHINATOWN, ZHONG WEN Jiang has found his niche. From morning until sundown, he squats on a makeshift stool planted on a sliver of pavement alongside the steps of an old school building, and i n that nook he mends worn shoes. Crowds of people surge by on narrow Bayard Street, but with his sturdy back against the stoop of the building and his bony legs straddling a homemade cobbler's last, he slices off a piece of rubber or leather, swabs on a yellowish glue, pounds in a few nails, and files the rough edges off a fresh heel or sole until it is ready for walking.

  Sometimes he takes a break for a filtered Chinese cigarette or for a rice gruel carried from the home in Brooklyn he shares with his wife. But otherwise, he fixes shoes seven days a week, in the swampy days of summer or the frigid bite of winter, deterred only by a blizzard or a downpour. Why does he work so diligently at what is plainly an illegal job? I asked him. “If I don't come here, what's going to happen to all the people who need their shoes fixed?” he replied.

  Zhong would be a charming curiosity, an intriguing twist on the immigrant peddlers who have long been a fixture of the city's commercial hubs, except that he is not alone. Just around the corner on Mulberry Street are two other shopless cobblers, one with a Honda generator that runs the grinder he uses to file off leather edges. And nearby are two watch repairmen who fix delicate mechanisms while standing at umbrella-shaded booths out on the sidewalk. Not too far away is a fortune-teller, Madame Gong, whose customers sit on small plastic umbrella-shaded stools on the sidewalk as she reads their palms and faces, communicates with their ancestors, or advises them on what day of the week it would be most propitious to marry or start a business.

  And these shopless craftsmen and servicepeople are not confined to Chinatown. Along Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, Carlos Roldan, a forty-seven-year-old immigrant from Colombia who sports a Hawaiian shirt and Groucho Marx eyebrows, washes shopkeepers' windows out of a shopping cart that holds his squeegees, rags, and cleaning agents. Customers can reach him only by beeper because he not only does not have a shop but also does not have a home, spending nights sleeping on the floor of a taco stand on the avenue. On Third Avenue in the East Bronx, men with nicknames like Country and Mouse repair alternators or do lube jobs and tune-ups right on the street, jacking cars up as traffic whizzes by while keeping an eye on the passing police cars that could give them tickets for working illegally. They get their parts from avenue auto-parts shops, which have bought into this symbiotic relationship, however illicit, because it assures them a steady stream of customers.

  Across the city, migrants from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, accustomed to such street workshops in their homelands, have set them up on New York's sidewalks as well, and changed the commerce and look of whole neighborhoods, among them Chinatown and Jackson Heights. Scholars told me the phenomenon reflects not just the variety of the immigrant influx but also the city's rising costs of doing business. “If you can have a store without paying the rent, you do it,” said Dr. William B. Helmreich, an urban ethnographer at the City University of New York.

  Since this has always been a city with a soft spot for an ingenious or enterprising way of scratching out a living at a cut-rate price, these rogue businessmen more than survive. Cynthia Lee, a curator at the Museum of Chinese in the Americas, housed in the onetime school that is the backdrop for Zhong's business, explained to me why these workmen are so embraced, even if they pose competition to some struggling shopkeepers. “It's the spirit of entrepreneurship in the Chinese American community,” she told me. “If you can find a way to make a living, you do it.”

  There is often a line of people waiting to hand their shoes to the cobbler of Bayard Street, largely because his prices—$15 for a leather sole and heel—are about half those of the rent-paying, shop-owning shoemaker a few blocks away. And the authorities seem to leave him alone even though he is in a spot flooded with all manner of authorities. The jail cells of the Manhattan House of Detention, the notorious Tombs, and the offices of the district attorney of Manhattan are across a small park from his stand, and the Fifth Precinct of the police department is a few blocks away on Elizabeth Street.

  “What about the police; don't they hassle you?” I asked him as we spoke through an interpreter provided by the museum.

  “The police officers are my customers,” he replied.

  Zhong enchanted me not just because he was a novel variety of peddler but very specifically because he fixed shoes. My father did too, for many years. Indeed, without his talent for shoemaking I might not be writing this book in the United States or anywhere at all. Like Zhong, my father was raised as a farm boy, in his case in the Galicia region in what was then southeastern Poland. He was not yet twenty years old when the Nazis attacked on September 1, 1939, but he avoided the horrors of the occupation because of a fortuitous accident of geography. His village was in a Ukrainian-speaking part of Poland that was absorbed into the Soviet Union as part of Stalin's infamous nonaggression pact with Hitler. My father was drafted into the Soviet army and after a year or so in the cavalry he was dispatched to the Ural Mountains, where he was assigned to a military factory that manufactured soldiers' boots. That work sustained not just him through
the war but also my mother, an undernourished and despondent refugee with whom he fell in love. Indeed, my father had become what was regarded among the bedraggled refugees, with the barest tongue in cheek, as a wealthy man. He was illicitly making extra pairs of boots for the officers, boots they especially needed for the Russian winter, and they expressed their gratitude by slipping him cans of pork and beans or bottles of vodka that he traded for food. My mother was so grateful for his affection and, in no small part, the food he provided that she married him in December 1943.

  He continued fashioning shoes until the war ended and for a year afterward, until he and my mother and their infant—me—made our way to Poland, where they learned with finality that his parents and six sisters and her parents and six of her brothers and sisters had been slaughtered. Like other refugees, they settled in the displaced persons camps in occupied Germany and waited for visas to the United States. In March 1950 they brought his last and other cobbler tools with them to New York and stored them under the bathtub in our first apartment on Manhattan's West Side.

  My younger brother and I would sometimes slide the tools out and, after shaking off the balls of dust, examine them as if they were sacramental objects: the last, which looked like a bony leg with an upside-down foot at one end, the blade sheathed in black leather, which served as its only handle, his thick, coarse file, a pair of cast-iron pliers, which I knew by its Yiddish name, a tsvang. We were beguiled by these artifacts from the grimy world of working stiffs and the cunning arts my father had acquired and that we too might absorb when we grew up.

  Every once in a while, my father actually fixed a shoe. He would slip the shoe over the sculpted foot and clamp the last firmly between his knees. I would see him take a swatch of leather and shave it with his calloused but deft fingers until it matched the worn sole. The work was so frustratingly precise that he kept his pink tongue gripped between his teeth to control his tension. He would brush glue on the new sole from a metal jar whose sweet bovine smell was intoxicating. Then he slipped some brads between his lips—I marveled how he never swallowed them—and pounded them in one at a time along the rim of the sole to fasten it to the shoe's upper half. This work was the best proof of my father's competence, and in a world where an immigrant like him had few other ways to assert his significance, it was inexpressively important to me. My mother had her own way of showing her competence and earning a livelihood. She was masterful with a sewing machine. Hunched over our old black Singer with its gold lettering, she would hem our pants, make her own dresses, and for most of my years growing up take seasonal jobs trimming the edges of straw hats. You didn't need English for such jobs and could support yourself at least until you put your children through school and they could accomplish the dreams you never could.

  Now a man from a remote Chinese village was surviving in the same wily ways, doing what he deemed necessary to scratch out his living, just like my parents, just like the Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants of a century ago. Many of the city's Chinese, who with a population of 261,551 constitute the second largest of the city's immigrant groups (after Dominicans), can be found in the illegal sweatshops among the 600 Chinese-owned garment factories in Chinatown, the Garment District, or Sunset Park, Brooklyn. They are the busboys and dishwashers at the 1,400 Chinese restaurants in New York City. And they constitute a large share of the new breed of unlicensed food peddlers, who prepare foods at home and sell them on the street right out of shopping bags and homemade carts that don't come under the scrutiny of the health department inspectors. Such ways of earning a living may explain why the per capita income for Chinese Americans is a woeful $16,700, much lower than the $22,402 for the city as a whole, according to a 2004 study by the Asian American Federation of New York. Despite the Chinese reputation as a “model minority” and the achievements of such Chinese as Dr. David Ho, the AIDS pioneer, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and designer Vera Wang, most Chinese come here with limited schooling, with one-third of adults having no more than a ninth-grade education.

  Chinatown, where Zhong works, is still the great thumping heart of the city's Chinese community. The maze of narrow tenement-lined streets is filled with more than 200 restaurants, teahouses, and dim-sum shops; Buddhist pagodas and pagoda-roofed banks and telephone booths; gift shops displaying silk kimonos, fans, lanterns, porcelain, and other novelties; apothecaries with arcane herbs and roots; newsstands selling four daily and a dozen weekly newspapers for readers whose sympathies are either with mainland China, or Taiwan, or Hong Kong; food stores with roasted ducks strung up as if they had been hung for capital crimes, bins of exotic mollusks (one store had twenty-one varieties of fresh shrimp when I last visited) and tanks of live fish, esoteric dried mushrooms, fresh litchi nuts on the stem, and all sorts of oddball green vegetables.

  Although there are furtive changes—yuppies are moving in to some of those tenements and paying high rents—Chinatown is still the mecca where Chinese from the five boroughs and the region come on days off, usually Sundays or Mondays, to refill on Chinese provisions, tend to business and immigration matters, and check in with their mutual aid societies (feng or fong) or their clan associations, both of which provide medical care, burials, and legal assistance.

  It is fitting perhaps that Zhong, though married, is a solitary male worker. Chinatown was a bachelor society until the Second World War because the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, repealed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, prevented most workers from having their wives and families join them. Chinese roots in New York, by some accounts, go back to the 1850s, when a merchant named Ah Kam opened a tobacco shop on Park Row and a grocery on Pell and took an apartment on Mott Street. The Wo Kee store opened in 1872 at 34 Mott Street, followed by fish markets and vegetable stands. Mott Street gradually became the spine of a Chinese shopping area. (“And tell me what street / Compares with Mott Street / In July,” Rodgers and Hart wrote in “Manhattan” in 1925.) Chinese immigrant men working in hand laundries or rolling cigars could go to Mott Street to stock up on food and clothing and often find a home-cooked meal. When the Chinese, most of them Cantonese, realized that Americans were intrigued by homespun dishes such as chop suey (“bits and pieces”), they consciously sought out a tourist trade, and thus was born the lively Chinatown of the guidebooks.

  To get in touch with Chinatown's past, I visited the Museum of Chinese in the Americas just above Zhong's workshop. Among the intimate detritus, much of it salvaged from dumpsters, are pressing irons used by the ubiquitous launderers, a crimson silk robe used by Chinese opera troupes, a photograph of a Chinese baseball team, a newspaper's tray of Chinese characters in lead type, a lion's-head mask used in a Chinese New Year celebration, a picture of Miss Chinatown 1971, and some artifacts that recall a Chinatown that until the 1930s was pocked with gambling, sex, and opium dens and was the battleground of Mafia-like bloody turf wars fought by rival tongs. Eventually, the Chinese branched out, and the museum displays the remnants of a cramped Chinese laundry in the Bronx of the 1950s, complete with shirts wrapped in brown paper, those familiar pink, green, and yellow numbered tickets, and a touching photograph of the family who lived behind the store. There is a poignant letter written by a wife in Hong Kong to her husband stranded in Chinatown, feelingly telling him, “With all these years in the foreign land, you are just work for others, slaved yourself for the sake of others.”

  Until 1965, Chinatown occupied only a seven-block-long quarter along streets like Pell, Mott, Doyer, and Bayard and had a population of 20,000. But the 1965 immigration law changed all that. With immigrants streaming in from once barely represented provinces such as Fujian, Chinatown quickly gobbled up Little Italy, large swaths of the Lower East Side, and the blocks north of City Hall, becoming the largest center of Chinese population in the Western Hemisphere. But Chinatown faced new problems too. A young New York Times reporter, Yilu Zhao, wrote movingly in an article in 2002 about how newcomers from Fujian are bewildered by a world set up for Cantonese and Mandarin speakers. (F
ujianese is as different from those languages as Yiddish is from German.) She told of how Renhui Tian, a Fujianese immigrant, wept in 2001 at Kennedy International Airport as he greeted two of his sons for the first time since they were infants. Xiaoxian and Xiaoqin, then five and seven, were born in Chinatown. But as infants Tian had sent them back to their home province in southeastern China to be raised by their grandparents so he and his wife could work longer hours to pay back the smugglers who charged them $40,000 for getting into the country. The Tian boys came into the city's schools already lagging academically because their doting grandparents hadn't bothered to teach them how to count or read letters.

  However central Chinatown is, Chinese have also for three decades now been leaving its bleak tenements for new frontiers outside Manhattan including Flushing, Elmhurst, Sunset Park, and Bensonhurst. There the solid brick row houses and attached homes are proof of their clambering up the social ladder just as they were for the Italians, Irish, and Jews of a half century ago. Indeed, by the 1980s only 30 percent of the city's Chinese lived in Chinatown. The Chinese usually follow the D, F, J, and Q subway lines so they can get back to Chinatown easily. Zhong, for example, no longer lives in the railroad apartments of Chinatown; he takes the J train to his two-bedroom flat in Brooklyn, for which he pays a rent of $1,000 a month. Poignantly, he said he did not know the name of his neighborhood but got off at a stop he recognized by its first two letters, Cr, which means it is probably Crescent Street in Cypress Hills along the Queens border with Brooklyn.