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

by Joseph Berger

  I discovered the Ghanaians and their odd fixation in the most pleasing way possible, serendipitously, by driving along the Concourse and noticing African shops sprinkled among the more Latino-flavored stores. One of these bore the sign “Ghana Homes Inc.” I stopped in to inquire what this business was all about and discovered I had stumbled across an enchanting folkway. Amoafo and a partner, Kwasi Kissi, started this business in 1999; it helps Ghanaian immigrants buy houses in Ghana. A three-bedroom cement house there can be bought for as little as $30,000, so $6,000 in savings may be all it takes to put a deposit down for a piece of the planet in a lush and stable land.

  Amoafo and Kissi are catering to peculiarities of West African tribal tradition. Ghanaians, as well as Nigerians and Ivorians, come from lands where ties to clan and family are primal and primary. For every Ghanaian, the extended family—parents, siblings, uncles, cousins, aunts, and grandparents—grounds one in the universe. In times of difficulty, the entire family pitches in to share the burden of repair, and at times of joy, the entire family shares the elation. Sons and daughters typically live with their parents until they have started their own families, and when they do, they choose to live with or next to their parents. Still, it is the building of a house that marks an individual's “cultural coming of age,” Chudi Uwazurike, a senior fellow at the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean, told me.

  Ghanaians started leaving Ghana in the 1970s when a succession of military governments sent the economy into a tailspin. Those who came here were often professionals, bureaucrats, and merchants. Many were well educated, since Ghana, the first African colony to gain independence from Britain, made schooling the focus of early development. The new immigrants sent money back to Ghana and persuaded relatives to join them here, swelling the migration. Now those who have settled into their lives here can finally concentrate on saving up for that house—in Ghana.

  Frank Samad came here twenty-five years ago after finishing high school in Ghana and started work as a security guard. He dropped his Ghanaian given name and chose Frank because there were two Franks who worked at his firm and he saw that it was a name people rarely mis-pronounced. He found better jobs, eventually managing a supermarket. After ten years, he opened Kantamanto African Market on Tremont Avenue just west of the Concourse. Kantamanto, which means “one who honors his word,” stocks smoked mudfish, ground yams, pumpkin-seeds, the tuberous root known as cassava, and smoked grasscutter—a very large rodent related to the guinea pig that runs wild in the bush and comes right after chicken and fish as a Ghanaian's preferred source of protein. It also carries kente cloth, African magazines, and phone cards that make possible a six-minute call to Ghana for $10. In New York he has always lived with his wife and three children in a rental apartment, but in 1993 he and his brother—a contractor—began building a four-bedroom house. It was located in a suburb of Accra, Ghana's capital of 2 million people. Now he stays there on his yearly visits home.

  “When you look at it, it doesn't make sense,” he admitted as we spoke in the rear of his store. “I'm not living there, and with the money I put in there, if I used it here I could have tripled the size of my store. But when I go to Ghana I have a place to live. I wouldn't like to bother my relatives or live in a hotel. That would be a letdown. After all those years here, I would go back to Ghana and it would be like being homeless. So with that kind of pride, anybody who makes a little money will buy a house in Ghana.”

  In a broader sense, the story of the Ghanaian houses illustrates once more the big difference between the immigrants of today and those of the past. Today's immigrants keep one foot in the Old Country largely because they can do so easily with jets (flights back home to Ghana can be had for $700) and cheap phone cards. “Always in the back of their minds is the idea of returning one day,” Amoafo said of Ghanaians. But it is largely a pipe dream. “I can tell you that ninety percent will never go back. But it defines their thinking.”

  The fact that Ghana Homes can exist as a profitable business testifies to the remarkable growth of the city's Ghanaian population, particularly in the census tracts along the Concourse, as the pioneers send word home that life here is good. Ghana, a country the size of Oregon with 20 million people, has an economy that can't keep up with the growth of its population. The 2000 U.S. Census revealed that the number of immigrants born in Ghana tripled in a decade, to 14,915, of whom 9,275 live in the Bronx. If children born here were included, the ranks of Ghanaians would expand by several thousand.

  Ghanaians bring with them a courtly culture that is at odds with the rough-hewn Bronx stereotype. Ghanaians encourage a smile for strangers, patience in daily dealings, and respect for elders and for women. A visitor to a Ghanaian home will be given a seat and water to drink before he is asked the purpose of his visit. Ghanaians appreciate a well-crafted phrase that deftly captures some wisdom about living. Ghanaians also tend to socialize within their own tribes, and there are dozens, including Ashanti, Ewe, Ga, Akwamu, and Akuapim, each with its own dialect. Akuapim, Amoafo told me, speak a very dignified dialect, while the Ashantis' conversation is more robust and forceful. Ghanaians of all tribes come together under the banner of the National Council of Ghanaian Associations, which sponsors an annual picnic in a state park, at which Ghanaian politics is dissected and thousands of dollars are raised for Ghanaian hospitals.

  Ghanaian life here is felt daily by New Yorkers in the cabs they drive and in nursing homes, where many Ghanaians take care of the frail elderly. (A tall, engaging, and graceful Ghanaian mother of five—her name was actually Grace—took care of my father at the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Riverdale before he died in 2003.) Since many Ghanaians arrive here with advanced degrees, Ghanaians are sprinkled throughout the top ranks of the city's banks, hospitals, and colleges. Kofi Annan, the seventh secretary-general of the United Nations, is a Ghanaian, the grandson of Ashanti and Fante tribal chiefs who studied at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and received a master of science degree in management from MIT. As with other Ghanaians in his larger tribe, his name took a standard pattern, with Kofi indicating a boy born on a Friday, and Annan indicating that he was the fourth child of his family.

  More than 400 Ghanaians live in Tracey Towers, the two circular forty-one-story buildings at the Concourse's northern end that are the Bronx's tallest and were completed in 1972 as part of a government-subsidized program aimed at keeping moderate- to middle-income families in the area. They socialize in several Ghanaian-inflected Pentecostal and Seventh-day Adventist churches along the Concourse. They're also visible in African groceries and variety shops that dot Highbridge and Morris Heights west of the Concourse and a half dozen sometimes-ragtag restaurants, such as the African and American Restaurant on University Avenue near Burnside Avenue.

  The restaurant's owner, Mohammed Abdullah, a burly man of forty-seven when I spoke to him, started working here as a gas station attendant in the Bronx after he came over from Accra in 1980. He brought his own home-cooked lunch to work, and his co-workers were so enamored of what they tasted, they paid him to make them lunch. Soon he was operating a restaurant incognito out of his fifth-floor apartment at 184th Street, three blocks off the Concourse, his landlord none the wiser. Finally he decided to become legitimate, opening his enterprise in a former donut shop in 1987, closing it, then, for $15,000, opening African and American Restaurant in what had been a Dominican fried-chicken shack. Abdullah, who has two tribal cuts on his cheeks, catered a Kwanzaa celebration for Mayor David Dinkins. He has done well enough to buy a house at West 179th Street for himself and the twelve children he has had with three wives, two of whom he was married to at the same time and one who died in Africa. (As a Muslim, he told me, he is allowed to have two wives, though I sensed he hadn't checked with New York authorities.) Six of his children were living with his mother-in-law in Ghana so they could go to a school where drug addiction and punkish behavior are not as unavoidable as they are in Bronx school
s.

  We sat at one of his oilcloth-covered tables, and he fed me spicy baked steak and spinach laced with crushed sunflower seeds. “This neighborhood is not really a good place to raise children,” he told me. “I send them home so they get better schooling and to be respectful and not mingle with the kids that, you know, will give them bad ideas.”

  It's not just mischief but the values children pick up that clash with Ghanaian attitudes toward family and clan, as Abdullah made charmingly clear. “The way my children are brought up, they have a sense of mother and father,” he said. “In the past, we find they grow up and all they care about is their wife. His mother and father are a headache for him. They lose that sense of family.”

  To help cement that sense of family, he bought a second house—in Ghana—which he visits yearly. But he is also reaching out to his black American neighbors, since they are so much larger a pool of potential customers. He serves them soul food, while at the same time enticing them to try his baked steak and sunflower spinach. “Now most of them don't eat soul food anymore,” he said.

  As with Abdullah, many Ghanaians have been in New York long enough that there are struggles between the habits of the immigrant generation and those of Ghanaians born here. Amoafo told me that many Ghanaian mothers are exasperated by teenage girls who want to wear tops and slacks that expose their midriffs, just as their American friends do. At the same time, those mothers are being introduced to liberated American women and becoming less docile with their husbands. “A woman becomes more vocal and a man is totally at a loss of how to deal with her,” Amoafo told me. Wanting a woman unspoiled by American impertinence, some Ghanaian men have their families back home find them a bride. Too often these marriages don't work out, sometimes because the cultural chasm is too great but sometimes, according to African Abroad, which has news in English of Ghana and Nigeria, because some of the native women come to the United States planning “to jump the marriage” as soon as they can, to tap American opportunities on their own.

  Given the values they bring with them, Ghanaians also struggle with Bronx streets. They sometimes look down on their poorer black American neighbors, who they feel are not as industrious as they are and whom they see as too willing to live on government handouts. “African Ghanaians have very little in common with black Americans,” Amoafo said. “They have different worldviews, different values. There's nothing in common in terms of aspiration.” If Ghanaians form relationships with American blacks, it is with those in the middle class, he said.

  Amoafo, a handsome, sinewy man of medium height who holds a legal resident's green card, came to the United States in 1973 as an exchange student with American Field Service. He attended high school in Tacoma, Washington, started out at a college in Baltimore, and got two years under his belt at New York University. He drove a taxicab and worked as a Wall Street administrative assistant and ten years ago started Ghana Homes with Kissi, who like him belongs to the Kwahu tribe, a division of the Akan group. Amoafo, his Kenyan wife, and their two boys and two girls live on the Concourse near 167th Street, less than a block south of where my family started our Bronx sojourn.

  Amoafo and Kissi's Ghana Homes stands out as a curiosity even among the Ghanaian businesses. Situated in the ground floor of a Concourse apartment house near Tremont Avenue, it pays its overhead by handling money transfers and travel arrangements. But Amoafo and Kissi make their real profits selling the houses, representing developers in Ghana as well as the country's main mortgage company. Amoafo and Kissi reassure potential customers that they can avoid the disheartenment of murky property titles or the fraud typical of some transactions.

  The houses are ranches or two-story affairs, usually part of a development. They cost anywhere from $30,000 to $300,000. Owners who live in the United States often arrange to rent the houses out or let family members use them. Still, they envision returning to their Ghanaian clans as soon as they put together a nest egg. One of Ghana Homes' customers, Austin Batse, a computer consultant in Durham, North Carolina, had wanted to return to Ghana to help build up the country practically since the day he immigrated here as a ten-year-old. In 2001, he bought one of Ghana Homes' houses for $63,000. Batse has never been to his house, but he asked his sister in Ghana to visit the house with a wedding photographer, and they shot a video that gives him deep joy to look at.

  “For a lot of people it's a status symbol of getting out of the position you were in,” Batse told me by telephone. “Someone who's not highly educated and works at a low-income job comes up with the down payment on thirty thousand dollars and achieves that type of house in a very nice area. You can be someone coming from a village, but you return in a totally different class because of the power of what you've been able to earn here.”

  THE GHANAIANS HAVE taken part in the revival of the Grand Concourse and the gathering renaissance of a borough that two decades earlier was known for its landscape of eviscerated buildings and Fort Apache air of menace. Buildings all along the boulevard have been sand-blasted or had their graffiti scrubbed off. In some cases the interiors have undergone wholesale renovation. These buildings have increasingly been filled with working families. Two notable bookends to the revival of the main stretch of the Concourse were unveiled in 2005. First, the Yankees announced plans to build a new stadium in the Bronx just north of the House That Ruth Built. The replacement will have echoes of the original stadium circa 1923 and seat up to 54,000, some of those inhabiting the fifty to sixty luxury boxes. But the new stadium is not without its touch of tristesse. To erect it, contractors will destroy two neighborhood parks, Macombs Dam Park, currently a track for runners who have at times included Olympians, and Mullaly Park, which I played in as a teenager. I still remember standing at home plate and hitting a ball that soared out of the park and struck the horizontal girders of the Jerome Avenue el, a truly towering home run in my subconscious field of dreams. Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, though, has a way of getting his way. He stopped wanting to flee the Bronx about the time the Yankees started winning World Series again and their attendance skyrocketed, doubling in a decade to a sport record of 4,200,518 in 2006. Surely the increasing appeal of an enhanced Concourse neighborhood helped draw fans.

  The second crowning Concourse milestone was the reopening of the Loews Paradise in October 2005. The theater, the Bronx version of Radio City Music Hall, originally opened a few weeks before the stock market crashed in 1929 with a showing of the “all-talking” film The Mysterious Dr. Fu-Manchu. The Paradise gave generations of working-class and lower-middle-class strivers a taste of Old World opulence and gave generations of teenagers a haunting setting for their first kiss. “It was meant to take people out of their humdrum existence and bring them into a world of unimagined wealth and luxury,” Lloyd Ultan, the Bronx historian, told me.

  The Paradise was designed by legendary theater architect John Eberson, and its atmospheric show included twinkling stars, rolling clouds, and flying pigeons. The stage was embraced on three sides by a Venetian garden, with walls dripping with sculptured vines, cypress trees, and classical statues. The vaulted lobby was surrounded by fluted and gilded mahogany pillars and an arched balustrade of royal proportions. Every nook seemed to be filled with cherubs, nymphs, and recumbent lions. In three domes set into the lobby's filigreed ceiling, Eberson had painters execute dreamy murals of ersatz half-nude deities: Sound, Story, and Film. On the lobby's north wall Eberson placed a Carrara marble fountain of a child on a dolphin and filled the fountain with goldfish. For the cream-toned terra-cotta-and-marble façade, Eberson designed a mechanical clock topped by St. George astride a charger slaying a fire-breathing dragon on the hour.

  I remember riding by bus along the Concourse one weekend in 1957, when I was twelve, and glimpsing a long line of teenagers against the Paradise marquee, which displayed Elvis Presley's name and “Jail-house Rock” in oscillating lights. For the teenagers, this opening was the biggest public event in their short history in the Bronx, and I recall
thinking I would never be cool enough to be included. A few years later my graduation from the Bronx High School of Science was held in the Paradise, and I remember walking by the fountain with its capering goldfish and looking up at the twinkling midnight blue sky. I wondered what memories my classmates at Bronx Science had, so I called a few of them. Diane Levine Edelstein remembered the Paradise balcony as something of a lovers' lane—though for nothing much more daring than a long kiss.

  “You walked in and you felt you were in another world, you weren't in a movie theater,” said Edelstein, now a senior research assistant at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. “We always sat in the balcony because you felt closer to heaven. I remember watching the stars and not looking at the movie.” And Phyllis Gross Greenbaum, now a publisher of community newspapers in the Washington-Baltimore area, touched a sympathetic chord when she told me why the Paradise stunned her and her friends. “I don't think many of us grew up with that kind of elegance,” she said.

  For thirty years, after the middle class left the Concourse, the Paradise was either boarded up or sliced into multiple screens. The new owner, Gerald Lieblich, acquired the theater for $4.5 million and restored much of its Italian baroque grandeur, getting workers to clean the statuary, install 4,000 burgundy seats, and repaint the blue ceiling. The stars, however, won't twinkle, because making them do so proved too costly. The goldfish pool will not be replaced because it would interfere with a concessions stand.