And the Paradise did not reopen as a movie house. Its opening-night bill in October 2005 was a salsa and merengue concert, clearly a bid to cater to another generation of strivers who did not grow up with that kind of elegance—Latinos, who now make up half the borough's populace. The entrepreneurs leasing the space also plan to hold gospel and rap concerts, live boxing matches, nostalgia acts that might appeal to onetime Bronx residents, and once again, high school graduations.
Despite such ornaments as the Paradise, the revival of the Concourse has exacted a price, one that is heartbreaking to old-time exiles. The Concourse was designed as a residential street, conceived as such by engineer Louis Aloys Risse in 1870. It was finally built between 1902 and 1909, then extended farther south in 1927 so that the completed boulevard was almost 200 feet wide and stretched for four and a half miles between 138th Street and Mosholu Parkway (roughly 207th Street). The boulevard really began to flourish in the 1930s and '40s, after the completion of the IND subway line, which ran underneath and produced stations every few blocks that became the impetus for commercial development on the station cross streets. Enterprising developers took advantage of the enchantment with Art Deco to create alluring buildings with stylish touches including polychrome brick, set-back steel-casement windows, and terrazzo lobby floors. The Concourse became the borough's parade route, the site of its government, and its most prestigious address. Those who grew up there or lived there as celebrities included Milton Berle, Babe Ruth, E. L. Doctorow, the singers Roberta Peters and Eydie Gormé, and the journalist David Halberstam, who lived in the stately thirteen-story Lewis Morris Apartments near 175th Street, where a white-gloved doorman opened doors of arriving cars. The Concourse's other iconic gem was a smaller cream-brick Art Deco structure at 1150 that was known popularly as “the fish building” for the tropical mosaic flanking its doorway.
The residential character of the boulevard survived the racial turnover, but paradoxically that character is being chipped away by the thor-oughfare's revival. On the ground floor of the fish building there are now a barbershop and a tax preparer's office, each with a prominent sign. In the Lewis Morris, where three-quarters of current tenants receive federal rent vouchers, the ground floor houses three clinics, each with a two-foot-high banner that advertises its acceptance of Medicaid and insurance plans. Indeed, scores of stores and clinics have been carved out of what were once ground-floor apartments. The wave seems to have accelerated in recent years so that almost every block between 161st Street and 196th Street now has a grocery, a barbershop, a beauty parlor, a travel agency, or a pharmacy, and some stretches are chockablock with stores and outsize signs. When I was growing up, only the blocks flanking the borough's shopping district of Fordham Road had stores; the only signs elsewhere were discreet doctors' shingles.
“Why do you have to have a sign up there saying ‘Family Dentist’?” Michael Saccio, a forty-eight-year-old prop man living in the fish building said to me. “On Park Avenue you see a little gold plaque. This guy is advertising like he's giving away something free.”
Preservationists, historians of the Bronx, wistful former residents, and some government officials say they are heartsick at what they regard as an aesthetic blight on a once-genteel street. They are trying to stop the commercialization by creating a Concourse historic district or by enforcing more strictly a 1989 zoning law that bans stores in all but a few places and limits signs in most of those locations to twelve square feet. In 2003, the borough president, Adolfo Carrión, Jr., asked the city's Department of Buildings to step in, and an inspector soon issued 170 violations at seventy to eighty buildings. The owners were given forty-five days to correct the transgressions. But Sid Dinsay, a department spokesman, admitted that “to my knowledge” none of the stores had been closed, though legal proceedings against some had begun. Meanwhile, enforcement of the signage laws has been suspended since early summer 2003, when the city council imposed a moratorium after receiving heated complaints from shopkeepers about the costs of changing signs. Carrión, an urban planner by training, told me he would like to find a way to steer merchants toward the busy commercial cross streets and away from the boulevard. Otherwise, the Concourse's sense of place would be damaged. “When you drive down Fifth Avenue or Central Park West, you know where you are,” he said. “The place has a personality. The Concourse should be one of those places in our city where we make a statement about how we care about our city.”
But even as the Concourse nears its one hundredth anniversary in 2009, official talk about a crackdown seems to be so much lip service. The fact is, preservationists say, that few residents are clamoring for enforcement. They have different needs and tastes—a desire for a nearby grocery to buy a container of milk for their children, more chances for jobs in those neighborhood stores, outposts of vitality to discourage muggers on desolate nights. They are not as concerned about keeping the almost pristine residential character of most of the boulevard and have welcomed the stores springing up on nearly every block and the signs that sometimes accompany them. For the old-time exiles, it may be heartbreaking to see the changes in their cherished Grand Concourse, but not to the newcomers. For them, the avenue's history is, well, history. “I think the people around here are more interested in having the stores,” Thomas Hernandez, a construction worker, told me as we chatted on the 169th Street corner. “You don't have to go to a supermarket three blocks away. As long as people have demands—buying cigarettes, baby milk, stuff like that—this is not going to faze anybody.”
Carlos Fernandez, the manager of Claris Record Shop, across from the fish building, told the story of how the store's owner was hauled into court six months before, and residents turned out in force to support him. “Otherwise, they have to go six blocks to buy a CD,” Fernandez said. Dr. Jagdish N. Markale, an immigrant from Bombay who owns the dental clinic across from the fish building, said he put up his sign a year ago out of fear that other dentists with signs might lure patients away. The street's history, he said, is not as important to residents as a grocery store, and added bluntly, “The government has to consider their priorities rather than that of the people who used to be here fifty years ago.”
GRAND CONCOURSE
WHERE TO GO
The Fish Building (ART DECO GEM, WITH A MOSAIC AT THE ENTRANCE WITH AN AQUARIUM THEME) 1150 GRAND CONCOURSE NEAR 167TH STREET; OTHER NOTABLE ART DECO BUILDINGS ARE AT 750, 888, 1947, 2155, AND 2830 GRAND CONCOURSE, AND A STROLL REVEALS DOZENS OF OTHERS.
Kantamanto African Market (AFRICAN GROCERIES AND PRODUCTS) 61 EAST TREMONT AVENUE; (718) 583-5250
Lewis Morris (ONCE THE GRANDE DAME OF GRAND CONCOURSE APARTMENT HOUSES) 1749 GRAND CONCOURSE AT 175TH STREET
Loews Paradise Theater (MOVIE PALACE) 2403 GRAND CONCOURSE; (718) 220-6144
WHERE TO EAT
African American Restaurant (GHANAIAN DELICACIES) 1987 UNIVERSITY AVENUE; (718) 731-8595
Chapter 13
Nursing Americans in Norwood
THE NEW YORK ECONOMY IS HONEYCOMBED WITH ETHNIC NICHES. Greeks own the diners and coffee shops, Koreans the fruit stores, South Asians the newsstands, and Afghans the sidewalk coffee carts and barbecued-chicken shacks. Brazilians shine shoes, Mexicans peddle flowers, and West Africans hawk umbrellas. For decades many of the firms that wash the windows of office buildings were owned not just by Ukrainian Jews but by Jews from a single town in Ukraine. And of course all of these joined the more storied occupational niches, some of which survive now only in legend, such as the Jewish garment workers, Italian stonemasons, and Irish cops (Irish and other whites no longer make up the bulk of police recruits; more than half are black, Hispanic, or Asian).
I stumbled across another niche when my father was hospitalized with a stroke in 2003 at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. I could not help but notice how many of the nurses tending him were Filipino. I could explain why so many were immigrants—Americans don't want to do the dirty, often unnerving work of ministering to the old and ve
ry sick. But why were so many from a single foreign country? I asked the Filipino nurses and not only learned why but discovered that there was a surgical case at the very same hospital that epitomized the Filipino role. As I walked around the streets outside the hospital, I also discovered that Filipino nurses had gently recast the character of that Bronx neighborhood, a place that calls itself Norwood.
Arlene Aguirre, a woman from a squalid Filipino village where she lived in a small hut with no running water, arrived in New York in September 2003 for some extraordinary surgery—the separation of her conjoined eighteen-month-old twins. Carl and Clarence had been born with the tops of their skulls fused together, preventing them from moving about independently. They spent their days in bed lying on their backs in a single line. The Montefiore surgeons mapping out their separation were going to do it in a way no one had ever dared before—in stages, with four operations over a year's time and many months of rehabilitation at Blythedale Children's Hospital in Valhalla, New York. They were fortunate in finding that the boys' brains were not fused, a factor that could allow for separating them without producing significant brain damage, if any. Still, the unprecedented operation in a city where Aguirre hardly knew a soul was complex and perilous and she was profoundly fearful for her children.
But by coming to a big-city hospital she found herself caressed by compatriots in a way she might not have been had she come for, say, a job on Wall Street. At Montefiore, she was swarmed by Filipino women. “People called to each other, ‘Did you hear there are conjoined twins and they're Filipino?’” recalled one of the women, Clemencia Wong. The Filipino women brought Aguirre pancit, a noodle dish as standard in the Philippines as French fries are here, and adobo, a garlicky chicken dish, and took her shopping at a nearby grocery that carries Filipino products. They gave her a phone card to call relatives back home and took her underwear home to launder. A half dozen women prayed with her at the twins' bedside in the tenth floor Pediatric ICU, and a special mass was held in the chapel. This was not just a spontaneous outpouring of love but the result of a plan devised by twenty Filipino nurses meeting with Dianne Aroh, the hospital's head nurse, to make sure Aguirre's ordeal was as cushioned as possible.
One-quarter of Montefiore's nursing staff is Filipino, a figure not too dissimilar from those in many other hospitals in the city, where women from a constellation of Caribbean islands are their only rivals for dominance. Filipinos in the New York area are practically defined by this single occupation. Thirty percent of the 173,000 Filipinos work as nurses or other health practitioners—four times the rate for the entire population. Many of the rest are their spouses, children, or aging parents. I talked about the phenomenon with several nurses in a conference room at Montefiore.
“If you meet a Filipino girl and say, ‘You're a nurse,’ you're probably right,” Clemencia Wong, a pediatric nursing instructor at Montefiore, told me.
“And if you meet a Filipino man, he'll probably say, ‘My wife is a nurse,’” chimed in Pio Paunon, a Filipino man who is the nurse manager at Montefiore and the president-elect of the Philippine Nurses Association of New York.
I learned that for more than three decades, American hospitals have aggressively recruited nurses from the Philippines, sometimes enticing them with bonuses of thousands of dollars. One male nurse at Montefiore told me the going rate at one time was $7,000. Hospitals prize Filipino nurses because they speak English with ease and bring with them professional schooling not too dissimilar from that of American nurses. The Philippines, after all, was an American colony or commonwealth from 1898 to 1946, except for four years of Japanese occupation. Its government, schools, and professional training programs were modeled on those of the United States, and the American government in the early twentieth century regularly sent Filipinos to such American colleges as the University of Illinois to instruct them in engineering, agriculture, and medicine.
There are other winning qualities that speak particularly well of Filipino culture. Hospital administrators value the nurses for their strong work ethic—not always true of other nurses—and their loyalty to employers. “They're extremely respectful of patients and their family members,” Aroh, the nursing chief at Montefiore, said of her Filipino staff. “And they're very flexible, willing to take new assignments on the spur of the moment, willing to work extra-long hours.” They are not as ready as some other nurses to switch hospitals for a pay raise or a shorter commute. Filipinos also bring a tenderness to their work that seems to stem from a culture where people insist on caring for their own aging or sick relatives. Nursing homes are uncommon in the Philippines. That tenderness stands in sharp contrast to the brusqueness that seems to be an accepted part of the experience of having a beloved relative confined to a hospital bed. “The family is the center of your life and it's your up-bringing,” Lolita B. Compas, a Filipina who is president of the New York State Nurses Association, told me.
The Filipino connection is crucial because American hospitals are drastically short of nurses, with fewer students entering the profession and more nurses leaving to retire or because they are frustrated by unpleasant working conditions. Hospitals and nursing homes have been appealing to immigration authorities for help, and these officials have made it easier for nurses to obtain visas and the green cards that give them permanent status. Nurses in the Philippines seem to have benefited the most from these preferences. A 2001 national survey by the Commission on Graduates of Foreign Nursing Schools found that 41 percent of the 789 nurses who responded had received their education in the Philippines, with Canada second at 26 percent. There were more nurses from the Philippines than from all of Europe and South America combined. Compas estimated that there are 10,000 Filipino nurses in the three states that make up the New York City area.
It should be noted, however, that what has been helpful to the United States is hurting the Philippines. So large is the exodus of nurses that in November 2005 the Philippine Medical Association called a conference to discuss the crisis, which some described as an approaching collapse of the country's health system. A former health secretary, Dr. Jaime Galvez Tan, estimated that 100,000 nurses had left the Philippines to work abroad since 1994, with more leaving than can be replaced by nursing schools. Britain and the United States were the most popular destinations.
As I looked into the matter, it became easy to understand why the lure of America is irresistible. With enough overtime and experience, nurses can earn $80,000 a year, more than twenty times what they would make in the Philippines. The average pay at Montefiore is $75,000. That money allows them to buy homes in suburbs such as Bergenfield, New Jersey, where 3,133 Filipinos live in a community of 26,247. For a not particularly large suburban town, it manages to have a store that sells nurses' uniforms. And its mayor for a time, Robert C. Rivas, claimed to be the only Filipino mayor in the Northeast.
Nursing in America also allows Filipinos to send money back home to pay for finer schools for their brothers and sisters. Maria Dolores Egasan, an intensive-care nurse who was at the Aguirre twins' bedside after their second operation, came here in 1989 and married a Filipino security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She got her job at Montefiore through her mother-in-law, a nurse, who has five sons, four of whom are married to nurses. Her life is not exactly regal, but she has been able to put her brother, Ferdinand Colon, through Concordia College in Manila, and he is now a computer engineer in Saudi Arabia. She also put her sister, Fernandita, through secretarial school. For someone from her modest background, passing the test of the Council of Graduates of Foreign Nursing Schools seemed like a ticket to prosperity. “We came from a third world country, and I think this is our passport to earn a good living,” said Egasan. “It's like winning the lotto if you pass the CGFNS. You will earn dollars and send them back home and send your brothers and sisters to school.”
The prevalence of nurses has also helped give Filipinos here an uncommon and upscale profile for a group of immigrants: 57.8 percent of the
city's 60,602 Filipinos are female; 49.7 percent have college degrees; and the median income of full-time workers is $41,000, far higher than the city median. Filipinos are now rising to senior levels in the health industry. When I spoke to her, Dr. Consuelo Dungca was a senior assistant vice president for clinical affairs at the city's Health and Hospitals Corporation. And of course, Compas, an instructor at Cabrini Medical Center, where 75 percent of the nursing staff is Filipino, was president of the New York State Nurses Association.
FILIPINOS OFTEN THINK of themselves as ethnic chameleons, people whose history of living under a variety of colonizers—Spanish, American, Japanese—allows them to adapt to any culture. The State Department estimates that there are 2 million Americans of Filipino ancestry, with concentrations in California, Hawaii, and Illinois larger than that in New York. But most Americans would be hard put to list Filipinos among the country's major immigrant groups, so scattered within the mainstream have they become. Indeed, Filipinos in the New York area have never formed a single Little Manila, no sharply defined enclave. Jersey City, with 15,860 Filipinos, has the closest thing to one along aptly named Manila Avenue near the Holland Tunnel. Indeed, what brings Filipinos together in one place are the hospitals, and there are significant concentrations in neighborhoods with large hospitals, such as Elmhurst in Queens and Manhattan's Stuyvesant Town.
Since the north Bronx has such hospitals as Montefiore, North Central, Albert Einstein, Jacobi, and St. Barnabas in its midst, such neighborhoods as Norwood, Bedford Park, Belmont, Bronxdale, Fordham, Jerome Park, Morris Park, Pelham Parkway, Wakefield, and Williams-bridge together boast more than 2,500 Filipinos. Down Gun Hill Road from Montefiore is a grocery store, the Philippine Food Center, that sells imports including Lily's Peanut Butter, coconut gel, lychee nuts, as well as SkyFlakes crackers and pancit noodles. It also has a sizable stock of both amorous and violent Filipino videotapes. Simon Robles, the elderly man behind the counter when I sampled some of the foods, told me the store is actually owned by his daughter, Felicitas Carino, a nurse at Montefiore. Norwood has no Filipino restaurants, but Filipinos might take the subway to treat themselves to a paella at upscale Cendrillon in SoHo, or, if they want to be surrounded by compadres, drive across the George Washington Bridge to Bergenfield, New Jersey, which has a cluster of Filipino shops and a very good homespun restaurant, the Bamboo Grill. Filipinos flock to the Bamboo Grill on weekends to indulge another of their national passions—ballroom dancing.
The World in a City: Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York Page 21