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

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The World in a City: Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York Page 23

by Joseph Berger


  Liberty Avenue's video stores are stocked with romantic musicals from India's Bollywood industry, which are particularly popular with Guyanese girls. Natasha Warikoo, a Harvard doctoral student in sociology who studied Guyanese teenagers, pointed out that these girls look “to an Indian culture based in India rather than the Caribbean for ‘authentic’ Indianness.” Gold stores have the same appeal as they do in Indian neighborhoods, though the jewelry on Liberty Avenue is less deftly fashioned.

  Richmond Hill's restaurants, though, are distinctly unlike those in an Indian enclave and are a reflection of a people with roots in poverty who haven't yet grown accustomed to white tablecloths and Muzak. The most characteristic are the shops that sell roti—curry-filled wraps—and there are one or two on practically every block: Richie's Roti Shop, Singh's Roti Shop, Bobby's Roti Shop, and St. John's Restaurant, which by some estimates has the best goat curry roti. Most are about as elegant as a Blimpie's, with a deli-style glass counter of hot trays from which servers scoop up various stews and fill round flat breads. There are fancier places, such as Kaieteur on Lefferts Boulevard, named after a 741-foot-high Guyanese waterfall, that do offer white tablecloths and savory dishes including rice and duck. There are also Guyanese bakeries—Brown Betty and Little Guyana—that sell such peculiarly Guyanese treats as blackeye cakes, currant roll, and pineapple tarts, and the longtime J & B West Indian Grocery, which stocks Caribbean products including bitter-melon, taro root, and sugar cane.

  Every spring, Guyanese and Trinidadians have their own celebration of Phagwah, a Hindu holiday that Indians call Holi but which Indo-Caribbeans have infused with the spirit and high jinks of Latin American Carnaval or Mardi Gras. The streets of Richmond Hill are ablaze with floats teeming with people in Indian costumes. Musicians play Indian drums and cymbals, even if the rhythms are Caribbean. Children dressed in white clothing spray one another with red, yellow, and blue dyes from old Formula 409 spray bottles.

  While the coolness between Indians and Guyanese was palpable to me, some Indians I spoke to thought too much is made of the chill. Uma Sengupta, a native Indian who is a Democratic assembly district leader, said the distance between Indians and Indo-Caribbeans simply represents an abrasive encounter of two different cultures. There need not be any haughtiness involved. “Even if they don't mix, that doesn't mean they look down,” she said. Some Guyanese leaders also prefer to see the glass half full. Dr. Dhanpaul Narine, who was an unsuccessful candidate for city council in 2005, contended in a letter to me that Indo-Caribbeans “have always held India close to their heart” and show a keen interest in news of India. Whenever there is an earthquake there, Guyanese and Trinidadians raise tens of thousands of dollars in Richmond Hill for relief.

  Warikoo, the sociology doctoral student, feels too much is made of there being a separate Guyanese enclave in Richmond Hill, pointing out that the Indian subcontinent is so fragmented linguistically, religiously, and geographically that many of its subcultures here have carved out their own neighborhoods. Indians from Gujarat, for example, have clustered in Forest Hills, Bangladeshis in Ozone Park. Almost 5,000 Sikhs—native Indians with a distinctive religion that blends Hinduism and Islam—have settled in Richmond Hill to be near their main temple. They are recognizable by the turbans the men wear.

  But many Indians and Guyanese acknowledge the arm's-length reserve between the two communities. Outar Pooran, sixty-eight, who is retired from a porter's job at the Giorgio Armani store in Manhattan and is active in Budhai's temple, said some Indians speak to him with the expression “you Guyanese people.” “When I speak, I say, ‘We Indians,’” said Pooran, whose grandfather left India in the 1880s. “They believe our grandparents quit India, so we are like strangers to them.”

  In telling me this story, Pooran intimated something that Guyanese do not speak much about explicitly because it is humiliating but that Budhai and others candidly articulated. Guyanese detect a lingering snobbish elitism among the Indians they encounter here, a throwback to the caste system. In Guyana the hierarchy has withered to virtual insignificance, while it survives in India—and among some Indians here. The Indians who immigrated in the 1960s were largely from higher castes, not the lowborn castes of the original Guyanese contract laborers. Sengupta, the Democratic leader, points out that Indians came here to fill gaps in skilled occupations, and in time they obtained green cards and citizenship. By contrast, more Guyanese either came here as visitors and overstayed visas or spirited across borders.

  Kris Oditt, the Guyanese owner of Brown Betty Restaurant, says Guyanese have much warmer relations with other diaspora Indians here—Indians from formerly British African colonies such as Uganda, South Africa, and Kenya. Marriages between Guyanese and Trinidadians are common; Budhai's son, for example, is engaged to a young woman from Trinidad. Marriages with Indian immigrants, though not unheard of, are far less common.

  Many Richmond Hill residents say that attitudes are already changing among generations born here, that the great American ethnic blender is working its magic. Bobbie Ramnath, a travel agent, notices that Guyanese are arranging trips to India to search for their roots. When a Sikh spiritual leader was pummeled into unconsciousness in 2004 by a group of hooligans who ridiculed his turban, Guyanese joined in the protests. Guyanese in Queens are also running for local elective office and forming alliances with all sorts of ethnic organizations, even occasionally those representing Indians. “Politics will bring all of us closer,” said Pooran, mentioning such Guyanese candidates as Narine and Taj Rajkumar, a City University professor who has run for office. “We'll communicate more, get to understand one another more.”

  Mahabir, the Baruch College senior, said that more Guyanese and Indian students at her school are crossing ethnic boundaries. She has already formed close friendships with Indians who are children of immigrants. When she walks into a classroom, she told me, the first people she notices are those of Indian descent. “We exchange a smile,” she said. It doesn't matter to her whether they are from India or Guyana—and she feels her Guyanese identity may not matter much to the Indians either.

  ANOTHER GROUP OF OFFSHOOTS from the Indian subcontinent is reshaping—some would say saving—a neighborhood not so far from Richmond Hill that until recent years was notorious for the city's worst murder rate. The neighborhood is Brooklyn's East New York, and it is a low-rise, largely black and Latino neighborhood on the Queens border that since the 1960s has been marred by run-down buildings, failing schools, drug bazaars, and soaring crime.

  For the first half of the twentieth century, East New York was a thriving community of blue-collar Irish, Italians, and Jews who were glad to afford the plainspoken brick and wood-frame row houses or pay rents in the tenement-like walk-ups. Half of working-class Brooklyn seemed to shop on Pitkin Avenue, and the high-priced Fortunoff chain got its start in the 1920s as a series of shops along Livonia Avenue. In the mid-1950s, my off-the-boat father searched futilely for an uncle who had come here years earlier and ended up close friends with the uncle's in-laws on Alabama Avenue. Sam Lessen, a worker for the state Workers' Compensation Board, and his wife, Fanny, owned one of those flimsy wood-frame houses.

  But East New York was cursed by a lethal brew of inept local leaders and foolish big-government decisions. Black families from nearby Brownsville, many of them displaced by urban renewal, were steered to empty homes and apartments, accelerating the departure of middle-class whites, some of whom simply abandoned their houses as unsellable. Meanwhile, the federal government foreclosed on too many mortgages, leaving a rash of hollow-eyed buildings ripe for arson. There were outbursts of rioting. One enclave that seemed to escape the ruination was Highland Park, a leafy plateau whose grand houses with views of midtown Manhattan are popular with black politicians and pastors. Still, by the late 1970s more than half the residential core of East New York had been leveled into rubble-strewn lots, and that blight lingered for two decades. Even five years ago developers were skittish about investing. Today, tho
ugh, nearly every vacant lot, even in the most rundown areas, is spoken for. Builders are putting up two- and three-family row houses, and African American and Latino police officers, nurses, and civil servants are sprucing up older houses.

  All this activity has been augmented by a group of newcomers to these parts—immigrants from Bangladesh. The country was once a Muslim-dominated part of British-ruled India, then became the eastern flank of a decolonialized Pakistan, and since 1971 has been independent. With 141 million people, Bangladesh is one of the world's poorest countries, plagued by calamitous floods and political volatility. That's why Bangladeshis emigrate. Until recent years they settled in more decorous communities such as Ozone Park. But they are now spilling over into the badlands of East New York.

  Women in burkas are now a common sight along Pitkin Avenue, once Brooklyn's Herald Square. Several mosques have opened, and groceries sell halal meats. In 2004, one company, Millennium Homes, was building twenty-two two- and three-family homes on Shepherd Avenue and Essex Street off Pitkin, most of which were snapped up by Bangladeshis. Millennium's sales agent was Shariar Uddin, who had worked as a waiter at the World Trade Center and on September 11, 2001, was supposed to show up for the 4 p.m. shift. Now he was pitching houses to his countrymen, people such as Mohammed Hamid, a fifty-two-year-old engineer. Although the sidewalk was warped and flecked with weeds and there was no decent grocery or dry cleaner nearby, Uddin was emphasizing the neighborhood's future and pointing out that the houses were right next to the Shepherd Avenue subway station. He also noted that a short ride away on Liberty Avenue in Ozone Park, there was Al Amin Grocery, which stocks Bangladeshi okra and dates, frozen paratha bread, and newspapers flown in from the capital of Dhaka. As Hamid listened, even the neighborhood's racial mix, something he once might have been wary of, seemed a plus. “You need to mix up with American culture, and this is a neighborhood with mixed people,” said Hamid as he put a down payment on a three-family home.

  Rashida Khanam chose to buy a three-family house in East New York rather than in a more flourishing area such as Astoria, Queens, where she had been renting. She is a widow in her late forties who has been in this country twelve years and supports herself and two college-going daughters by selling bread in a Manhattan bakery. East New York prices, unlike those in Astoria, were affordable, as she found out on periodic visits to a niece who was already living in East New York. She looked for evidence of any unpleasantness such as crime but “I didn't see anything bad.” “I think the neighborhood will be OK,” she told me.

  Some of the forces upgrading East New York are the same as those that have been gentrifying once-crime-ridden neighborhoods such as Harlem. Crime across the city has plummeted since 1990, when a record 2,245 murders were recorded—almost four times current levels. The breathtaking improvements in the reliability and ambience of the subways—even the ability to transfer from buses to trains without paying another fare—have helped revive neighborhoods far from midtown. Municipal government, starting with the Koch administration in the late 1970s, can claim credit for rebuilding properties seized by the city for tax delinquency or getting nonprofit organizations such as Nehemiah Houses—active in East New York—to rebuild. Tax abatements and city-financed construction primed the pump for private investment, encouraged banks to lend, and spurred insurers to insure.

  And the city's population has rebounded after falling close to 7 million in 1980. The Department of City Planning estimates that 8.15 million now live in the five boroughs and that more than 9 million could be living here within twenty years. Much of that spurt is the result of immigration, and all those additional guests from overseas need shelter. Since comparatively little new housing is affordable in established neighborhoods, buyers and renters with shallow pockets have had to look at the city's ragged margins, gambling on once-moribund blocks such as those in East New York.

  Many immigrants also look to real estate as a way to make their American fortune, often using the income stream from renting half of a two-family home as their springboard. It's not a coincidence that many of the neighborhoods gentrifying now are full of two- and three-family homes. These newcomers from overseas have been open to living among other races and willing to risk their life savings on shabby blocks.

  “We're one of the last frontiers,” William S. Wilkins, an official of the Local Development Corporation of East New York, told me. “It's the cheapest game in town. Where else are you going to find houses for two hundred to three hundred thousand dollars in Brooklyn?”

  The sprucing up of homes has rippled across East New York. The area's surviving factories and warehouses, where products including pasta and light fixtures are made or stored, are humming with workers, with a vacancy rate estimated at less than 10 percent compared to 25 percent a decade ago. The new Gateway Mall by Jamaica Bay, with its Home Depot and Target, attracts New Yorkers from miles around. The neighborhood's most notorious school, Thomas Jefferson High School, where in 1992 two teenagers were shot to death an hour before a visit by Mayor Dinkins, has been divided into five more manageable mini-schools, with such themes as civil rights and fire safety.

  “It's not Shangri-la,” Wilkins said. “But if you've been renting your whole life, this is the American dream.”

  But the American dream can sometimes get twisted into a nightmare. Just a half year after I wrote about East New York's revival for The New York Times, I had to return because the Bangladeshi buyers of Millennium Homes were calling to say they had lost the homes they were promised. In six months, they said, prices had soared $50,000 to $75,000 higher, and the builder realized he could fetch far more money by selling the dwellings to newer buyers, even if that meant breaking contracts. When I arrived, working-class Bangladeshis were standing in a driving rain outside their unfinished houses. Under a canopy of umbrellas, they were huddled mournfully with children, baby carriages, and hand-lettered signs that read “We Want House” and “We Want Justice.” Because of the rain, the ink was running like tears on those signs. It was a small demonstration by New York standards, no more than twenty people in the soggy dirt of a construction zone on a bleak Monday afternoon. But it signified how much the protestors craved owning homes like other Americans and how furious they were that their hopes had been dashed.

  The protestors included Salimul Hoque, a thirty-nine-year-old housepainter who came from Bangladesh three years before, and people like him. He lived with his wife, Khaleda, and their two young boys and a girl in a rented house plagued by a balky refrigerator, mice, and rats. “One day a rat bit me on my toe,” Khaleda told me angrily. Hoque had put down $10,000 on a house valued at $515,000, hoping he could bid farewell to that rental. Another protestor was Nazmul Chowdhury, a gray-bearded man of fifty-six with gold-rimmed glasses who worked providing information to patients at Maimonides Medical Center. Standing in the rain with his wife, Baiby, trying to explain his predicament, he seemed overcome. He claimed he was supposed to close on his $485,000 house on March 31, 2004, but that the house was unfinished and his $10,000 deposit had been returned. “I've been in this country twenty-five years, and this is my dream,” he said. “I've never owned a house. I want my house back; I don't want the money.”

  There too was Rashida Khanam, the bakery worker who had been so exuberantly expectant six months before. Now her mood was very different, though respectful of American ways, she bottled up her grievances. But her daughter Tanzia Lokman, a twenty-one-year-old student at St. John's University, voiced them for her. She was particularly angry with Millennium's sales director, Shariar Uddin. “He promised us the house would be ready by January 2004,” she said, pointing out that the rent for their Astoria apartment could have gone toward a mortgage.

  The paradox was that Uddin was there with them, and had been the person who alerted me to the demonstration. He had quit Millennium because he was upset about what he called the company's deception, could not participate in an “injustice to my clients.” Yet some of his customers were furious wi
th him. “He's the biggest culprit,” Tanzia Lokman said. “He trapped us. He sold all of us on that company.”

  I called Danny Vaswani, the president of Millennium, who contended that the families had failed to satisfy income and other requirements needed for mortgages, and had exhausted several extensions. He denied that he was exploiting a surging market. But the protesting families brought letters from banks along with a mortgage broker, Shah S. Haque, to prove that they qualified handily for mortgages. Mohammed F. Hussein, a sales manager, and Hamid, the engineer, produced binding commitment letters from banks that their mortgages had been approved. “I think he's playing a trick so people leave him alone and he can sell it off at a bigger price,” Hamid said of Vaswani.

  A lawyer for some of the buyers, Dennis R. Sawh, said that the only outstanding issue they faced was the need for an appraisal, which usually requires the builder to complete the house. Since seventeen of the twenty-two houses had not been completed at that point and therefore had not received certificates of occupancy, his clients' mortgage commitments had expired, creating what Sawh said was a Catch-22.

  Uddin tried to mollify those disappointed with him; nevertheless, he was a powerful ally. “He's thinking these people don't have enough courage, enough support, and enough money to go to court,” Uddin said of his former boss. “These people are working hard, and their only dream is buying a house.”

  The issues were still bubbling at the start of 2007, and Uddin told me he too felt exploited. “They used me,” he said. “They used my contacts and my expertise to sell these houses.”

 

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