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

by Joseph Berger

  Yes, the remaining Italians are adapting. The real estate agencies on Eighteenth Avenue may bear Italian names, but Calabrese employs five Chinese-speaking and six Russian-speaking brokers among his staff of forty. Salvatore Alba, whose bakery had seen long lines for its cannoli and cheesecake ever since his Sicilian parents opened it in 1932, hired a Chinese American woman to sell Italian ices. “I figure if they can't speak English, we'll get someone to speak to them in Chinese,” Alba told me when we spoke in 2002. Aldo Studio now displays a large photograph of a Chinese bride and groom standing in front of a maroon Harley-Davidson. Churches that were once heavily Italian are now offering masses in Chinese.

  But the heartbreaking evidence of loss is everywhere. I revisited Bensonhurst in 2006 after a three-year absence and noticed that on Eighteenth Avenue, two of the espresso cafés had been turned into a Starbucks and a Dunkin' Donuts and that there were fewer Italian groceries. Older people told me they had to walk farther for the Italian products they need. The Feast of Santa Rosalia is still held every summer and is as teeming as ever, but only half the revelers and visitors are Italian, the merchants knowing that their sausages have become an American, not just an Italian treat. I was particularly saddened to see that the Alba Pastry storefront was covered in plywood, with construction proceeding on a replacement enterprise. It is history.

  The Starbucks was a melting pot, with a slender young man in a yarmulke sitting near a young Chinese man with an iPod in his ears clicking away at his laptop, and he was sitting next to two Russian women animatedly chatting. There was now a Chinese bakery, novelty store, beauty parlor, and pharmacy on Eighteenth Avenue I hadn't noticed before, and Healing Treasure, a shop that sold ginseng, angelica, and other Chinese medicinal herbs and offered acupuncture on site. In a local example of globalization, it was run by a short, wiry Russian man with a glinting earring. “Sometimes good ginseng is the difference between living and dying,” he told my wife.

  Bensonhurst's Italians are fanning out to New Jersey or Long Island or across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to Staten Island—which lets the grown-up children remain a short drive from their aging parents. Almost no Italians are moving in. Philip V. Cannistraro, acting executive director of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute at Queens College, studied migration in the last years of the 1990s and found that in all that time, fewer than 300 Italians had settled in Bensonhurst.

  It should be remembered that Bensonhurst, famously the setting for bus driver Ralph Kramden's apartment in TV's The Honeymooners, was always multiethnic, though from World War II to the 1980s, the other large group was Jewish (Buddy Hackett, Jerry Stiller, Elliott Gould, Harvey Fierstein, and Abe Burrows all hailed from Bensonhurst). But the ethnicity today is new. The Jews now are mostly Russian, as the groceries, fruit stores, and pharmacies with Russian lettering attest. Along the side streets, Chinese are on the ascent, buying up two-family houses made of relatively fire-resistant brick rather than wood for $400,000 and more. They relish the neighborhood's orderliness, its schools with seasoned teachers, and the subway lines that go straight to Chinatown. Under the el at Eighty-sixth Street, there is now a cavernous Chinese store, T & H Supermarket, that sells Chinese vegetables, dishware, live carp, and more exotic fish for people who like to see their fish wriggling just before it is cooked. Indeed, it is relatively safe to predict that a Chinatown, complete with dim-sum parlors, will prosper along Eighty-sixth Street, once a thoroughly Italian street.

  There have been tensions—in the public schools—where Italian children are a diminishing presence. Some Chinese parents feel Italian families have maneuvered to deny their children academic awards. In 2001, Schools Chancellor Harold Levy ordered an investigation into complaints that five Chinese students beginning their senior year were forced to leave Lafayette High School on the specious grounds that they had completed their graduation requirements. Chinese families felt some of the students might have had a shot at becoming the valedictorian, denying the honor to one of the seniors of Italian descent. Italians now compose less than 10 percent of Lafayette's student body, when in the 1960s they along with Jews composed the bulk of the school. Asian students have also been targets of bullies and of racial taunting—not necessarily by Italians but by black and Latino teenagers, who now make up a majority of Lafayette's student body. Asian leaders explain that Asian teenagers are smaller in stature, may not speak English breezily, and are taught to concentrate on getting good grades and not to confront bullies, get into trouble in school, or embarrass their families. The tensions have been so persistent and the school so ineffective that in 2006 Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein decided to close Lafayette along with four other troubled high schools. Each high school will be broken up into four or so small schools built around a theme such as science or the environment, with roughly 400 to 500 students in each small school.

  THERE HAVE ALSO BEEN cultural misunderstandings in Bensonhurst. As newcomers, Chinese work long hours and don't have time to attend to chores until late at night. Jerry Chiappetta, executive director of the Italian-American Coalition of Organizations, which runs centers for the elderly, told me about a squabble he had with a Chinese neighbor, someone he had first tried to befriend with a basket of homegrown tomatoes from his backyard. “He did admirable things with his home, but when he got into late-night hours using a jackhammer, I got a little irate,” Chiappetta said. “He stopped it, but it took me blowing my gasket one night.”

  But aside from such incidents and those centered on the young, Chinese in the neighborhood told me they liked Italians and have enjoyed relatively amicable relationships. “Italian people are friendly, easy to talk to,” said Lisa Pan, a Chinese woman who works at her family-owned business, Wei's Gift Shop, which draws Italian youngsters who prize its Yu-Gi-Oh! Japanese trading cards. Jeiying Franco, a Chinese woman who has taught physics at Lafayette since 1984, claimed that even the incidents at Lafayette were not representative of Italian feelings. “I don't think Italian people have any resentment toward the Chinese,” she said. “The Chinese are hardworking. They never bother their neighbors.” The Chinese also have traditions that endear them to the Italians, said Betty Lee, an administrator at the Brooklyn Chinese American Association. Just like Italians, they buy houses so different generations of Chinese families can live together.

  Bensonhurst has not yet acquired a Chinese character or even a Russian one—so dominant is the Italian—but it is only a matter of time. In this ferment, many Italians have lost their “comfort zone,” said Chiappetta. He continues to see houses on his block being sold to Asian families as the Italians retire or their children marry and leave home. Each year brings fewer neighbors of the kind who make wine in their garage or grow basil in their backyard gardens and then give him sprigs to plant in his yard so he can make pesto or flavor his tomatoes. “When you have an influx of people who don't share similar traditions, it's not a question of disliking them; it's just there is less in common,” he said. “And if you're on the border of should-I-move-or-not, it's one more reason to move.”

  Chiappetta, who has lived in Bensonhurst for forty years and graduated from the neighborhood's New Utrecht High School, recalled a time when he and his brothers lived with their parents, with their uncles and aunts nearby. But his twenty-five-year-old daughter, Kristin, lives on Long Island with his four grandchildren. When we spoke, he confided that he remained in the neighborhood principally to be near his elderly mother. “She should live to a hundred and twenty, but if she should go I would be less inclined to stay if Mom weren't around,” he said. His brother, a chiropractor, has already moved to a fancier Brooklyn neighborhood, though it is still close by, only a mile away, because he too wants to be near their aging mother.

  Italian families, who had perhaps the most close-knit ties of all the immigrants who came here a century ago, are dispersing. “There is a degree of sadness as people mourn the passing of an old life, an old world,” Cannistraro, the Queens College professor, told me. �
�One of the characteristics of older neighborhoods is that the people there tend to stay put. So what you're left with is a neighborhood of old people. There cannot be anything but sadness in watching that.”

  Calabrese takes all the changes in stride as another turn of the American immigration wheel. “You go back to the early 1900s; Italians were moving near the Bowery and you'd have two or three families sharing a two-bedroom apartment in order to buy a house,” he said. “Chinese are doing the same.” Fifteen years ago, when the Chinese began to move in, there were complaints from Italians. But as they realized that the Chinese were creating few problems, all that was left was rueful resignation.

  “The Feast of Santa Rosalia is still going on, but how much longer?” Calabrese said. “If you asked me fifteen years ago, I would have said it was going on forever. Now I don't know, and that makes me sad because I am Italian.”

  BENSONHURST

  WHERE TO GO

  Aldo Studio (“BIG FAT ITALIAN WEDDING” PHOTOGRAPHER) 6108 18TH AVENUE; (718) 236-6300; www.aldostudio.com

  18th Avenue, between 65th Street and 86th Street (YEAR-ROUND ITALIAN FEAST)

  SAS Italian Records (ITALIAN MUSIC, COFFEEMAKERS, AND PRODUCTS) 7113 18TH AVENUE; (718) 331-05 39

  T & H Supermarket (CHINESE MARKET AND EMPORIUM) 86TH STREET AND AVENUE U

  WHERE TO EAT

  II Colosseo (HOMESPUN ITALIAN) 7704 18TH AVENUE; (718) 234-3663

  Tomasso's (UPSCALE ITALIAN) 1464 86TH STREET; (718) 236-9883

  Villabate Pasticceria and Bakery (ORNATE CONFECTIONS) 7117 18TH AVENUE; (718) 331-8430; www.villabate.net

  Chapter 16

  Steadfast in Gerritsen Beach and Broad Channel

  NEW YORK IS AN EDGY CITY AND IT ALSO HAS AN EDGE—MILES of shoreline lapped by sea and river that surround a metropolis that after all is made up of two islands (Manhattan and Staten), the western end of another island (Brooklyn and Queens), and a large peninsula (the Bronx). Those shores on the city's edge happen to provide cunning hideaways for people who want to stay out of the New York limelight, the kind of New Yorkers who call Manhattan “the city” and rarely visit except to work. They like the end-of-the-world feeling of a place where they can go no farther, are smack up against the Atlantic Ocean or one of its lagoons, and know that out there lie the deep and the void. So, caught between razzle-dazzle and nothingness, they turn inward, stick to themselves, cultivate a crusty insularity that eyes outsiders with more than a smidgeon of suspicion, and would like nothing better than if strangers stayed strange. And yet they are as much New Yorkers as the city's 8.25 million other denizens.

  There are more than a dozen of these spots in New York, but two that I visited seemed the most undiscovered, unsung, and Brigadoon-like: Gerritsen Beach in Brooklyn and Broad Channel in Queens. They are alike in their inbred qualities, in the clannish way people relate to one another, and in their gently frayed appearance, as if people this far out don't really have to dress up for visitors. But each has a distinctive face and personality and idiosyncratic story line that trumpets its singularity.

  What struck me about Gerritsen Beach was how timeless it was. While the one unchanging truth about New York's neighborhoods is that they constantly change, Gerritsen Beach defies that rule. Tucked between the better-known fishing colony of Sheepshead Bay and suburban-like Marine Park, Gerritsen Beach is a portlike cluster of 2,300 closely packed bungalows and brick homes, a village where seagulls wheel across somber skies and a lone cormorant may perch for hours on a rotted piling. Its inhabitants include the families of firefighters, police officers, garbage collectors, subway conductors, “people who make everything work,” as one resident, Michael Taylor, Jr., likes to say. More recent settlers include bankers and traders, but they are often the children and grandchildren of Gerritsen Beach residents. Ethnically, most residents are of Irish, German, or Scandinavian stock. That profile was true twenty years ago, forty years ago, and even eighty years ago, when the neighborhood was first settled.

  Most New Yorkers have never heard of Gerritsen Beach, and that is just fine with its residents, who are insular to the bone. Lorraine DeVoy, the unofficial historian, a demure but steely woman who works as a dispatcher for the fire volunteers, estimates that one-third of the residents can claim a relative living in the neighborhood. She accounts for a big share of kin. Her grandparents moved to “the Beach” in the 1920s, her parents stayed on, and so did she. Now, DeVoy's son Michael, a captain in the fire department, lives on Abbey Court, her son Charles, who works for the Department of Environmental Protection, lives on Hymen Court, and a third son, Jimmy, lives with her and owns the local liquor store. Those sons have given her four grandchildren that constitute a fifth generation of Gerritsen Beach DeVoys.

  As a result of such ties, people look out for one another, dispelling the urban anonymity that some New Yorkers may find liberating but that most in Gerritsen Beach find chilling. “What I hated growing up here, I love about it today: Everybody knows everybody,” Joe Benecke, a third-generation “Beacher,” told me.

  Benecke is a former marine in his late forties who earns his living as a subway conductor. His grandfather, who delivered eggs and milk by horse and cart, moved to Gerritsen Beach from Coney Island and with his wife raised eleven children. Benecke's parents stayed on and raised him there. Benecke has a brother, an aunt, an uncle, two nieces, a nephew, and a dozen cousins with homes in Gerritsen. Clannishness like that makes for a certain busybody nosiness, and growing up, Benecke bridled at having neighbors who snitched to his parents when he cut school. But after living in Sheepshead Bay and Astoria, he missed the embrace of the Gerritsen weave and moved back. Now, as a father of three boys and two girls, he sees his neighbors' watchfulness in a new light. “If my son is doing something wrong, I know about it before he has a chance to come home and give me his side of the story,” he said. “Of course there are times when you want to keep something in the closet and you can't. But it's the price you pay for living here. And I'll pay that price. My laundry is not that dirty that I have to fear.”

  In sociological parlance, Gerritsen Beach is an enclave, and in twenty-first-century New York, tossed about by four decades of robust immigration, the number of stable enclaves is shrinking. In Queens, pockets such as Howard Beach, St. Albans, Broad Channel, Breezy Point, and Middle Village (virtually surrounded by cemeteries) still qualify. So do City Island, Woodlawn, and Harding Park (another colony of bungalows inhabited largely by Puerto Ricans) in the Bronx, and Mill Basin and Bergen Beach in Brooklyn. Enclaves tend to be either hard to reach or isolated, and Gerritsen Beach is both. There is practically only one way in—on Gerritsen Avenue. Residents need a car to get to Manhattan, or the willingness to take first the B31 bus to Kings Highway station, then a long ride on the Q line. “I had to leave the house at 7:20 to get to work at nine o'clock,” Anne Dietrich, the president of the Gerritsen Beach Property Owners Association, told me, recounting her daily odyssey when she worked as a secretary to a judge.

  Sharon Zukin, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, says that Gerritsen Beach and similar enclaves also display strong bonds among the generations; after they attend college or marry, children raised on the Beach crave returning to their parents' neighborhood, an outlook that has become almost un-American. In enclaves there are often strong ties forged by similar occupations or, as in Hasidic Williamsburg, by religious practices. Enclaves can also be economic, for instance, Manhattan's Silk Stocking district, too expensive for most people to afford, or Brooklyn's Brownsville, too run-down to attract all but the poor. But generally, enclaves are places where the residents want to live with kindred souls, and so they barely change. Gerritsen Beach ranked third among middle-class Brooklyn neighborhoods in displaying the least racial change between the 1990 and 2000 censuses; it was topped only by Mill Basin and Bergen Beach, its next-door neighbors.

  Gerritsen Beach's nearly 7,000 residents like the fact that their neighborhood is on the Shell Bank Creek and a perpendicular canal
. They can dock their cruisers and fishing boats alongside their homes and teach their children to row dinghies just about the same time they teach them to ride bicycles. Indeed, the water bonds fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, around boats and their overblown rituals. Gerritsen Beach's residents like the alphabetized narrow side streets— Abbey, Beacon, Canton, Dare, Eaton, Frank, Gain, and so on—that are safe for children to caper in. They like a neighborhood dominated by two churches, Resurrection Roman Catholic and St. James Evangelical Lutheran, which simplifies religious relations. They like sending their children either to the half-century-old elementary school, PS 277, or to Resurrection's parochial school; deep affection grows for those schools when children often have the same instructors the parents did and legends are passed along about eccentric gym teachers or cafeteria rituals. Gerritsen Beach's residents like having a Kiddie Beach for $285 a season, a Little League, and three or four homespun parades a year. They like a neighborhood where there's nothing to attract strangers—like popular restaurants; Gerritsen Avenue has a pizzeria, a bar, and three delis. They like a neighborhood where many men, including Benecke, consider it a moral obligation to serve in the military and work for the twenty-eight-member volunteer fire company, the only remaining volunteer company in Brooklyn.