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

by Joseph Berger

  Gerritsen Beach was named for Wolfert Gerritsen, an adventurous Dutchman who in the 1630s heeded Henry Hudson's call to settle his newly discovered patch of earth and built a flour mill on Gerritsen Creek, now Marine Park. (The mill stood there until the 1930s, when it burned down.) Until 1920 the only houses were occupied by squatters, but then a developer imagined the area's prospects as a summer resort and packed it full of one-story bungalows with pitched roofs and dormers, though no basements, backyards, or sewage lines. For many years, Gerritsen Beach was considered not much better than a shantytown. Still, the houses were snapped up by Irish and German families of modest income like Lorraine DeVoy's grandparents. The grandfather, Cormac Divine, had a government job, but he bought a summer house at 9 Ebony Court in 1924. “My grandmother heard she could put two hundred dollars down,” DeVoy told me. “That's how the Irish and Germans moved into Gerritsen Beach. It was something they could afford.”

  Another set of grandparents, John and Catherine Bennis, had already moved to a house on Dare Court in 1922. Four of the Bennis children bought houses in Gerritsen Beach when they grew up, and so did three of the Divine children. Lorraine DeVoy was born in Gerritsen Beach in 1938. She remembered returning from school, changing into a bathing suit, and going swimming with friends at the end of Gerritsen Avenue—something she did for years, until outsiders began to use the spot as a dumping ground.

  Bungalows were soon winterized, particularly during the housing shortage that followed World War II. Developers capitalized on year-round buyers and built two-story homes north of the canal. In the 1950s, after a campaign by the civic association, the city built sewers and paved them over, and paid residents $2,500 apiece to have their homes elevated with hydraulic jacks to the new street grade. The newer section boasts sidewalks, something the older section does not.

  Through the Depression and the war years, and for many years afterward, medical services were provided by one man—Dr. Louis Baron-berg, a distinguished-looking physician who made $3 house calls in a Thunderbird. One writer on a Gerritsen Beach blog, Annette Marchan McKean, remembered gashing her knee after disobediently riding her bike when her parents weren't home, then running to Dr. Baronberg. “Dr. Baronberg put three stitches in it and after I told him the circumstances, he covered it with a Band-Aid and told me to keep it dry and come back in a week to have the stitches taken out. Never told my parents and never asked for a penny of money.” Until the end of the twentieth century, Gerritsen Beach residents borrowed books out of a storefront library branch on Gerritsen Avenue. But they fought for and won a well-stocked modern building with a clock tower, a cathedral ceiling, and a maritime view out a two-story window. It has become the unofficial community center. “They fought for everything they got,” DeVoy said. “Nothing came easy. They found in fighting for the community they improved the community.”

  Those early homeowners kindled a rebellious, do-it-yourself spirit that persists today. A good illustration came when residents wanted to create a memorial on the Marine Park baseball field to Lawrence G. Veling, who was killed in the World Trade Center collapse. Another native firefighter and four other residents were also killed, but Veling's ties to local baseball were special. Veling had grown up on Eton Court and for a time he and a partner operated a deli on Gerritsen Avenue. Like many other Beachers, he worked two jobs—as a fireman with Engine 235 in Bedford-Stuyvesant and as a high school custodian. A burly, balding man with a gravelly voice and kind face, he liked doing guy things—playing softball and coaching Little League—but he was also a man mushy enough to delight his two-year-old, Kevin, with his suddenly discovered knack for drawing characters from the Nickelodeon show Blue's Clues. “I knew my kids would grow up to be great adults because they had a great father,” Diane Veling told an interviewer for a snapshot of her husband that became part of The New York Times' “Por-traits of Grief.” When he was killed at forty-four, he left behind three children, Ryan and Cynthia as well as Kevin. Residents felt it only natural to honor him in one of the ways he honored the community—on the baseball field. But the effort to build a monument got mired in red tape. So did the plucky residents take that passively? No, they brought in a cement truck and bulldozer and built it themselves.

  The barriers that have kept Gerritsen Beach isolated have attracted a certain human specimen—people who are not all that dazzled by Manhattan's glitz. George R. Broadhead, a retired advertising executive who left the Beach in disenchantment when he was younger but returned in 2001, told me of one such incurious neighbor. The man came up to him and asked somewhat sheepishly, “You go to the city a lot—do you know where the Metropolitan Museum is? I got a nephew visiting from Ireland.”

  “I had to explain to him how to get to the Met,” Broadhead told me. “When I was a kid it was that way in Gerritsen Beach.”

  That provincialism is nurtured by the fact that when houses come on the market, they are usually passed around among relatives or friends. Those clapboard wood-frame houses on lots typically forty-five feet by fifty feet had an average value of $189,320 in 2000, which makes them affordable by Gerritsen Beach residents, whose median household income was $52,582. All that tight-knitting gives the Beach a distinctive pioneer camaraderie that residents boast of to an extent that residents of, say, the Upper East Side would never do. Doreen Greenwood, a local real estate broker, told me, “You can live in an area and that's all it is, but Gerritsen Beach is a true neighborhood. If you go away, people will take care of your dog and water your plants if you give them a key.” Greenwood, a woman in her early fifties who drives the volunteers' fire truck, grew up in Gerritsen Beach in a two-bedroom bungalow on Eaton Court. Three children slept in one bedroom, two in another, and her parents slept in the living room on a pullout couch. When it was time to start her own family, she didn't want to leave and bought her own house in 1975. “We didn't want to live anyplace else,” she said. “It was great growing up. There was always something to do—either fishing, boating, or playing ball. And now my children are buying houses and having children in Gerritsen Beach.” She counts two grown sons, a daughter, two grandchildren, and a sister as neighbors.

  The flip side of all that togetherness is a wariness of outsiders. Beachers acknowledge that not everyone would feel welcome in so clannish a neighborhood. “Anyplace that small and close-knit, you're going to have a distrust of outsiders,” DeVoy says. “We like our community to stay the way it is. Doesn't everybody?” Still, Gerritsen Beach residents deny that they willfully exclude people, and when I checked with the city's Commission on Human Rights, officials there told me they had no record of any overt discrimination by Gerritsen Beach homeowners or brokers.

  Yet Gerritsen Beach is changing, however imperceptibly. The 2000 census counted 293 Hispanics, 151 Asians, and 27 blacks among the 6,877 residents, numbers larger than in the 1990 census. Although the number of residents who had not graduated from high school still stood at a hefty 16 percent, the number of college graduates had increased: 15.5 percent of residents twenty-five or older have a BA degree or better. “Up to the seventies, most people here were firemen, sanitation men, police, post office, or DEP,” DeVoy said. “It's only been since the seventies that you had kids who grew up, went to college, and would move out of the Beach and do other work.” Rising home values—winterized houses on the water can fetch $400,000 or more—are also spurring more residents to put their homes on the market, with some going to stockbrokers and lawyers. And changing tastes are also changing the composition of the Beach. Four of DeVoy's sisters didn't want to live in a place where “your mother-in-law is in your house all the time” and settled in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. “You used to go to church and you knew everybody,” lamented DeVoy. “Now you don't.”

  Broadhead, a blue-eyed descendant of the English and Dutch colonists who is now in his early seventies, forsook Gerritsen Beach after serving as a marine in the Korean War, where he was wounded on the day of the truce and awarded a Silver Star. He wanted out because
he remembered the Beach as the kind of neighborhood that “if you were to tell the kids, ‘I went to a museum,’ they'd say, ‘What are you, a sissy?’” Growing up there, he would sneak away to readings by e.e. cummings at the 92nd Street Y (he owns a painting by cummings of his wife). After graduating from St. John's University, he spent much of his adult life as an advertising executive for the Newhouse newspaper chain and other publications, living in Greenwich, Connecticut, Nashville, and Beverly Hills, marrying three times, and fathering a son and three daughters. All the while, he collected first editions by writers such as John O'Hara, Robert Benchley, and T. S. Eliot.

  But after his mother died, he moved back into her house in Gerritsen Beach. He found he liked hanging out among the gruff-talking, jocular veterans at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Hall who understood his brutal war experiences. He even became the unit's commander. He was surprised to find less narrowness of outlook and was pleased to see what he called Gerritsen Beach's “creeping diversity.” There was a Chinese American neighbor next door on Knapp Street and a black former marine sergeant in the VFW hall. Although he frequents such Manhattan restaurants as Balthazar, he also likes dining again at Brennan & Carr, a nearly seventy-year-old Irish tavern just outside Gerritsen on Nostrand Avenue and famous in southern Brooklyn for its hot roast beef sandwiches dipped in broth. “When we started taking girls out to the movies, some of us thought we were more sophisticated taking them here,” he told me over a lunch of hot roast beef. Most of all he was pleasantly surprised by how much he liked, now that he was older, being in a neighborhood where people knew him in their marrow, knew him, despite his age, as “Belle's son,” and could gently scold him, “Georgie, you need a haircut!”

  “From Beverly Hills, where I used to eat at Spago, the Grill, and Musso and Frank's,” he said, “I walked into a place where people called you Georgie.”

  GERRITSEN BEACH

  WHERE TO GO

  Gerritsen Beach Public Library (CHECK OUT THE VIEW FROM THE PICTURE WINDOW) 280 GERRITSEN AVENUE; (718) 368-1435

  Gerritsen Beach Volunteer Fire Department 52 SEBA AVENUE; (718) 332-9292

  WHERE TO EAT

  Brennan & Carr Restaurant (IRISH TAVERN KNOWN FOR BROTH-DIPPED ROAST BEEF SANDWICHES) 3432 NOSTRAND AVENUE; (718) 646-9559

  Victoria Pizzeria 2716 GERRITSEN AVENUE; (718) 891-9496

  BROAD CHANNEL, AN ISLAND of tumbledown bungalows in the middle of Jamaica Bay, has much in common with Gerritsen Beach. It too is a neighborhood peopled by blue-collar civil servants who like to live around boats, and it too is fairly inbred. But only it has Charles W. Howard, the man who styles himself as the duke of this Queens duchy by dint of the fortune he has made in a rather unconventional enterprise.

  Howard rents out portable toilets, a business he operates right on Broad Channel. Call-A-Head Portable Toilets is one of the state's biggest suppliers for construction sites, rock concerts, and, yes, outdoor weddings and bar mitzvahs. Running such a business in a waterside bedroom community on the edge of the protected marshland of Jamaica Bay has earned him more than a few detractors, but by the time I met him, he was drawing even more criticism with his outsize ambitions to remake Broad Channel itself. He wanted to reshape the occasionally woebegone mile-long island into something closer in splendor to Newport, Rhode Island, or at least to Cape May, New Jersey. He wanted to build shops, restaurants, and other amenities that, as he put it, might recreate the elegance of the Gilded Age yet have the fun of Disney World. “My goal is to make Broad Channel like America's great seashore communities,” he told me. “And the reason I'm doing it here is because I can't think of a better place to live.”

  A stout man in his early forties who carries his girth with Orson Welles–like confidence, he clearly sees himself as the island's benefactor and speaks of his role in Broad Channel as one of noblesse oblige. “I want to help the town I grew up in,” he said. “I want to protect the town.” What frustrates him, he said, is that neighbors unhappy with his toilets are casting aspersions on his development plans. They accuse him of building flamboyant castles out of character with an island that has all the trappings of a forgotten fishing village—ramshackle bungalows standing on stilts over marshland, backyard canals clogged with boats. Howard thinks their real gripe is with his toilets and that they should get over it. “This company's what's rebuilding Broad Channel, and a lot of people who don't like portable toilets don't appreciate that,” he said. “People will appreciate it in the end, but people should appreciate it now.”

  In Broad Channel, it's hard not to appreciate Call-A-Head. A visitor entering the island over the only northern approach—a bridge spanning Jamaica Bay and its wildlife refuge—will immediately see some of the company's 4,000 fiberglass booths and a fleet of stainless-steel pumping trucks bearing the slogan “We're #1 at Picking Up #2.” Howard estimates that he is New York State's biggest supplier of portable toilets, though rivals dispute that assessment. Still, Call-A-Head's more than $10 million-a-year business has allowed Howard to become Broad Channel's Donald J. Trump. He owns twenty properties that will eventually include an ornate pharmacy, medical offices for eight doctors, and a Venetian café. (When I visited, the island did not have a single drugstore, doctor, or sit-down restaurant.) He also envisions opening a year-round Christmas store and a hotel to be called Howard's End Inn, not after the E. M. Forster novel but because, he said without a shred of irony, “it's at the end of town and my name is Howard.”

  The toilet business has been good to him, giving him the island's most opulent home, a $1.5 million house with an indoor pool and Jacuzzi that he says was inspired by those Newport mansions and Disney pavilions, a forty-six-foot yacht moored right alongside that sleeps six, and a Jaguar and two Porsches that help him tool around the island with the swagger of its leading citizen. While his critics have not been especially vocal—in a neighborhood of just 3,000 residents, people know one another and choose words carefully—many do complain that Howard's structural confections dwarf the landscape.

  Frank Harnisher, a retired New York Stock Exchange broker who was born in Broad Channel, told me, “Everything he builds is like a castle. I don't want to be criticizing him, but he's worked hard and he wants to leave his mark.” Then there are the next-door neighbors of Call-A-Head. “At times the smell is obnoxious,” said John F. McCambridge, eighty-seven, a veteran wounded in the Battle of the Bulge who still runs an accounting and insurance office on the main street. “My wife was here for sixteen months sick with cancer and I'd be there screaming.”

  It's not just neighbors who have objected. Investigators for the State Department of Environmental Conservation have accused the company of washing potties next to Jamaica Bay's wetlands, and city inspectors have issued the business seventeen summonses since 2000. In November 2004, Call-A-Head reached an agreement with the Queens district attorney's office in which the company, without admitting wrongdoing, paid fines of $100,000 to clear charges of polluting protected wetlands.

  Howard is unrepentant. “We've been under the microscope for twenty years,” he said. Indeed, he thinks there's a certain degree of envy by the city inspectors. “You can't have a city worker who gets sixty or seventy thousand dollars a year relate to me,” he said. “It's a power issue.” He took me on a tour of his toilet business and vigorously argued that waste collected in the portable toilets was pumped out at sewage treatment plants; then the potties were steam-cleaned in Broad Channel, with the dirty water draining down catch basins that lead to the sewer system. In his earthy way, Howard volunteered that his business might be out of place in Beverly Hills, but Broad Channel is no Beverly Hills. “Nobody likes portable toilets until they have to run into one,” he said, adding that when his company supplies portable toilets for an event such as a Bruce Springsteen concert at Shea Stadium, “It helps the environment.”

  There is something utterly disarming about his guilelessness. He has adopted the language of the architects he deals with, throwing around such design terms
as “vernacular” as if he were building a skyscraper instead of a drugstore on a low-rise street. “We wanted this to become an anchor,” he said of the drugstore. His concepts are borrowed from trips he's made to places like Disney World, where as someone growing up in modest Broad Channel he was clearly awed. “The thinking is that by putting in old-style architecture it would start a renaissance that would elevate Broad Channel's style,” he told me. He also has wistful notions of what Broad Channel could be, a neighborly, Frank Capra kind of small town that Broad Channel never was. His reason for building the mansionlike medical center—it will have six cupolas and fifteen gables—is telling. “I want to make the island a place where you can hear, ‘Good morning, Doctor.’ You don't hear that now.”

  It is a fair bet that most New Yorkers have never been to Broad Channel, which lies between Howard Beach and the Rockaways and is connected to them by two bridges and the A train. As Jamaica Bay's only inhabited island, it was until late into the last century a backwater whose inhabitants were derided as “swamp rats.” They lived in fishermen's shacks and other run-down dwellings that they seldom bothered to fix up since they were tenants on land owned by the city, which had visions of the island as a preserve. What the residents had, though, was what some called “a poor man's paradise”—long, misty views of the Manhattan skyline, emerald marshes, and skies graced by the flight of egrets, oyster catchers, and laughing gulls.

  All that began to change after 1982, when the city allowed residents to buy their properties for bargain-basement prices. Homeowners winterized bungalows and added second stories. Among those who bought shortly after the city surrendered the island were Fred and Barbara Toborg. She edits the newsletter of the northeast chapter of the American Littoral Society, which works to protect the seashore. He retired as a gym teacher and soccer coach at Trinity High School in Manhattan, where his players included John McEnroe. They live on the edge of a marsh where herons and egrets feast and where the rhythms of daily life are often governed by the tides. The marsh they look out on is unusual because it is bisected by the tracks for the A-line subway and every few minutes the train roars through.“This is a field in Kansas and that's the Transcontinental Railroad going by,” Toborg likes to say about his view. The Toborgs cautioned me about not misunderstanding Broad Channel. “To live out here you have to be of a certain mentality,” Mrs.Toborg said. “We're not a neat community. One yard is grass, another cement. No two houses are alike. It's very individualistic.”