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 27

by Joseph Berger


  But word about Broad Channel has gotten out, and outsiders have been buying. Properties that cost $10,000 in the early eighties now fetch $400,000, and developers are putting up brick houses. The island now styles itself as “the Venice of New York” because of canals that allow residents to live on the waterfront, swimming from childhood in the brackish waters and docking their boats there. They play in Broad Channel Park, with its well-tended tennis, handball, and basketball courts, and use the public library branch, which has a maritime rotunda with ceiling windows. The favorite gathering spot on Cross Bay Boulevard is a bar called Grassy Point, known as Grassy's, but for dining on something fancier than pizza or a bagel, residents go over a bridge to the Rockaways peninsula.

  Lawyers and stockbrokers have been moving in, subtly changing the character of a community known for the kind of rough-edged city workers responsible for a notorious incident in 1998. Broad Channel's Labor Day parade indulges in humor that satirizes multiethnic New York; Hasidim and Asians were skewered in previous parades. But the 1998 parade went too far. A police officer and two firefighters wore blackface and Afro wigs while riding on a float called “Black to the Future: Broad Channel 2098.” One firefighter spoofed the killing a few months before of James Byrd, Jr., a black Texan who had been dragged to his death behind a pickup truck. Mrs. Toborg told me, “I saw it go by and I knew it had crossed the line. You don't make fun of people dying.” Mayor Rudolph Giuliani fired the city workers.

  No one is moving faster to remake Broad Channel than Howard, who grew up fishing and swimming on the island that his great-great-grandfather had settled on. His father, Charles P. Howard, had worked as a truck driver for a portable-toilet company and started Call-A-Head in 1976 out of what had been a gas station. In 1981, when the business had just 150 plywood toilet booths, the father turned it over to his teenage son, who had grander ideas and artful ways of promoting them. “We didn't see eye to eye,” he said of his father, who still lives on the island. “He was very conservative. He didn't like to take chances.” With just a degree from Beach Channel High School, Howard built up the business from one that had just two employees to one that has fifty-six. It generally charges $165 a month for renting a portable toilet. That means that when all 4,000 toilets are being used, the business is grossing more than $660,000 a month.

  Howard, a father of three who proudly describes himself as a workaholic, thinks his business has boomed because of his “forte for marketing.” For construction sites, he paints toilet booths orange and gray to match the colors of bulldozers and concrete and charges 30 percent more. He has improvised a five-by-five-foot shed that he says amounts to a conventional bathroom, with a flush toilet, a sink, and a towel dispenser, that customers are also willing to pay more for. He feels he is bringing the same inventive design to his buildings, adorning the pharmacy, for example, with mahogany shelving and a cathedral ceiling painted light blue and soft pink. His decorating schemes might not pass muster on Park Avenue, but he is proud of them nonetheless.

  Take the drugstore. “When you walk in you'll think about being in an English library, but when you look up it will be like the Bahamas,” he said. “It's kind of like a Nordstrom. It's different than walking into a Target. It's a high-end store.”

  Howard projects a beguiling artlessness, as when he talks about the great pleasure he takes in finding catchy names for his properties. The pharmacy is being called Wharton's Apothecary because he noticed that the names of many great American companies—Wal-Mart, Woolworth's, Waldbaum's—start with the large letter W. He is calling a deli he is converting into an old-fashioned grocery Hamberry's, because it will sell meat and fruit. “Ham, which is the butcher, and berry, which is the market,” was the way he put it. “It's going to be a grocery store like a hundred years ago.” A café he plans to renovate will be called Victoria's Café. “Very Victorian,” he explained. “It also has the word ‘victory’ in it. It's very hard to lose with the word ‘victory.’” His yacht is named Both Ends, another playful allusion to his main business.

  His motive for developing parts of Broad Channel is not just to make money, he assured me. “I'm here to make art,” he said. “If it makes money, fine. That's the key to creating—someone sees it and does it. That's what makes the world.” Then he added, with shameless nobility, “It's the greatest thing a person can do—to leave something behind.”

  In a neighborhood where he has donated lighting and bleachers for sandlot baseball, Howard has some supporters, including Seth Silverman, a lawyer who thinks some of the gripers are in essence Luddites. “It's the old-timers versus the new-timers, and what the new-timers are going to do to change everything,” he said. But Howard doesn't seem rattled even by his detractors. When they wonder whether his pharmacy will prosper in a world of chain drugstores that accept numerous prescription plans, Howard counters that people will shop there “because it's going to be an event to go into that store.” They will pay more for his shampoo, he predicts. Indeed, he suggested, figuring out how to sell pricier items will be a piece of cake for someone with his track record. “If you can sell a toilet,” he said, “you can sell anything.”

  BROAD CHANNEL

  WHERE TO GO

  Call-A-Head (PORTABLE TOILET RENTALS) 304 CROSS BAY BOULEVARD; (718) 634-2085; www.callahead.com

  WHERE TO EAT

  THERE'S NOTHING BUT BAGELS AND PIZZA ON THE ISLAND, BUT PLENTY ACROSS THE BRIDGE IN THE ROCKAWAYS, INCLUDING SOME WATERFRONT SPOTS.

  Chapter 17

  Factories of Revival Around the Town

  IN THE SUMMER OF 2004, A HIPSTER NAMED TODD FATJO STEPPED out on the roof of a onetime piano factory in the notorious South Bronx and fell in love with the jagged panorama—the grid of bridges along the Harlem River, the blur and purr of three highways, the rooftop water tanks, the gaudy billboards, the hulking housing projects. Most people would not find that view to their liking, but Fatjo, a rangy late-twentyish man raised in the foothills of the Catskills, was smitten, like Beauty with the Beast. “It's great at sunset,” Fatjo told me a year later. “I like the industrial scene, the metal, the brick. I've seen enough sunsets over mountains.”

  Fatjo, who supports himself by deejaying and other odd jobs, is part of a crop of improbable newcomers who are making the South Bronx a vanguard address. Hundreds of artists, Web designers, photographers, journalists, even doctors, many of them refugees from the rising rents of Brooklyn's Williamsburg and Manhattan's East Village, have been seduced by the mix of industrial lofts and ninteenth-century row houses in the Port Morris and Mott Haven neighborhoods. Some now even call the area SoBro. Yes, it's the very South Bronx notorious for squalor and arson, the very South Bronx where Tom Wolfe set the opening of The Bonfire of the Vanities, in which a Master of the Universe driving with his mistress in his Mercedes-Benz gets lost on creepy Bruckner Boulevard and triggers a race-relations nightmare.

  Well, Bruckner Boulevard and the blocks radiating off it now boast two tidy bars that a Master of the Universe would feel comfortable having a drink in, including one, the Bruckner Bar and Grill, that serves pear and arugula salad. There are a dozen antique shops; a new lively art gallery, Haven Arts, to join three older ones; and a wannabe European café that sells bourgeois bohemian delights such as croissants and veggie wraps.

  What is happening in the industrial lofts of the South Bronx is happening as well in fabled factory neighborhoods such as Brooklyn's Red Hook and Gowanus and the Garment Center in Manhattan. The hunger to live in a newly vibrant—and safe—New York, particularly in neighborhoods a short subway ride from midtown, has turned roving eyes to the noisy, smelly, greasy, ratty places no one would have chosen to live in a few decades ago. And they are choosing those neighborhoods not just out of need, but out of desire. These young homesteaders don't cotton to streamlined Trump apartment houses or picket-fenced suburban homes, but prefer the authenticity of a 1950s cityscape. They are moving alongside a canal, the Gowanus, which despite improvements still has a nasty sm
ell when the wind blows with a certain malice, into the Garment Center, where sewing machines still shriek, and into a forgotten bleak Brooklyn corner, Red Hook, where the rumble of water-front-bound trucks over cobblestone streets is background music.

  In the South Bronx and Red Hook, they are moving next door to public housing projects, once known as sources of neighborhood crime, but now, with crime so low, the buildings are seen as treasure troves of ethnic diversity, experience, and adventure, just as polyglot immigrant neighborhoods are. Perhaps it's the result of growing up in less segregated neighborhoods and attending more polychrome schools and colleges, but young people today simply are far more willing than their parents or grandparents to live with people different from them. That explains the increasing presence of whites and Asians in the brown-stones of Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant and the increasing presence of blacks from Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in the Victorian houses of Ditmas Park. The activity in New York both spurs and mirrors what is happening in older sections of such cities as Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, and Philadelphia, as younger people spurn the well-groomed acres of the suburbs they grew up in for the electricity of city living.

  The trend testifies to the fact that immigration isn't the only force that is reshaping the city in dramatic ways. In fact, it is not too farfetched to say the two trends are related. As the city becomes more of a patchwork of peoples, it is also becoming more of a patchwork of places to live. As immigrants infuse the oddest corners of the city, young men and women are injecting themselves into places young people would not have chosen to live decades ago. Just as almost any person, no matter what color or language, is increasingly welcome almost anywhere in the city, so anyplace with four walls becomes suitable for a dwelling—with a bit of imagination.

  It all began with SoHo, which proved in the 1970s that artists would live among the pounding, grinding, and dust of machinery if they could have charming buildings—in SoHo's case, the fabled cast-iron warehouses—with acres of space and tall windows that soaked in light. When lawyers and stockbrokers followed in the 1980s and 1990s, and boutiques, galleries, and restaurants started cropping up, developers and city officials took notice. They learned to stop making a neat division between places where people live and places where they work. Much of the movement was driven by the decay in manufacturing. In 2004, the New York State Department of Labor counted 120,492 industrial employees in the city, while a decade before there were twice that many. The decline has left lofts going begging for tenants, while a booming residential market spurred landlords to improvise ways of converting them into living spaces.

  In the South Bronx, the area beguiling artists and Internet jockeys is still dominated by factories such as the Zaro's Bread Basket bakery and warehouses such as Shleppers Moving and Storage as well as by car washes and gas stations, all framed by the elevated Major Deegan Expressway and ramps for the Willis and Third Avenue bridges. In the 1970s the neighborhood went into a tailspin of torched buildings, fore-closures, and runaway crime that led to its christening by police as Fort Apache. The embarrassing nadir came during the second game of the 1977 World Series at Yankee Stadium when Howard Cossell noticed ABC's camera-toting helicopter focusing on a fire consuming an abandoned elementary school west of the ballpark and told the national audience, “There it is, ladies and gentlemen; the Bronx is burning.” But during the next three decades, programs by the city and church and nonprofit groups reclaimed scorched and abandoned buildings and built thousands of new ranch houses and imitation town houses on vacant lots. When the Giuliani administration's tough policing caused crime to plunge, people who never would have thought of the Bronx as a place to live reconsidered.

  On Bruckner Boulevard specifically, a mixed-use rezoning of five industrial blocks in 1997 created at least 200 new apartments and other homes. Most of the new tenants were single people or childless couples, so the quality of the local schools—among the city's worst—was not an issue. By 2000, Linda Cunningham, an Ohio-born sculptor whose outdoor installations have been exhibited near the United Nations, felt secure enough to buy a five-story loft on East 140th Street with two partners for $660,000. “When I got off the subway, white faces were distinctive,” she said. “Someone would stop me and ask if I needed directions.” Now she feels comfortable getting off the subway at 2 a.m. She notices that a local Western Beef supermarket has accommodated the tastes of the newcomers, selling alfalfa sprouts, mesclun, and “a decent yogurt.”

  “I get to the Metropolitan Museum much faster than I could from SoHo,” she told me as she boasted of another neighborhood asset, the number 6 train, which is a quick ride to Lexington Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street.

  Now anyone strolling on Bruckner can see boxes of geraniums and satellite dishes adorning the industrial windows of a five-story redbrick former piano factory known as the Clocktower. It was converted into seventy-five apartment lofts by Isaac Jacobs, a Hasidic Jew, experienced with adapting lofts in East Williamsburg. The Clocktower lofts rent for between $1,000 and $2,000 per month, according to Fatjo, who helps pay his rent by working for the landlord as a real estate broker of sorts, showing apartments to young artists and bohemians. Jacobs explains this odd symbiosis between a Hasid and a hipster by saying, “He talks their language.” Partly as a result of this new influx, the neighborhood's ranks of college-educated residents grew by 86.5 percent between 1990 and 2000.

  The artists and hipsters are also drawn by the long-standing Latino and African American culture—sidewalk dominoes games, well-tended vacant-lot gardens, restaurants with fried plantains—that give the neighborhood a populist authenticity that cannot be matched in Manhattan's decorous precincts. Porfirio Díaz, who owns the Maybar Cafe and Piano Bar on Third Avenue, put it simply: New customers are “very happy with Spanish food because the prices are low.”

  The artists are also happy to have sidewalk entrepreneur Angel Villalona. For sixteen years this Dominican immigrant has been selling papayas, coconuts, and mangoes from the side of a battered truck. He also makes batidas—fruit milkshakes—that he stirs in a riveting ritual that would probably not pass muster with the health department. He yanks the cord on a greasy generator propped on the sidewalk, and it feeds electricity to an Osterizer that whips fruit and milk into a tasty malted. One customer, Charles Bachelor, a truck driver who immigrated from Antigua, told me, charmingly describing white Americans as Europeans, “White Europeans used to be afraid to walk in this neighborhood. Now they walk comfortably.”

  The newcomers, some of whom have spent much of their lives abroad or in the hinterlands and are not put off by the Bronx's outdated reputation, say they have felt welcomed. Still, no one expects the area to become another TriBeCa anytime soon, because the South Bronx has a longtime population of poorer Latinos and blacks that are braced to resist gentrification that will price them out of the neighborhood. “It's going to attract a class of people whose incomes and lifestyles are going to be radically different from those in the South Bronx, which is one of the poorest areas in the city,” Hector Soto, a lawyer active in developmental issues, told me.

  Many of those fears coalesced around a rezoning measure passed by the city council in March 2005 that essentially added another eleven square blocks of Port Morris to the 1997 rezoning. Soto and other critics—backed by newly settled artists and professionals—fought in vain for provisions reserving half of any new apartments for low-income families, losing to those who felt set-asides would hinder development.

  Now a few longtime locals are defending the rezoning because they want the lofts as well. José Baez, a thirty-six-year-old photographer who grew up in the Bronx, rents a 1,000-square-foot loft in the Clocktower for $1,350 a month. “For what you get here, you get a closet in Manhattan,” he said. And local merchants are thankful for the infusion of new money. Ronald Trinidad, a twenty-seven-year-old Dominican immigrant, started the Open House Café a year ago with his partner, Eric Beroff, and sells croissants to artists heading to the subway at 13
8th Street. “Lots of people come here from downtown Brooklyn and ask me, ‘Where do I rent?’” he told me.

  Paradoxically, there are newcomers who worry that gentrification will lead to an unappetizing blandness that will leave the neighborhood as mainstream as SoHo, with its branches of Bloomingdale's and the Gap. Fatjo, a canny trend spotter, is already worried that the South Bronx may soon be played out. “This neighborhood is already happening,” Fatjo said. “I may have to move soon.”

  SOUTH BRONX

  WHERE TO GO

  Antique District (A DOZEN ANTIQUE SHOPS) ALEXANDER AVENUE AND BRUCKNER BOULEVARD

  Clocktower (ONETIME PIANO FACTORY, NOW APARTMENTS) 112 LINCOLN AVENUE

  Haven Arts (GALLERY) 235 EAST 141ST STREET; (718) 585-5753

  WHERE TO EAT

  Blue Ox Bar (MUSIC AND DRINKS) THIRD AVENUE AND 139TH STREET; (718) 402-1045

  Bruckner Bar and Grill (PLEASANT RESTAURANT) 1 BRUCKNER BOULEVARD; (718) 665-2001

 

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