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

by Joseph Berger

  360 (FRENCH BISTRO) 360 VAN BRUNT STREET; (718) 246-0360

  “In the summer, you can hear the water lapping against the docks and the foghorns and the ships going by,” he said. “But if you're going to have thousands of cars, the quality of life is about to change.”

  THE GOWANUS CANAL often stinks and is almost always spotted with slicks of oil. The streets alongside it are practically deserted, the silence broken by the rumble of concrete mixers and oil tankers or the screech of buzz saws. Graffiti abounds, and no one would use the word “harmonious” for the landscape, where ramshackle wood-frame and brick row houses are tucked higgledy-piggledy among factories and two housing projects.

  Yet many of the 14,500 people whose homes flank the canal love the neighborhood's rough, anarchic feel. They want to preserve a vanishing urban way of life where lunch-bucket workers lived among their work-places. “To me, it's comfortable. It's not phony; it's not pristine,” said Linda Mariano, who has lived in a brick row house in Gowanus with her husband since 1974. “It's a mishmash, and I like the variety. You take two steps and you're someplace else.”

  In recent years, residents of this slender neighborhood squeezed between prosperous brownstone Brooklyn neighborhoods such as Park Slope and Carroll Gardens have had to grapple with a number of proposals to convert Gowanus factories and warehouses into apartments. The reason is the residents' own success in getting the city to clean up the inky waters of the mile-long canal. Already, striped bass and jellyfish swim in its waters and canoeists paddle along the surface. New benches dot the canal's banks and cormorants perch on its old pilings. With the canal more attractive, landlords of factory lofts, sniffing the higher prices they can command for apartments, are holding their industrial properties off the market or offering the briefest of leases.

  So the working-class residents who do not want their neighborhood of oil depots, brass factories, and workers' homes transformed by apartments with Sub-Zero refrigerators and Viking ranges have formed impromptu groups such as Friends and Residents of Greater Gowanus, or FROGG. They have been joined in opposing the conversions by sympathetic residents in Carroll Gardens such as Celia Cacace, who savors her family's blue-collar stripes. “My sister Linda worked in Bush Terminal making envelopes,” said Cacace, who is sixty-nine. “My brother Ralphie worked cleaning septic tanks in ships. Tony, he's the one born before me, he got a job in Long Island City for a sheet metal factory. My sister Esther, she passed away, she worked for American Can Company.” She wants the hundreds of factories in Gowanus and nearby Red Hook to be able to provide jobs for a new generation of immigrants and blue-collar workers. “They call it gentrification; I call it genocide,” she said. “They're killing neighborhoods.”

  So far, these activists have successfully blocked requests for variances to convert a four-story warehouse at Butler Street, a graffiti-scarred plant at Union Street, and an export-import company on Third Street into apartments. When we spoke, they were gearing up to fight one of the city's more well-heeled development firms, a venture of the billion-aire diamond entrepreneur Lev Leviev and the builder Shaya Boymel-green. The developers want to tear down a factory and dig out a chemically contaminated patch of ground known as a brownfield to create Gowanus Village, a large condominium complex of loft buildings and town houses.

  FROGG and its allies are defying powerful trends that view Gowanus as a reinvigorated residential bridge from Park Slope on the east to Carroll Gardens on the west and Boerum Hill on the northwest. When I visited the neighborhood in 2005, a 100-room Comfort Inn was rising on the edge of Gowanus, and Whole Foods, the giant gourmet purveyor, had cleared a nearly square-block space at Third Street for its first Brooklyn market. Gowanus is also less than a half mile away from the Atlantic Yards, railroad yards where the developer Bruce Ratner is planning to build a basketball arena for the Nets and sixteen buildings with 7,300 apartments, a project that has drawn a determined opposition from some neighborhood groups.

  Neighborhood activists were heartened that Gowanus was included in the Bloomberg administration proposal for industrial business zones. But they were upset that the draft maps protected only southern Gowanus, not the blocks north of Third Street where the conversion of lofts into residences has been proposed. Carl Hum, director of the Mayor's Office for Industrial and Manufacturing Businesses, defends the plan as a way to strike a balance between places to live and places to work in a city with a growing population.

  Not everybody in the Gowanus area opposes more housing. Some residents, such as Sandra Mineo, a longtime homeowner, are tired of the perennially ragged look of the neighborhood and think ugly properties should be gussied up—even if that means making them residential. “I'd rather see something done with it than nothing done with it,” Mineo told me. Buddy Scotto, founder of Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation, a nonprofit group, has been pressing for converting buildings into housing for the elderly and moderate-income families. Gowanus' days as a manufacturing hub are passing, he claims, because its loft buildings don't have the tall, cavernous, column-free spaces that forklifts can easily navigate. “These industrial buildings are obsolete,” he said. “Nobody wants to load elevators anymore.”

  But Thomas of Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Development argues that Gowanus industry is still vibrant. Her group's survey in 2005 counted 500 industrial firms, a 25 percent rise since 1997, and found that only 3 percent of industrial spaces were vacant. What she doesn't acknowledge easily is that many newer occupants are hardly industrial at all—blueprint-drafting firms and costume assemblers. And while the debate rages on, landlords are finding artists and other illegal tenants to live in their lofts, trends that often presage full-blown conversion to residences. Twelve artists live legally in a former factory building at 280 Nevins Street. One of those is Margaret Maugenest, who moved from SoHo in 1984. “SoHo was an interesting neighborhood,” she said. “You had the trucks and the rag industry. You had the artists, who are workers also because that's what we are. Now you have a neighborhood that doesn't have much character.”

  There are so many artists in Gowanus now that in October 2005, 115 of them took part in the Annual Gowanus Artists Studio Tour. But the inevitable drift to upscale housing for lawyers and stockbrokers is clear to people who have seen it all before. Jozef Koppelman, a cabinet-maker in a former garage on Baltic Street, has had his small firm pushed successively out of SoHo, Hell's Kitchen, Williamsburg, Chelsea, and Dumbo, and worries about being forced out of Gowanus. “I'm a textbook example,” he said. “I think about how many buildings I've worked in that now have a doorman.”

  GOWANUS

  WHERE TO GO

  Gowanus Canal (A CHARMING URBAN CANAL; WALK IT FROM BUTLER STREET TO THE BROOKLYN-QUEENS EXPRESSWAY BY WEAVING IN AND OUT ALONG THE BRANCHING STREETS, AND CHECK OUT THE HISTORIC BRIDGES—UNION STREET, CARROLL STREET, THIRD STREET, NINTH STREET—EACH WITH ITS OWN PECULIAR SYSTEM OF RETRACTING WHEN BARGES SAIL BY)

  President Street (NINETEENTH-CENTURY BROWNSTONES)

  WHERE TO EAT

  Monte's Venetian Room (AT 100 YEARS OLD, CLAIMS TO BE THE CITY'S OLDEST ITALIAN RESTAURANT) 451 CARROLL STREET; (718) 624-8984

  Sweet Melissa (DESSERTS) 296 BOND STREET; (718) 797-2840

  Vinny's of Carroll Gardens (PIZZA AND PASTA) 295 SMITH STREET; (718) 875-5600

  Chapter 18

  Crisscrossing Generations on the Lower East Side

  NO NEIGHBORHOOD IN NEW YORK CITY HAS BEEN AS ENTANGLED with immigrants as the Lower East Side. It was where the Irish settled when they fled the potato famine and where their gangs made stinking, treacherous pockets such as Five Points the stuff of urban legend. It was where Chinese men came to build the nation's railroads and do its laundry and Italians to build underground subways and water tunnels. And it was where Jews such as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, and Sophie Tucker transformed the squalor and absurdities around them into the jokes and songs that etched this pushcart maelstrom on the nation's con
sciousness.

  But over the last two or three decades, it seemed that the neighborhood had spent its immigrant vigor. By the 1990s, the last major immigrant groups—Dominicans and even some Chinese who had spilled over from Chinatown—were also forsaking its unkempt streets. After all, more than a few New Yorkers concluded, why would anyone want to live in those cold-water railroad flats with the bathtubs in the kitchen and the toilets in the hall? Well, such cynics were spectacularly wrong. Immigrants might not want to live there, but new Generations X, Y, Z of young people raised on grunge, slacking, and postmodern irony have found this neighborhood to their liking. So, of course, have landlords, who discovered that for a minimal investment—stick a toilet inside the apartment and shower stall alongside it—they could rent railroad flats for $2,000 a month that not too long before had been renting for less than $300. So valuable was an empty flat that landlords were paying long-settled families $50,000 to leave. In these spruced-up hovels were living Web designers, blog and zine writers, fashion photographers, makeup artists, even tenderfoot lawyers and stockbrokers, their rents often paid by their parents.

  Ratner's, the venerable temple of dairy, and Schmulka Bernstein, which introduced generations of Jews to the pleasures of kosher Chinese, may have closed, but I kept reading about voguish restaurants opening on shabby streets such as Clinton and Rivington that were charging more than $30 for entrees: 71 Clinton Fresh Food, WD-50, Faila, and Schiller's Liquor Bar. They had pedigreed chefs and distinctly unkosher nouvelle dishes right next to dusty cluttered stores where hunched men in yarmulkes were selling bolts of fabric and discount underwear. I took a walk with my wife one evening and could not believe the exuberant night scene of twenty- and thirtysomethings enchanted by this latest outpost of freedom and inventiveness. Just as Greenwich Village had once been, this was a new frontier of bohemia.

  More than a few of these nonconformists, I was to discover, were children and grandchildren of earlier inhabitants who fled the Lower East Side in disgust for cleaner, lighter apartments in the Bronx or Flat-bush. Janet Nelson, who grew up in suburban Massapequa, Long Island, with Jerry Seinfeld and Joey Buttafucco and managed 71 Clinton Fresh Food before it closed, told me, “We have a lot of customers who come in and say, ‘I used to live here and now my grandson lives here.’” I wondered what the long-ago residents and merchants would make of the wholesale revolution in this neighborhood that off-the-boat Jewish and Italian immigrants both treasured and cursed and finally escaped more than a half century ago. I particularly wondered about old-timers who were now seeing their children and grandchildren return.

  My curiosity came with long tendrils attached. This was the neighborhood where my immigrant parents took me in the 1950s and 1960s to get decent clothes at cut-rate prices. If you didn't mind threading through narrow streets and jostling crowds, then shopping in dust and disarray with hurried and sometimes outright rude salesmen, you could come away from Orchard Street with a fine suit or a package of underwear at half the price those items sold for the year before at Macy's or Gimbels. My father took my mother down to Levine & Smith on Division Street under the Manhattan Bridge to buy her a winter coat. Not too far away, at Louis Kaplan, they ordered bespoke bar mitzvah suits for my brother and me. Kaplan, a master tailor, wielded chalk and measuring tape over the contours of your body with no respect for the privacy of any sensitive parts. He dictated what you were to wear, and any dissent was greeted with a look of disheartenment that made it difficult to differ. But at the end you came away with a Savile Row suit at Salvage Row prices.

  In later years, both as a single man and as a young family man, I sometimes went down to Allen and Grand streets to buy sheets and towels at the Ezra Cohen overstock emporium and somehow never came away without a haul of nostalgic treats: a jar of Guss' Pickles, maybe a salami from Katz's Delicatessen, herring and Nova Scotia salmon from Russ & Daughters, and dried fruits from one of several burlap-bag purveyors. Sometimes I stopped in to see my father. Late in his life, with ruptured discs in his back and clogged arteries in his legs, he took a part-time job on Orchard Street as a salesman in J. S. Hosiery, a store that sold underwear and socks and was owned by an Orthodox couple from Brooklyn. On those benumbed legs, he clambered up two and three flights of stairs several times an hour to get sample boxes to show the wholesale customers. Sometimes, he brought home packages of underwear and socks for my brother and me or a cake from Gertel's Bakery. He had become a fixture of this neighborhood. So without ever living there, I was pulled into the neighborhood's orbit.

  Over the years as a reporter, I often wrote about the neighborhood and looked for fresh ways to illuminate its past or unravel its present. In 2004, I learned that the Seward Park Public Library, an old redbrick and stone palazzo on East Broadway, was reopening after two years of renovations. For that event, librarians had located archives of its earliest days that chronicled year by year—sometimes in prosaic bureaucratese, sometimes in vivid, tender fashion—changes in the neighborhood's makeup and also singled out the books that riveted readers. In a 1920 report, the branch librarian took admiring note of how the neighborhood's tenement dwellers and sweatshop workers were thirsting for Dickens and Hawthorne, but she also lamented the “disorderliness, disregard of the rights of others, mental defectives and ‘queer’ characters on the borderland of sanity, thefts and book mutilations.” Other reports describe how embryonic socialists intoxicated by volumes of Marx crowded next to bearded men bent over The Last of the Mohicans in Yiddish and working women drinking in Byron and Poe.

  By the Depression, another branch librarian was struggling with “undesirables” dozing on radiators, but she was charmed by the resilience of unemployed men searching for books on syrup flavoring and stocking manufacture so they could start businesses. In later years, the archives contained other tasty sociological morsels, recording how prospering Jews were moving to the Bronx and Queens, leaving behind poorer Orthodox brethren. The waning of the 1940s brought Puerto Ricans to the neighborhood, and the librarian in 1951 lamented that while the enthusiasm of the children required the library to buy Spanish titles, the adults do not “find their way to the library.”

  “Most of them,” the librarian wrote, “are young people busy with home and babies, trying to adjust where adjustment is particularly difficult; a new language; a large and bewildering city, especially since they come from rural communities; laws and regulations which seem purposely bent on plaguing them.”

  Whatever their country, fresh immigrants sought out the library like a life raft. In 1971, the librarian described the increasing numbers of Chinese youngsters in the reference room as “the most methodical and thorough little researchers.” She was “cutting back on the purchase of Jewish materials in order to build up the Chinese.” The 1998 librarian, Susan Singer, noted how immigrants from China's Fukien Province “are escorted in by relatives to apply for a library card only days after arriving in the United States.” More recently, Mary Jones, the current branch librarian and herself an immigrant from County Roscommon, Ireland, pointed to a bookcase that captured an era's passing. The Yiddish and Hebrew collection was reduced to three forlorn shelves.

  Jones' observation pained but did not surprise me. Whenever I visited in recent years, I noticed how much of the Jewish past had vanished or faded. Louis Kaplan and Levine & Smith were gone, and Ezra Cohen was a shrunken version of its former self. Yes, there were places with evocative names such as Goldberger Draper, Fishkin Knitwear, and Fine & Klein Handbags, but most of these stores were owned by Chinese, Korean, Indian, or Pakistani shopkeepers or, increasingly, by avant-garde entrepreneurs selling the kinds of frivolous frills that the Lower East Side never understood. Sam Goldstein, owner of Sam's Knitwear— Wholesale and Retail at 93 Orchard Street and a man whose yarmulke covers the few wisps of hair on his balding crown, put the transformation simply: “The neighborhood went up, but the old-time merchants went down.”

  Everywhere I went, there were cafés for laptop peckers with r
eally good latte at really high prices, but no more merchants of dried fruits. There were modern dancers in an old school building on Rivington Street, Bikram yoga classes in a loft on Allen Street, and a restaurant on Orchard Street called Café Lika with an interior that looked like a bohemian bordello, though it had a splendid Tuscan garden out back. But Gertel's, a seventy-five-year-old neighborhood institution famous for its rugelach and chocolate babka, was looking woebegone, barely holding its head above water. And so was Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery, founded as a pushcart in 1910 by a Romanian rabbi. This shop on Houston Street still retains a dumbwaiter for delivering trays of knishes from the basement ovens. It draws older customers such as eighty-year-old Frank Ligotti, who remembers living on Orchard Street in the 1930s and paying $12 a week for an apartment heated by a coal stove. “The toilets were in the hall—one for the two front apartments, one for the two rear,” he remembered. But Joseph Yagudaev, a manager, told me that Yonah Schimmel now endures by selling many of its knishes over the Internet through knishery.com. “All the Jews who went to Florida and California still order knishes,” he informed me. “They're willing to pay shipping. They love these knishes.”

  Still, the neighborhood was pulsating again, brimming with young hipsters in black clothing, tattoos, and pierced tongues, peddling new art that didn't arouse me but surely excited younger strivers with the cash to spare. The stores and restaurants were of a type never imagined by the homespun, unembellished peddlers of yore: 360 Toy Group, a boutique stocked with expensive action figures; Recon, which offers “graffiti-inspired clothing” such as jazzy knit shirts priced at $45; Girls Love Shoes, which sells—and rents—vintage footwear and is run by a woman whose great-grandfather had opened a yeshiva on East Broadway; and Il Laboratorio del Gelato, which has luscious gelato in more than twenty flavors including cheddar cheese and wasabi. Then there was the incomparable Fusionarts Museum. In 1983, Shalom Neuman paid $100,000 for a run-down corner building on Stanton Street that was surrounded by crack dealers and doorways sheltering prostitutes. He turned it into an art gallery that features large animated robots with arms made of plastic ducts and hair salvaged from brooms. “Fusion golems,” Neuman called them, christening one zany figure with erotic overtones as “Womanizer.” His tale of the museum's history seemed to capture the new Lower East Side ethos.