An Anachronism Finds Its Way

[Excerpt From Chapter Five]

The Star restaurant it was called. It sold “Chops, Steaks and Seafood.” It was the kind of small Greek coffee shop that used to abound in Manhattan, but has been dwindling even there. Here, it stood out as a leftover from a bygone world.

The shop sat on Thirty-seventh Avenue, the principal shopping street of Jackson Heights. The street was a swirl of color and activity. Colombians on their way to Ecuadorean restaurants to eat yucca or ropa vieja. Koreans and other Asians came out of small stores selling herbs and spices. Indian women walked by wearing scarfs and other components of traditional dress. The street was a river of life, bustling with people and commerce.

In this flowing river, the Star restaurant sat like an island or an alley, part of this world but not of it. It somehow signaled that it was of another era, and might not be long for the present one.

The restaurant was filled, appropriately enough, with elderly Jewish women. They seemed like refugees from a storm, huddled in this sheltered place while the passions of color, language, and dress swirled and stormed outside on the street. They sat in black-vinyl booths and at square-topped tables, drinking coffee and discussing events. They eagerly surrounded me when I asked them about the neighborhood, eager to have a visitor, and a relatively young man at that. Most had lived in this neighborhood for their entire adult life, some fifty years. The stores they walked to, the candy shops, the movie theaters, the five-and-dimes, were largely gone now. They were widows, their husbands passing before them. They did not like being minorities now in ethnicity, custom, and style in a neighborhood they helped build.

“These people are so dirty, they are filthy,” said a woman with big glasses who had just finished showing photos of her trip to Italy. “They throw their trash in the street. There is crime.”

“They change the child’s diapers in the car, and throw it out on the street, just like they do in India,” said another woman.

“And let the child diddle in the curb,” said still another.

“I even saw a man stand up against a wall and do it,” said the first woman.

This account of the immigrants’ bathroom habits seemed unfair, but probably true. Having lived in Spain for two years, I’m aware that Americans’ bathroom habits are unusually fastidious compared to most. It was common in Spain for a mother to help a child urinate into the street. Men would routinely pee against a wall on a downtown street. I became accustomed to doing so myself.

One woman, less angry than the others, said she still liked it here, but that things had changed.

“There used to be so much to do here. There were the movie theaters. There was a candy store.”

“There was the bingo hall down the street,” said another woman.

“Even the Woolworth’s is closing,” said one woman. The national chain had just closed all Woolworth’s in the country, but to these women it was just one more familiar friend departing.

The women’s complaints were ironic, because while they noticed how much things had changed, I noticed how much things had stayed the same in Jackson Heights. Even if the color, religions, and languages of the people on the street changed, Jackson Heights was still a neighborhood that took working-class immigrants not long off the boat and lifted them into the middle class by providing them the opportunity for hard work. What makes Jackson Heights a rarity is that it is an urban neighborhood, based around the subway and elevated train line. Unlike most urban neighborhoods, Jackson Heights had not become either a slum or a giant fern bar.

Working in the City

As the suburbs have become ubiquitous, the urban neighborhood like Jackson Heights has become a specialized place, for the artist, the junkie, the rich, the homeless, the gay, the intellectually curious. What it isn’t, generally speaking, is home to the police officer with two kids, the assistant hotel manager, the school teacher, and, of course, the factory worker. In other words, the working and middle classes. The classic working-class urban neighborhood, where a guy with a lunch pail walked to work or to a streetcar, subway, or bus, has become a rarity as the systems that produced it become a rarity.

The same goes for the classic ethnic, immigrant neighborhood. For many immigrants today, the town-house complex near the freeway ramp–in other words, the suburbs–has become the destination after getting off the boat. Only in a few cities, or parts of cities, are the walkable street, the walk-up apartment, still the first stop. The inner-city areas are either too expensive or too much of a slum.

But one urban area that is still home to the emerging middle class and the immigrant is New York City. In most cities, urban neighborhoods have become vestigial organs, either kept alive as luxury items for the well off, or abandoned to decay. In New York, urban neighborhoods still create the middle class, taking poor or less well-off people and providing them the environment by which they can make their way to a more established position economically.

One of those neighborhoods in the city is Jackson Heights in Queens. It’s been a ladder for an emerging middle class for most of its existence, and it still is. Latin Americans, Koreans, and Indians have replaced or merged with Italians, Jews, Germans, and Greeks. These changes have often been wrenching sociologically. But the bottom line is that Jackson Heights is still where new immigrants come, get their first jobs, and move up.

Why does it still exist? Why has it become neither a slum nor a gentrified boutique neighborhood? What keeps its inhabitants living, with jobs, in a neighborhood where the car is still an uncommon element? In answering these questions, we see several things:

One, is the uniqueness of New York City, which, after a destructive flirtation with the highway midcentury, has in the last generation become more and more dependent on mass transit. This makes it unique among America’s cities. It has not been easy. It has managed to revive and enhance and build on a seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century street pattern. Grids of streets where factory workers walked to jobs are now inhabited by stockbrokers or fashion executives who use limousine service. Neighborhoods like Jackson Heights still revolve around the central star of Manhattan, whose economy warms all the outer boroughs and gives life to their streets. Two, we see how transportation determines form and thus lifestyle. People live differently in Jackson Heights, and most of New York, because they get around differently. Three, we see the uniqueness of the street-based life that non-car-centered transportation produces. There is a closeness, an intimacy to life, in Jackson Heights that must at times be suffocating but which I often yearn for. We gave up something when most of our cities opted to build highways and Interstates, rather than train lines or subways.