From a Babel of Tongues, a Neighborhood

The World Comes to Woodside

On Saturdays, Walter Arana moves like one of the turbo-charged action heroes from the movies he rents and sells in his store in Woodside, Queens. His hands fly from the cash register to the computer to the videos stacked behind him and then to the push-button clicker he keeps around his neck to buzz the door open for the steady flow of customers.

The phone rings. “Si. Si. Wait a sec,” barks Mr. Arana, a linguistic quick-change artist in a neighborhood where people come from 49 countries and speak 34 different languages. Then he pirouettes, aims the remote control and silences the soccer game that has transfixed an Irish immigrant waiting at the counter.

Nodding hello to two teenagers deliberating in Bengali by the horror films, Mr. Arana registers them with the practiced eye of an urban anthropologist. He knows they are from Bangladesh, just as he knows the names of British soccer players and Dominican movie stars, because it is smart business to know.

“In a neighborhood like this one, it’s good to know even the capital of their country and ask them about it,” he says, gently motioning for the two to show him what they want, “because when they first come to the States, they feel no one knows them.”

Meet Walter Arana: Peruvian immigrant, local notable and artful avatar of the diverse human tide that is transforming New York City — from the neighborhood up — with its multiplicity of languages, religions and skills.

Here at the end of the century, one in three city residents is an immigrant and, of those, nearly half are newly minted New Yorkers who arrived only in the last 15 years. Not since 1910, at the peak of this century’s great wave of immigration through Ellis Island, has the ratio of newcomers been as high.

Sheer numbers are only the beginning of the story. No other city has absorbed so many different nationalities — more than 100 — since immigration laws were changed in 1965 to open the door to people from Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. And this diversity within diversity is changing the very definition of the ethnic New York neighborhood.

Classic old ethnic neighborhoods that had successfully resisted change for half a century, now belong to no one and to everyone. They are a clashing, colorful, polyglot, multiethnic collection of microcommunities whose members sometimes come together on neutral ground like Mr. Arana’s video store, and sometimes lead parallel lives.

In their volume and their variety, the immigrants have affected each pillar of the neighborhood architecture.

Overburdened schools where bilingual education once was just academic theory now struggle to absorb an influx of children who do not speak English. Where once there were moribund churches and synagogues, immigrants are reinvigorating religious institutions. And the local shops, where everyone once felt at home, now must choose between serving an ethnic niche or the dissonant tastes of a multinational clientele.

One hundred years ago, the newest New Yorkers were largely unskilled and unlettered. They worked close to home in Lower Manhattan, with people much like themselves, so that the sweatshop and the schools became enclaves, too. As the subways and bridges extended to the thinly populated outer boroughs, ethnic neighborhoods could pick themselves up lock, stock and barrel and move onto unclaimed turf.

Those archetypal New York ethnic neighborhoods, the stuff of the city’s literature, its memoirs and its founding myths, were once urban villages of a few square blocks where immigrants lost their accents and joined the American mainstream, where everyone worshiped at the same few churches or synagogues, learned the same lessons in school and exchanged gossip at the same corner drug store.

If it was never quite as homogenous as some of its old-timers remember, these neighborhoods did bespeak the influence of one dominant group. For much of this century, if you were Irish-American in Woodside, Italian-American in Bensonhurst or a Jew of Russian heritage in Brighton Beach, the neighborhood felt like your turf.

Those who now arrive in New York find a built-out city with few manufacturing jobs, where they must compete for the affordable housing they can find with native-born New Yorkers and other immigrants with whom they share little but their dreams.

Woodside under the microscope is one churning compact sliver of the city — less than one-fifth of a square mile bounded by Queens Boulevard, Woodside Avenue, 52nd and 64th Streets — where the old notion of neighborhood is being deconstructed and reassembled.

On the Block A Sweet Smell As the Bars Close

Around 4 a.m., a sweet, musty smell drifts onto the street on a light cloud of steam from the Man Mi Korean Bakery, beckoning the delivery trucks that will soon deliver the mom-and-pop shop’s mung bean rice cakes and sticky sang donuts around the city.

Up and down a seven-block stretch of Roosevelt Avenue, it is closing time for the Irish pubs. A man locks the door of the Mi Pais restaurant, pausing to stare at the picture of the voluptuous singer — “La Sexy de P.R.” — whose upcoming show is advertised on a hand-lettered poster in the window.

Daylight brings a group of solemn girls in long blue robes and white head scarves trooping toward the Razi Islamic School, once the home of Catholic Charities and now adorned with Arabic phrases and painted tiles in feathery designs of white, yellow and blue. The manicurists in the Thai Beauty Salon prepare for their first Hispanic customers of the day as an Indian immigrant in a baseball cap arranges Greek, Arabic, Spanish and Urdu newspapers on the shelves in his convenience store. Across the street, the lights in the window of the Yuan Fu Sing grocery store flicker on, illuminating the dust on the boxes of Chinese Anti-Contusion Rheumatism Plaster and American beer.

By noon, all of these colors, spices and languages blend into one swirl of activity. Livery-car drivers cram into Warteg Fortuna, a tiny restaurant with eight stools, piles of Indonesian magazines and a pungent smell of curry and chili rising from behind the counter. On the side streets, where doll-size plastic statues of Jesus are nestled among the geraniums, the Irish-American retirees who first settled the neighborhood emerge to sweep up the front steps of their peaked two-family shingled homes.

All this diversity translates into a neighborhood with one of the city’s highest proportions of immigrants: more than half of its 9,000 residents were foreign-born as of the 1990 census, and about half of those newcomers have lived in the United States for 10 years or less. Since then, the flow of immigrants into the neighborhood, and their diversity, has only increased, according to immigration records, city housing surveys and school enrollment data.

Now, 70 percent of apartments are occupied by at least one foreign-born person. One in five children in the local elementary school, Public School 11, arrived in the country only in the last three years. Eight in 10 school-age children live in a home where the family communicates in a language other than English.

There has not been such a concentration of newcomers in the neighborhood since World War I, when up-and-coming Irish immigrants abandoned the tenements of Lower Manhattan for the suburban charms of Woodside’s garden apartments and shaded streets of shingled homes.

Woodside soon came to be known as “Irishtown,” a conceit it could preserve during the years when the city was expanding and restrictive national laws substantially slowed the flow of new immigrants. But starting in the recessionary 1970’s, as the remnants of the Ellis Island generations moved away, the neighborhood became a magnet for a new wave of immigrants.

Now, no one group can claim the neighborhood as its turf. In today’s Woodside, people have different, perhaps more pragmatic, relationships to the neighborhood.

They are people like Elvis Jain, a 28-year-old student from India who favors pointed cowboy boots and recently dropped out of business school to open a Filipino food store on Roosevelt Avenue two blocks from St. Sebastian’s Roman Catholic Church. For him, the neighborhood is a place to make money. His marketing strategy was simple: “Filipino people are very religious, so they will always be passing by here on their way to church,” he said.

Here, too, are Wing and Yee Hom, immigrants from Hong Kong who bought a small house in 1981 with savings from their restaurant in Chinatown. The neighborhood offered good schools for their two children, but even now they do not feel a sense of belonging. “Because I’m Chinese they are still not friendly,” Mrs. Hom said. “Sometimes I walk on the street, just a few houses below my own, and they don’t want to say hello.”

Then there are residents like Patrick Finn, whose grandparents, Irish immigrants, moved here in 1923. He can no longer name all the families on his block, but the diversity has made the neighborhood more interesting. “It doesn’t matter to me who runs the stores as long as they laugh at my jokes,” said Mr. Finn, 46. “Even if they don’t understand them.”

In the Classroom A Teacher Seeks Common Ground

Marlene Silverman welcomes a visitor to her classroom at P.S. 11 with a wry introduction. “I’m the only American here,” she says with a sweep of her arm to take in the 22 sixth graders seated in closely packed clusters of 2 and 4 at small metal desks.

In this small space, half of a normal classroom, are children who need to learn English. They come from India, Korea, China, Egypt, Bosnia and an array of South American countries, so many different countries that Mrs. Silverman is not sure herself who is from where.

They are among 300 at the school, out of a total enrollment this year of nearly 1,300 in kindergarten through sixth grade, who have been placed in bilingual classes or are assigned to teachers of English as a second language like Ms. Silverman. The goal is to get them reading and writing well enough to be transferred into regular classes within three years.

P.S. 11, the stolid brick heart of the neighborhood, has become one of the city’s most crowded schools, with as many as 46 children in a class, and one of its most linguistically diverse.

In Ms. Silverman’s classroom, a card with “clock” written on it is taped to the clock. The door is labeled. So are the bookcase and the sink. Against this backdrop of order, her students come and go, separated into language groups and later recombined as a class.

In the morning, the Spanish-speaking children leave for special instruction in their academic subjects with a Spanish-speaking teacher. In the afternoon, the Korean and Chinese children are pulled out to study in Korean and Chinese. While they are gone, other teachers rotate into the class to help those who speak other languages, including Arabic, Urdu and Bengali.

Organizing their days requires the precision planning of a military campaign, but one burdened by foot soldiers who do not always understand the orders and thus progress at different speeds.

This morning’s task is to draw a picture and write about the book the class was supposed to have read and understood, in English, the day before. It is a Chinese folk tale — the school has decided that all classes will study China as the multicultural project of the year — about a stone cutter named Chan Lo who wants to carve a fish from a perfect piece of jade.

In a far corner of the room, Sun Soo’ Shin, a boy who arrived from Korea 10 months ago, has had enough of the assignment and has twisted around in his seat to pull a different book from the shelf behind him to read on his own. “The stone,” he has written next to a quick sketch of Chan Lo and his jade, “is make sound like chop-chop or ss-ss. Chan Lo hear the that sound in the stone.”

But a group of children, flummoxed by the assignment, ignore the teacher and consult with one another quietly in Chinese. Then, together, they kneel before the book that is propped against the blackboard and all begin to meticulously copy the picture of Chan Lo on the cover. Seemingly oblivious to the activity around them, they never get to the task of writing about the story before the bell rings, 45 minutes later, for lunch.

Behind them, an Indian immigrant named Priyank V. Shukla, dressed like all his classmates in blue jeans and sneakers, has quickly finished a minimalist sketch of a man standing by a square in which a fish floats serenely. He learned English back home, he says, so he has progressed faster at school. While he waits for his classmates to finish their drawings, he scrunches over his desk, grasps his pencil tightly in his fist and writes a dozen lines about the story.

At Prayer Joining a Church, Creating a Home

High above the rows of wooden pews, where the arched mauve-and-pink rococo ceiling of St. Sebastian’s Roman Catholic Church meets its pale green walls, Cheeman Kim glances at the green-robed priest below to check his timing and then leans toward the microphone.

“Please join us in ‘Jerusalem My Happy Home’ on page 226,” he announces in slow, heavily accented English, as the hundred or so worshipers at Sunday morning Mass stand up with a rustling of hymnals and shuffling of feet.

Then he raises his arms, turns to the expectant faces of the 13 vocalists of his all-Korean choir and nods briskly to his wife, Eunsook, to play the opening chords on the organ. Their voices, strong and melodious, saturate the chapel, and an expression of sweet joy suffuses Mr. Kim’s face.

As it has for generations of immigrants, religion provides a neighborhood within a neighborhood for people estranged by language and culture. The latest wave of immigrants has returned the favor: it has rejuvenated established churches and created new ones to reflect every conceivable national origin and permutation of faith.

Above the groceries and phone parlors on one block of Roosevelt Avenue, signs advertise the Choong Hyun Church, the Korean Methodist New York Agape Church and the Spanish Unity Ministerio de Cristianismo Practico. The Woodside Baptist Church, built in 1925, shares space with the Gereja Kristen Indonesia congregation. A Central American evangelical church has moved into a warehouse across the street from a body repair shop.

For some, the house of worship is a safe harbor where immigrants like themselves find community in a bewildering world. For others, like the Kims, the church is a stepping stone to belonging, the first American institution they dared approach where they felt at ease.

“This is my home,” Mr. Kim said emphatically, referring to the Woodside parish where he has now rented a home and opened a music school. “This is my hometown.”

The Kims, who immigrated from Seoul eight years ago, could have joined an all-Korean Catholic church. But they chose the 104-year-old St. Sebastian’s, whose pastor is the latest of an unbroken line of Irish-Americans in the job, even though it does not provide a Korean-language service.

One reason is their 16-year-old son, Paul, who still sings in his father’s choir but speaks fluent English and is quickly picking up American teenage cultural accouterments like dyed and spiked hair. A church just for Korean immigrants — and a neighborhood dominated by Korean immigrants — might drive young people like him away from the fold and the family.

“The second generation doesn’t like it,” Mr. Kim said, “and doesn’t need it.”

The elder Mr. Kim has begun to emerge from his immigrant shell, too. His confidence bolstered by several years of dealing with St. Sebastian officials in his halting English, he recently signed up as a community volunteer to patrol the streets of Woodside. Twice a month, he sets a flashing blue light on the roof of his car and drives around looking for trouble that the police should know about.

“Mostly it is Korean people who get together,” he said, “but I am trying community groups. Because now I live and work in this location and I must be part of it.”

In the Stores Movie Rentals Bind a Community

If a neighborhood is a place where everybody knows your name, then Walter Arana has made this one his own.

He arrived from Lima, Peru, in 1979 at the age of 15, with barely enough English to navigate the airport arrivals terminal. Now, after 14 years in the business of renting videos in Woodside, he has adapted perfectly to his new environment.

Mr. Arana only needs to look around him to understand the risks in an immigrant neighborhood like Woodside with its dizzying mix of languages, national origins and tastes.

The Chinese immigrant who leased his store before him was a printer, but he failed because he worked only in Chinese. Across the street was a Spanish- language travel agency that gave way to a Filipino-run food store that gave way to an Ecuadorian restaurant that rarely has any customers.

“It’s very difficult to market in such a situation,” said Mr. Arana, jangling the two thin gold chains he wears around his wrist. “If you’re selling clothing, for example, the sizes and the colors depend on who’s in the neighborhood. As a product of this multicultural society, I learned as I went along.”

What he learned is that each segment of the neighborhood has its quirks and preferences. Knowing them has made him a popular man and his shop a haven of neighborly comaraderie.

On a recent Saturday, a Mexican man climbed the stairs from the basement where the adult videos are kept and glided to the counter holding a pink video box containing a European-made pornographic film.

“He lives with a group of guys who are here without families,” confided Mr. Arana, as the man slipped into the fading afternoon sunshine on Roosevelt Avenue. “The Central Americans,” he added, revealing another bit of neighborhood intelligence, “won’t rent the American porno. Too much silicone.”

For his Peruvian customers, he keeps on hand a selection of the popular television variety show “Comicos Ambulantes,” which friends tape for him back in Lima. For some of his American-born customers who tell him they want to learn Spanish, he stocks classic comedies with minimal dialogue. For children, immigrant or not, he has English-language videos.

“The kids pick up the language real quick,” he explained, “so even though they might not understand everything, they are familiar with the dialogue.”

For Irish immigrants in Woodside — the old-timers who have lived there for decades and the newcomers who took advantage of special visas for the Irish in the early 1990’s — Mr. Arana orders any Irish film he can get. “They’re as sentimental as we are,” he said. “They want to see their own people and the same type of stories they heard when they were little.”

Sometimes when Mr. Arana goes out at night for a drink or to watch a soccer game in one of the local clubs, other customers will hail him like an old friend.

“Usually in this country, you’ve got to have millions of dollars before anyone recognizes you,” he says. “But since I’ve been in the neighborhood so long, somebody always recognizes me. That’s great, because otherwise you’re just a Social Security number.”

Next: The new immigrants remake a suburb in New Jersey.



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