Changing Neighborhoods

Iconic New York Food With an Ethnic Twist

Mohid Kumar, originally from Bangladesh, manages a pizza-by-the-slice shop in Midtown, Manhattan. (Patricia Rey Mallén) — Mohid Kumar, originally from Bangladesh, manages a pizza-by-the-slice shop in Midtown, Manhattan. Photo by Patricia Rey Mallén.

Flushing, Queens — The line stretching out of J.K. Bakery in Union St, Flushing, Queens, reached three doors down from the bagel shop. Inside, the scent of freshly baked onion bagels was enough to make one’s stomach rumble.

Behind the counter, Joon Hee Kim, the son of the Korea-born owner of the shop for the past 20 years, greets the regulars by name and their preferred order in quick Korean. The star of the shop, a classic that doesn’t get old: the plain.

“Koreans are very cautious with food,” said Kim, handing out the third plain bagel in a row. “Even among customers who have been coming for years, the plain is our best sold bagel.”

The bagel is the most beloved breakfast item in New York – even in Flushing, a predominantly Korean neighborhood. But as the city’s demographics shift, so do its icons.

MULTIMEDIA

Korean-run Bagel Shop

Indian-owned Pizzeria

J.K. Bakery, a traditional Jewish bagel shop which has been on Union Street for decades, is now owned by the Kim family. The bagels are as iconic as they’ve always been, but the faces behind this bakery’s counter are changing.

New York’s food staples like pizza or bagels cannot be attributed to any demographic group anymore, said City Comptroller John C. Liu, who represented Flushing at City Council from 2001 to 2005 and is a usual customer of J.K. Bakery. “They are a part of New York now,” he said.

J.K. Bakery has become a staple of the eating scenery of Flushing, the hub of the Korean community in New York City for over ten years. Before that it was mainly white and Jewish, as shown by the numbers from the 1960 Census. Since 1965, when the first Korean immigrants started arriving, the area’s Korean population has grown to reach 64,000 according to the 2010 Census. The numbers make Flushing the biggest Korean neighborhood in the U.S.

One of those early arrivals was Kim’s father, who worked odd jobs for a couple of years before starting to work as an apprentice at J.K Bakery, then owned by a Jewish family. Five years later, when the Jewish owner retired, Kim’s father bought the shop.

Twenty-three years later, he still owns the neighborhood hotspot—and still has a hand in how the bagels are made.

“My father tastes the dough every morning to make sure it’s perfect,” said Kim, 28. “No salty or bland bagels are sold here.”

Bagels are not alone in this demographic switch-a-roo – the other quintessential New York bite, the pizza, is experiencing a similar revolution. Pizza by the slice for $1, sometimes less, is still served by many Italians. But in at least one corner of Midtown, pizza slices are dished out by different hands.

“Everybody likes pizza,” said Mohid Kumar, manager of Bombay Pizza, an Indian owned pizza-by-the-slice place on 38th st. and 6th Avenue. “And everybody can make pizza, too.”

Kumar, 49, a Bangladeshi immigrant, has been managing the store for two and a half years. He employs four people, all Hispanic, which sometimes complicates communication just a little bit. “When they talk among themselves, I have no idea what they’re saying.,” says Kumar, who insists thought that making pizza is team work. “One colleague makes the dough, the other puts in the ingredients, then to the oven. I cut it.”

“Everybody loves pizza. Everybody can make pizza, too.”

– Mohid Kumar,
Bombay Pizza Manager

In spite of his 16 years in New York, Kumar is not willing to give up in his roots: in the back of Bombay Pizza there is an Indian vegetarian food counter, which includes dosa, an Indian version of pizza. “Many customers change their mind when they come into the store,” said Kumar. “They come for the pizza, and stay for the Indian curries.”

The popularity of pizza and bagels in New York City date back to early 20th Century, when Jews from Eastern Europe and Italians were the two major immigrant groups in New York. This combined with the abundance of wheat made it easy for both bread-based products to spread.

“The particular demographics of New York brought bagels and pizza to other groups who would otherwise never have tried them,” said New York-based food writer Frederick Kaufman. “What is happening today is one step further in the fusion of cuisines.”

As deeply engraved into New York’s history as they are, these food staples must not be altered, at least anymore than necessary: Kim and his father adhere to that philosophy.

“We don’t toast bagels here, sorry,” says Woo Hee Kim – Kim’s aunt who also helps at the shop – to a customer who requested it be done to her bagel. “We don’t even own a toaster,” continues Kim. “Bagels are not traditionally toasted, so we don’t do it.”

Old habits die hard though, even when mastering the art of making a bagel. Kim, who was born in the States, does take daily advantage of the treats of his shop; his father, on the other hand, starts the day the Korean way: with a dish of rice, seaweed and soup.

“Koreans are still dazzled by the idea of bagels,” said Kim. He said that a couple of years ago, his father tried to open a bagel shop in Seoul, but ended up returning to New York when the business did not prosper.

Apparently though, the Korean population is actually opening up to new cuisines.

“We hear that Mexican food is all the rage now,” said Kim. “So who knows, maybe bagels will be the next thing! And then we can try again.”

The Holdouts: Staying Put in Bushwick

Robert Camacho stands outside Maria Hernandez Park in Bushwick.

Bushwick, Brooklyn — Some New Yorkers, like Robert Camacho, never venture far from the neighborhoods they knew as a child.

Camacho, 51, went to the same elementary school as his mother, P.S. 26, on Lafayette and Reid Street. He still lives on Stanhope Street, in the home of his father, who passed away in 2001. He has lived in Bushwick and Bedford Stuyvesant, the neighborhood that borders it, since he was a toddler and has no plans to leave

Camacho feels a strong emotional connection to his neighborhood, as many long-time residents in other neighborhoods do. Recently, however, Camacho has come to feel like an outsider.

If you ask Camacho what makes the area so special, he’ll say it was the closeness among neighbors. When he’d see someone on the streets, they were almost family. He knew their parents, their brothers, sisters and grandparents. “They stay in your house, you stay in theirs,” Camacho said. “Any food, they feed you.”

This feeling of community was important to a boy growing up without much family support. Camacho’s mother left when he was two. At that time his father was only making $60 dollars a week. “There was nine of us. So it was rough,” he said. For a time Camacho’s uncle and his aunt helped raise him and two of his siblings. Then when his father remarried, all three children were reunited with his father. His father’s new wife was 15-years old. She became a mother of nine overnight.

“Now everybody’s flocking to Bushwick. You see new homes, new houses and they pushing us out.”
– Robert Camacho,
Longtime Bushwick Resident

As if his family situation were not tough enough, Bushwick had its own share of troubles. In the late 60s and early 70s the friction between Latinos and African Americans in Bushwick was well-documented. Camacho’s elementary school, P.S. 26, was mostly African American and as one of the few Puerto Ricans in his school Camacho was teased a lot. He got into fistfights and knife fights. The right side of his stomach still bears faded red scars from the time he was stabbed on a playground.

At school there was one boy, Butch, an African American, who Camacho said he fought every day. Any time they saw each other in parks and grocery stores, punches flew.

“It was something like a hate thing,” Camacho said, “That thing was in me and it was in him.”

Camacho formed a “crew” with his friends. They called themselves the Kosiuszko Boys or KB for short, Kosiuszko was the name of the block his family had moved to. They carried guns and knives. “We made sure that who ever came in there, nothing was going to happen,” he said.

When Camacho was 16, he left home and the following year his stepmother signed him out of high school. He lived in a nearby apartment building on Bushwick Avenue with his girlfriend and worked as a building super. The couple had two children, but eventually broke up HOW MANY YEARS LATER.

Then WHEN? he met Joanne, his current wife, and had two more children. Unlike his own parents, Camacho promised he would treat his children equally and show them the kind of affection he never received.

Today, the anger Camacho felt for certan individuals is long extinguished. As for Butch, the boy he fought everyday, “I see him now and we’re like the best friends,” Camacho laughs. “Are you kidding me? He gives me a hug and a kiss. “

Camacho’s hardscrabble coming of age mirrors the stormy evolution of his neighborhood, a farming village turned factory town. The town was settled mostly by Dutch and Swedish and Norwegian immigrants in the mid-1600s. But by the 1830’s, the neighborhood had transformed into a factory town—replete with distilleries, refineries and warehouses—and a shipping yard. Germans and Italians filtered in. In the 1960s an influx of low-income Puerto Rican and African American led to the “white flight” typical of that era. Speculators bought low and sold high to the minority newcomers, many of whom defaulted.

In the early 1970s, the government withdrew its financial support to the neighborhood shuttering social agencies and closing many of its firehouses. Riots erupted in the streets, gangs flourished, and murders happened in broad daylight. Bushwick was crumbling.

“Nobody wanted to live in Bushwick,” said Camacho. “The city was giving land for a dollar and homes for a dollar, and you had a year to take care of it and people still wasn’t buying.”

Beginning in the late 1990s, Mayor Koch introduced major reforms that saw crimes rates drop and pushed Bushwick forward on its path to economic recovery. Today, Bushwick has turned around—and longtime residents, like Camacho, are trying to adjust. There are more coffee shops, more bars, a thriving art scene and more urban professionals than in years past. “Now everybody’s flocking to Bushwick. You see new homes, new houses and they pushing us out,” he said. The number of non-Hispanic Whites has tripled in the last decade, growing from approximately 3,000 to 9,500. The average one-bedroom rental costs about $1400, which is out of range for many long-time residents.

When Camacho walks down the street he still pictures the neighborhood as it was. He remembers which houses sold drugs, where drops were made, and the best places to hide overnight, after the police broke up a fight.

“Everybody was saying that Bushwick was no good and Bushwick was terrible; a lot of drugs, a lot of gangs,” said Camacho. “You had good people there. You had people that care about each other.” The storeowners he knew have left, and the dynamic between him and his new neighbors is awkward. “Sometimes when you do talk to them they think something’s wrong or you want something. They’re all to themselves,” he said. “It’s the transition.”

The Holdouts: Urban Residents Cling to Old Ways

Habiba Ali and Pamela Downing inside their apartment at the Hotel Wales.

Upper East Side, New York — They call themselves permanents. Habiba Ali, 63, and Pamela Downing, 55, share a room at the end of a long, musty hallway in a boutique hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Excepting one other resident, they are the last of their kind.

Nostalgia, inertia and low rent keep some New Yorkers tied to their neighborhoods as the world around them changes. When Ali and Downing first moved into the Hotel Wales in the 1980’s, on Madison Avenue between 92nd and 93rd Street, the building was shabby and certainly wouldn’t have attracted tourists, but it was well situated.

Theirs was the neighborhood of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the Marx Brothers, Woody Allen, and Paul Newman. Carnegie Hill, the stretch of blocks from 86th Street to 98th Street is named after the steel king, Andrew Carnegie. Ali and Downing, hardly millionaires, managed to live among Manhattan’s wealthiest and most admired families for nearly three decades. Today the hotel has been renovated and an overnight stay costs around $200.

While many of the neighborhood’s more famous residents have died or left, the streets and stores still exude an air of entitlement. Ali and Downing’s lifestyle is anything but: their apartment is rent-controlled. Ali and Downing pay less in monthly rent than a guest of the hotel might pay for a week’s visit. No wonder they’ve stayed for nearly three decades.

Memories of New York Past

“We live in a posh five star hotel with no pennies in the pocket,” said Ali, who came to New York from Pakistan 1979, just after her father passed away. Her plan was to complete a six-month course at the Pratt Institute’s School of Art and Design. She formed a close friendship with a French American woman Kathleen LePercq. The stranger was sympathetic to Ali, who didn’t know many people and was still mourning her father. LePercq helped her to obtain a visa and ultimately her citizenship.

Ali moved into the building in 1984, paying $225 a week. Downing, a legal assistant, joined her the following year. The price increased by $35. Today, they won’t share their precise rent, but by Manhattan standards it is absurdly inexpensive. Still, there are months when they have struggled to pay for it. When that happens, their families help.

The hotel may be posh, but their apartment certainly isn’t. It totals 450 square feet, comprising one bedroom, a narrow kitchen, and a bathroom. If a guest of the hotel were to accidentally step inside their apartment, he or she would not confuse it with their own room for a second. The sheer amount of stuff that is stacked on the floor or counter, nailed, taped or draped on the wall, is overwhelming. There is only one bed and it is Ali’s. Downing prefers the floor. She points to a folded up mat and blankets set beside a bureau, her bed.

At a small table near the wall, opposite the window and bed is a veritable shrine to Ali’s parents, Dr. Riaz Ali and Begum Amuzzinah Ali. Beside their framed photos are portraits of Kathleen LePercq, Ali’s “American mother” and mentor.

“My father was a doctor first. So, I grew up in a home where I didn’t know much about what difficulties are going to be,” Ali said. Her concept of America came from magazines like Vogue and Better Homes and Gardens. “I didn’t think there was poverty in New York,” she said.

Downing’s childhood was very different from Ali’s. There was no television in her house, no store-bought toys and no alcohol. She was brought up as a Seventh Day Adventist. She actually did sleep on the floor in childhood as well, underneath a piano, oddly enough. Downing said the pets she kept in a bedroom she shared with her sister chewed too loudly at night. Instead of moving their cages from her bedroom, she moved herself.

Downing came to New York after graduating college, to satisfy her curiosity about the city and perhaps to test her mettle.

Ali and Downing met at the Church of the Holy Redeemer, where Downing stayed in the community’s retreat house. She cooked meals for guests and managed the library. Ali and her colleagues from Pratt came for a tour of the church . The two women connected, after discovering they had a mutual friend, and met often for lunch and walks. “We clicked to each other,” said Ali.

When her job at the Most Holy Redeemer Church ended, Downing still wanted to explore parts of the city she hadn’t seen. “I’m a great procrastinator,” said Downing. “So, Habiba said ‘Why don’t you come and park your bags at my place,’” Downing said. The two have not lived apart since.

Downing looks like a schoolgirl from a bygone era. She wears her own kind of uniform every day: a long floral jumper over a blouse or other long-sleeved dress, her greying hair parted and clasped in a neat low ponytail, and glasses. Her favorite joke is a pun involving papal edicts. Her favorite childhood story was Alice in Wonderland. She read it in Latin. And for years she has inventoried the flora and fauna of Central Park. For nearly two decades, She worked in the same downtown office before retiring.

Ali wears a black canvas dress, like a judge’s robe, only short-sleeved with a blouse underneath and a cast on one arm—she fractured it in a fall. Her hair is swept into a bun, her eyes dark and observant. She speaks quickly tumbling over her words as if worried someone will interrupt her and occasionally Downing does.

When a guest or other listener looks confused by something Ali says or when Ali struggles to find the correct word, Downing inserts herself into the conversation. Neither has taken the traditional route of marriage and raising a family, though Downing has certainly thought about how her life might have been different.

“In a way I regret that I never did get married and have kids, but you know it’s too late now,” she laughed.

“You can do it,” said Ali.

“I’m too old. My knees won’t let me,” said Downing.

Fortunately Downing said she never felt any pressure or judgment from her relatives. “My family was always very unconventional and certainly nobody would judge anybody for how they wanted to live,” she said.

In the late eighties, the building’s first owner, Mr. Bernard Goldberg, converted 1295 Madison Ave. from an apartment building and transient lodging house to the elegant Hotel Wales. “Mr. Goldberg was a gentleman, a very nice man. He called all the permanents and asked them if they want to go,” said Ali But to Ali and Downing he suggested, ““Just stay quiet and pay my rent on time.” He sensed that they if they left they would not be happy some place else. They agreed.

At that time, only 15 residents considered the hotel home. Most agreed to be compensated by Goldbeg and left. The others died. Today, guests change day-to-day, owners change every few years, and even the hallway art changes– Downing recalls sketches of Puss in Boots, from the famous children’s illustrator Alain Vaes. Twenty-seven years later ,the only fixtures in the building are Downing and Ali.

When asked why they have stayed in New York so long, so far from their families. Ali restates her bond with Ms. LePercq, “my most important care person in my life”, after her immediate family. Also, she said, “I found my love in New York real love. Genuine.” Pressed for details, she resists. “That’s a special private question, I don’t want to go in detail.”

Living there is also comfortable. Ali doesn’t have to cook or clean. The hotel provides clean linens every week. There is a tea room, a rooftop garden and a large dining room on the second floor that where they can entertain friends as long as the hotel guests don’t need the space. If there’s a problem, Ali will phone management and complain. They have defined roles. Downing cleans and fixes things. Ali supervises and on occasion, she cooks.

Sometimes, Ali, who is older, admonishes Downing for not doing something Ali asked, like cleaning dishes or not following precise directions. “I sometimes feel that I get scolded unfairly when bad things happen with which I’m in some remote way connected,” said Downing. But Ali apparently gets her share of scolding too, from her own family.

“The whole family likes Pamela and they stand up for her against me,” she said. “[They say] that I should be good to Pamela.”

Downing and Ali are not a couple. The insinuation that they are more than friends is offensive to them. When posing for photographs, they don’t touch and they keep a seat between them on the couch. Her eyes at once vulnerable, Ali said, “Once I told Pamela’s mother, ‘Mrs. Downing, people say all kinds of things about us.’ She said, ‘Leave it to God.”

Sometimes their fights threaten their arrangement. “Pamela slams the doors and says I’m going away,” Ali said. “And if she wants to go now I says ‘Get out! Go! I don’t care.’”

“It’s true,” said Downing.

“But maybe,” Ali said, “I will call her the next day and say, ‘What are you doing? Are you coming back?’”

The Holdouts: NYU’s Plans to Grow Worry Village Residents

Lifelong New Yorker Joffrey Wilson at the community garden at East 6th Street and Avenue A.

In the East Village, a dichotomy cuts the neighborhood in half. New apartment buildings, all glass windows and steel accents, stand alongside their brick forebears, with ivy trailing along their fire escapes. The modern constructions represent the changing population of the neighborhood, as the influx of students from New York University has continued to grow.

“The greedy landlords, they jump all over that,” said Joffrey Wilson, a longtime resident. “When the students are here for three or four months, they’ll paint the place and sand the floor down and add another few hundred dollars on the rent. People who have lived here for decades can barely afford to live here anymore.”

The university was recently in the news because of its controversial NYU 2031 plan, which proposed the construction of two “superblocks” near Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. The selected blocks would be used for NYU’s purposes, including academic buildings and a hotel. Though the plan was not well-publicized to students, it garnered support from the New York Times–and an outcry from community members seeking to preserve an older vision of New York.

“[The plan] really compromised the integrity of the neighborhood, the family structure of the streets,” said Wilson.

Community Board 2 obviously felt the same way and voted down the plan in February.

“We’re very strongly opposed to their expansion plan, we think it would have a terribly damaging effect on Greenwich Village,” said Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society For Historic Preservation, a leading challenger of the plan. “It would oversaturate an area that’s already oversaturated with NYU facilities. It would change the character. It would eliminate valuable public open green space.”

Since then, the university downsized the plan, which now includes the preservation of two playgrounds and an agreement to reduce the heights of new buildings. But residents still aren’t pleased.

“The 2031 plan is still very significant and will still have an enormous negative impact on Greenwich Village and its surrounding neighborhood,” said Terri Cude, co-chair of the Community Action Alliance on NYU 2031. “It still changes the nature of Greenwich Village and it’s still massive. The reduction was not enough to change any of that.”

The alliance is composed of community associations from the neighborhoods affected by NYU’s presence, which also include NoHo and Union Square. Members are concerned about the local character, including small businesses, being affected.

“The additional construction will change the neighborhood to the point where they will no longer have the audience they need to survive,” Cude said. “It’s the nature of the customers, as people don’t want to live on a college campus. They change the demographic from a diverse mix to more students.”

The high ratio of students in the population is a common concern.

“It changes the Village–and the word village is important–into something that might look more like Midtown,” Cude said. “Which is fine if you like Midtown, but if you want a village, it’s not.”

Keeping the area residential is also important to residents like Wilson. The community garden that he oversees lies at the intersection of East Sixth Street and Avenue B. It is also within a census tract, 26.01, that has gone from 54.2 percent family households in 2000 to 47.9 percent in 2010. In the six block tract, the total number of households has jumped from 1,224 to 1,486. He worries about the neighborhood being overrun by students.

“Any given night, the bars are swelling with NYU students,” Wilson said. “I don’t know where they get the money to buy all this alcohol and stay up so late. They should be studying and putting their money toward their books and loans.”

Though the NYU 2031 plan is continuing to be negotiated, residents are still suspicious of the eventual outcome.

“It doesn’t benefit the people, it only benefits NYU,” said Wladek Debowski, who noted that he first saw the population beginning to change during the 80s and 90s.

Greenwich Village preservation advocate Berman, the Community Action Alliance, and others have pushed for NYU to instead target a less residential area, such as the Financial District.

Click the image below of NYU’s previous expansion: