Month: October 2011

Categories
Interview

Isabel Jennings – registered nurse at Mount Sinai Queens Hospital

Isabel Jennings in 30th Ave's Bakeway Cafe, before her shift at Mount Sinai Hospital Queens
Isabel Jennings in 30th Ave's Bakeway Cafe, before her shift at Mount Sinai Hospital Queens

The stretch of 30th Ave between 28th and Crescent Streets is dominated by Mount Sinai Queens hospital.  Throughout the day there are uniformed doctors and nurses crossing the Avenue to get coffee and sandwiches at Father & Son’s Delhi, ambulances and stretchers coming and going, relatives arriving to visit family members.   On a Sunday morning I spoke with Isabel Jennings before her shift began.  She is a registered nurse who works in the hospital’s emergency department.

Isabel was born in Puerto Rico and brought up in Astoria.  This Summer, after a twenty year absence from the neighborhood, she returned from Atlanta, Georgia, to work here.  Her daughter (who studies at Columbia) and son-in-law were expecting their first child – Isabel’s first grandchild.  Isabel moved back to New York City to help them.   She lives in Upper Manhattan and commutes three times a week to Mount Sinai for her 11am to 11.30pm shift.

“I have mixed feelings about coming back,” she says.  “Even though I grew up here, went to school here, it’s still been a big adjustment.”  Another adjustment has been her shift hours.  “I’m used to working seven in the morning until seven in the evening.  This is a rough shift.”

In the emergency department, Isabel treats “anything from keeping someone alive to assuring someone that their cough will go away if they follow the doctor’s instructions.  It’s quite intense.  It’s extremely busy in the emergency department.  I was not prepared for the immensity of it.  The hospital is very small, and it is the only hospital here for a good distance around.”

Isabel uses the commute at the end of her day to distance herself from the life-and-death situations she has dealt with at work.  “I try to defuse all the emotions by the time I get home.”

Mount Sinai was founded in 1910 as “Daly’s Astoria Sanatorium.”  It then became “Astoria General Hospital”.   In 1999, faced with financial difficulties and struggling to survive as a stand-alone hospital, it was sold to Manhattan’s Mount Sinai.  As its website states, “it is the only community hospital to bear the Mount Sinai name.”

Isabel enjoys helping other people through her work.  But she adds: “I do not enjoy the health care system in this country.  It just presents problems, so you can’t really help everyone.  I think we need an effective national healthcare program.  And around here, we need a few more hospitals.”

Categories
Interview

Peter Loupakis – Loupakis Karate Acrobatics

Peter Loupakis (fourth from r) with some of his students at Loupakis Karate Acrobatics
Peter Loupakis (fourth from r) with some of his students at Loupakis Karate Acrobatics

Peter Loupakis works at Loupakis Karate Acrobatics school on 31st Street just North of the 30th Ave subway station.   I spoke with him between two classes.  The first was with a group of young kids.  When I arrived they were learning to walk up a steeply slanting beam. “Let’s learn to climb the Matterhorn!” Peter called to them as they cautiously stepped up towards the highest end then jumped off with the help of guiding adult hands.  Then as we finished speaking, the next class, a group of teenagers, was warming up in leaps and bounds around the room.

Peter was born in Greece.  His father, Tony Loupakis, is a champion wrestler-turned acrobat, who began teaching Peter and his older brother Harry when they were one-and-a-half and three years old respectively.  “We continued ever since.  We moved here to the US when I was five.  By then we had already started tours as a group,” says Peter.  “We were called the Trio Loupakis.”

The trio was successful.  The outside and inside walls of their gym, which they set up in 1973 in a former dance studio, are covered in a collage of newspaper clips and photos from their winning competitions.  There are headlines like, “Man who rolls around on broken glass,” accompanied by a photo of Tony lying on glass shards with a weight on top of him.

Tony is now 77 but is still involved.  “He’s inside the gym every day. He’s teaching classes. He’s not just the one in the office signing people up.  He’s active and in there,” Peter says.

Tragically, Harry died in an accident in Greece in 2009.  “He will always be a part of us,” says Peter.  Tony and Peter have continued to perform.  It seems that it is so integral to their lives it would be impossible to imagine them doing anything else.  When I asked Peter at one point if he had a preference for teaching or performing he said, “it’s not really a question of preference any more.  It’s what I do.  I perform, I compete, I teach.  This is it.”

In July, Tony and Peter won two first places at a competition in Las Vegas, one for a karate-based routine and one for acrobatic gymnastics.  They are taking part in a regional competition in November.  And they often take part in shows at weekends.  Peter’s daughters, now 15 and 17, sometimes join in those too.

Peter says that it is unusual to provide martial arts and acrobatic gymnastics in one space, as they do at their gym.  “Normally those don’t go together.  But I think they should.  They complement each other. You need similar skills.  I like to say we take the best of different kinds of martial arts and acrobatics.  Over the course of the years, teachers come to our gym: teachers of Kung Fu, Shotokan, Goju, different styles of martial arts.  We’ve gleaned a little bit of the pie from everyone.”

The school is only open after school hours.  “That’s one of the beauties of the job – I’m not here all day,” says Peter.  Not that he is relaxing when he’s not at the gym: during the daytime he works as a physical education teacher in a school.

“Teaching is hard,” he says, “especially teaching children…it can be a little bit…taxing is the word!  But it’s fun.  And it’s never the same day at the office, ever.  That keeps it exciting.”

When the school first started, around 80% of the students were Greek.  Now it’s more like 10% or fewer Greek students, with the others reflecting Astoria’s diversity – sometimes with an upswing in one group or another.  “For example, a Polish couple came in and brought their child.  They go to a Polish school in the area so they tell all their friends and suddenly we have an influx of Polish people because of that.”

Peter now has eight or nine what he calls “grandkids” at the gym: kids whose parents he had taught when they were children.  The gym takes students of all ages.  “I’d like to say it’s fun for anyone.  Anyone can learn. The ability is there.  It’s a question of taking the time to learn to do it.  Some people learn fast and you know they are naturals, but some people take longer.  As long as you keep trying, you will get it.”

The outside of Loupakis Karate Acrobatics
Categories
Interview

Ralph and Yury Almaz – Almaz Brothers jewelers

Ralph (l) and Yury (r) Almaz in their store on 30th Ave
Ralph (l) and Yury (r) Almaz in their store on 30th Ave

Brothers Ralph and Yury Almaz opened their jewelers store at 35-13 30th Ave 26 years ago.  It is aptly named Almaz Brothers.  They had come to New York a few years previously from Uzbekistan.  There were jewelers in their family going back generations and their grandfather was one; they decided to continue the tradition.

The brothers chose Astoria to live because it was livelier than parts of Brooklyn that they had seen, and for the European feeling on its streets.  “It was always a dynamic neighborhood, very colorful and multi-ethnic,” says Ralph.  “It has kept the same way all these years, though now we see a lot more young professionals moving in too.”

When the brothers came to New York during the cold war, communication with relatives and friends back in Uzbekistan was extremely difficult.  Ralph says that now communication is open.  “People can come here, we talk on email, Skype and so on,” he says, although they do not return often because most of their close family have left.

Almaz Brothers specializes in engagement rings and bridal jewellery like wedding bands.  They also sell other jewelry items and watches.  Twice a year, Ralph and Yury attend an international jewelery show at Jacob Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, where jewelers from all over the world are represented: from Italy, Hong Kong, Israel, Turkey, Brazil…They buy most of their jewelry there and then tailor it for their customers in their store.  Yury adds that they also import diamonds from Israel, where his son is in the diamond-cutting business.

In the business of selling engagement rings, of course sometimes the proposal is rejected or the engagement breaks off.  “In that case, we offer to restyle the ring so that it does not look like an engagement ring,” says Ralph.  “Or if not, we offer to buy it back, though the customer takes a loss of course.”

Their business changes with the economy.  “Right now there’s a new trend of people bringing back a lot of their gold,” Ralph says.  “They want to take advantage of high gold prices and now everyone wants to sell their old jewelry, coins, and diamonds.  If it’s an interesting item we try to sell it.  But in most cases we melt down everything and then sell it to refiners.”

The brothers have clear-cut roles.  Ralph works on the shop floor where he deals with the customers and Yury focuses on customizing the jewelry in the back of the shop – when I took the photo for this interview he made sure that he had the small magnifying glass that he uses in his work around his neck so it would feature in the picture.  The most satisfying aspect of his work, he says, is creating something special.

Categories
Interview

Abdul Said

Abdul Said on his doorstep just off 30th Ave
Abdul Said on his doorstep just off 30th Ave

Abdul Said has lived in Astoria for almost 15 years, and in his current place on 23rd Street, just off 30th Avenue, for four and half years.  I met him on a sunny Sunday morning sitting on his doorstep, drinking a coffee bought from the Dunkin’ Donuts by the 30th Ave subway station.

He lives in one of the neighborhood’s old detached houses.  But like many of the older homes it is scheduled to be knocked down and turned into a bigger apartment building.  He’ll be moving, when a friend joins him from Boston, into one of the new buildings round the corner on 21st Street.

“Everywhere there are houses going down and new buildings going up,” he says.  “I don’t mind.  It’s good business for the owners.  They see people moving into the area and smell the money.  When I first moved here from Brooklyn everything said ‘for rent’, ‘for rent’.  Now it’s hard to find a place.”  The new buildings, he adds, can have 14-16 apartments.  The old houses on the same site housed just two or three families.

Abdul is originally from Morocco and came to the US 26 years ago.  “I’m from a small town in East Morocco, a very French part of the country.  The North is much more Spanish.”  He returns to Morocco to see family and friends.  “I like to travel once a year.  I just came back recently from a trip, I was away about six weeks – four weeks in Morocco and two weeks in Spain.”

Recently there was a news story about a New York Police Department surveillance program focused on Moroccans – not because of any specific allegations against individuals but in order to build up a detailed picture of the city’s Moroccan community, in support of the government’s anti-terrorism efforts.  “I read about the police stuff, yes,” says Abdul.  “It’s part of what’s going on in the world, the past decade.  A lot of people are getting confused.  It’s part of what’s going on.”

On the current democracy movements underway in the Middle East, Abdul is optimistic.  “It’s like the sky, one minute it’s all cloudy and the next minute it’s clear.  They needed to get rid of those guys who had been in power for thirty, forty years.  That makes no sense.  You need a system like here.  Every four years if you don’t like who’s in charge you vote him out.  These people were there for a lifetime.  Now there’s a new generation who don’t buy those things.  They want change.”

Before coming to New York, Abdul lived in Florida for ten years where he worked in real estate.  His two children are still there, with their mother who is originally from Brooklyn (she and Abdul are divorced).  Since moving to New York Abdul has worked in the restaurant industry: currently he is a bar tender in the Marriott hotel near La Guardia airport.

When Abdul first came to New York he lived in Brooklyn.  He was working in an Irish restaurant in Manhattan and the commute took a long time.  Then he came to visit a friend in Astoria, saw Manhattan just across the river and learned that it only takes 20 minutes to travel between the two.

He also likes Astoria for the fact it is quiet.  “Though it’s got a lot less quiet now, especially with lots of people moving here from Manhattan,” he says.  “The area up near Steinway has changed a lot.”  Abdul still finds quiet in Astoria Park.  Often he takes car there to have breakfast overlooking the river.  “Oh man, I love that place!”