Panayiotis Menikou is the President of EuroMarket (slogan “Fine European Foods). It is on 31st Street under the subway tracks, half a block south of the 30th Ave station. When he is not dealing with orders in his office he can often be seen outside the front of the store, talking with friends and neighbors as the trains rumble overhead.
Panayiotis was born in northern Cyprus. He was fourteen when Turkey invaded the island in 1974. “They came from the North towards the South,” he says. “My father put us in a tractor and we drove south to save ourselves.
“I told him I wanted to take the radio. I had our big radio all ready to go. He said ‘oh no, leave it here, you’re going to break it.’ We thought we would only leave for one day or two days and go back.
“So that’s how my father found himself out on the street with his wife and five kids (I have two brothers and two sisters). The people from my community were spread out across different parts of southern Cyprus.”
Panayiotis worked hard through high school and then went into the army for compulsory military service. He was wondering what to do on leaving the army when some friends who had gone to study in the US encouraged him to join them. They helped him enroll in Queens College to learn English, and in 1980 he moved here. He later brought one of his brothers, and then the other brother, and then his sisters to the US to study as well.
While he was studying, Panayiotis opened up “Cyprus Deli” on 30th Avenue. His siblings all returned to Cyprus at various points, but he stayed on. He had the idea for EuroMarket because a lot of his European customers started asking if he could stock products from their countries in the deli – he realized there was a need for a European supermarket in the neighborhood. One day he was walking down 31st Street and passed a pool hall that had been closed for two years: he decided that would be his location.
EuroMarket sells food from all over Eastern Europe: from Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Poland, and Greece…”Slowly-slowly we will sell everything!” Panayiotis says.
It also stocks over sells over 700 varieties of beer. “Cyprus Deli became well-known for its beer. We were the first around here to stock the German and Belgian beers. So when I started this store, I thought we must keep selling beers from all over the world.” His own favorite is Duvel from Belgium for its strong, full flavor.
Panayiotis says it was hard getting the business going at the beginning. Its location just off 30th Avenue means that people do not stumble across it – they have to know it is there. But things are getting better now: he has more and more products, more and more customers.
One of Panayiotis’ staff opens the store at eight in the morning, and he arrives at nine thirty or ten. Then he works through until midnight, seven days a week. “I’m single,” says Panayiotis, “my business takes my life!”
Panayiotis has lived in the neighborhood for 31 years and has no plans to move unless one day he returns to Cyprus. “I like it because it feels like you’re in Europe, because of the people, the cafés. Everything I need is close to my house. And the city is only 10 or 15 minutes away.”
Once or twice a year he goes to Cyprus to see his family. “Cyprus is beautiful,” he says. “There is a lot of tourism, and the economy is strong.”
The “green line” between the north and south of the island was opened in 2003 so residents from either side can now cross over. “My brothers went to see my house. But I didn’t go. I don’t feel like going. You know, there are Turkish people living inside your house, and you have to ask for permission to go. This is ridiculous. We have a lot of land there that today would be worth a lot of money. It’s near Famagusta, one of the best beaches.
“My father had passed away in 1991. I think all this heavy stuff happening to him, it was bad for him. So my brothers went. And they took my sister who was thirteen months old when she left. They showed her where she was born, and where she made her first steps.”
EuroMarket interior, with its European products and flags
Aravella Simotas, 32, is the New York State Assemblymember for district 36. Her district covers all of Astoria (30th Ave included) and some of Long Island City.
She describes her job as “legislating in Albany for the people of Astoria. My constituency – who I consider my bosses – live here in my district. My job entails going to Albany and ensuring that their interests are accounted for, and that I advocate for them.”
Simotas came to Astoria with her parents from Greece when she was six months old. She has been involved in community work here since high school, and when the seat became available in 2010 she was a natural candidate.
Not that she had established it as a career goal. “Albany seats in New York City are like a cheap one-bedroom on the Upper East Side. It doesn’t happen! Or if it does happen, it doesn’t happen often at all,” she says.
But last year the senator who represented Astoria and its neighboring districts like Woodside and Ravenswood – George Onorato – retired. District 36 Assemblymember Michael Gianaris ran for and got the New York State Senate seat, leaving his former Assembly seat open.
Simotas is the first Greek-American woman in the Assembly.
Childhood, and “immigrant values”
Simotas says that Astoria has always been a growing community of immigrants. “It’s a place where middle class people have come to raise their families and look for the American dream.”
Her own story is an example of this. Her parents arrived from Greece “with two suitcases in their hands”. Their family (the parents, Aravella and her brother) lived in a one-bedroom apartment. Simotas’ father worked in a delicatessen, then bought the delicatessen, and eventually bought his own home in the neighborhood.
Simotas went to elementary school at PS17 on 30th Ave. Then she attended Junior High School 126 and William C. Bryant High School, both also in Astoria. She also took classes at St. Demetrios, the largest Greek-American school in the US, which is two blocks below the 30th Ave subway station.
“My parents always instilled in me that you should know your culture and your roots. So five days a week after normal school I went to Greek school! That’s what a lot of children of Greek immigrant parents did. And they still do. Even the second generation.
“Growing up you don’t want to go to two schools, have no time to play with your friends or watch television, all the things kids usually do. It was about 20 years later that I truly appreciated the fact that my parents did that.”
They encouraged her to excel in English school too. “If I got a ninety-five on a test and not a hundred my mom would sit there and ask why I didn’t get a hundred! She knew I had the capacity and she wanted me to live up to it. My parents’ mentality was, ‘we come here and we worked very hard to give you guys opportunities.’ A typical American story.”
Simotas says she particularly appreciates what she calls the “immigrant values” that her parents instilled in her. “Those are values of a very hard work-ethic, of always keeping your word, and always giving back to your community.”
While in college at Fordham University Simotas worked with New York City Council, in their Office of Oversight and Investigations. She examined issues like how the MTA was spending taxpayers’ money, and the sale of lottery tickets to underage minors. It gave her a taste of how government can change things.
Then while at Fordham Law School she served as the local district representative for former city council member Peter Vallone Senior, and went on to run his son’s campaign in 2001. After leaving law school, she worked for a while in the federal court system before becoming a commercial litigator – all the while remaining a member of Queens Community Planning Board 1 and serving on other local boards.
Challenges of being a new – and a female – Assemblymember
Simotas says she faces two particular challenges as a New York State Assemblymember. She’s new, in an institution in which many hold their seats for years and years. And she’s a woman – currently only 23% of the legislature (i.e. Senate and Assembly) are women.
The gender in-balance has a lot to do with the tough schedule, Simotas says. From January through June she has to be in Albany for three days a week – four in March during the budget period. Then for the remaining days, including the weekends, she’s working in Astoria and attending community events. Her working days often extend to two or three in the morning.
“It’s a similar situation to the field of law. When many of my female colleagues reached a certain level and were either ready to have a family or to have a second child, they just didn’t think that there was a way to balance it all. Sometimes people also convince themselves they can’t do it. You have to make your own set of rules and you have to make it work for you.”
Simotas has been married for six years, and while she does not yet have children, she hopes to someday, and to find a way to strike that balance.
As a new Assemblymember, a big challenge is learning the unwritten rules. “To actually understand how to get something done, you’re not going to read it in any rulebook. You have to develop relationships and learn how to move something through the Assembly.”
Simotas says her colleagues’ advice has been a crucial help so far, in navigating the Assembly and in managing to get her first bill through within 12 weeks of having started work (a change to civil law that cuts red tape for litigants who want to discontinue their lawsuit).
“The leadership in the Assembly, and particularly the women, have been so generous with their time and sharing their institutional knowledge. You would think there might be some kind of rivalry but absolutely not. I haven’t felt it at all.” She also receives advice from Senator Gianaris (her predecessor), whom she considers her mentor.
As well as guidance within the legislature Simotas has support at home. Of her husband John Katsanos she says, “he has been tremendous – the most supportive person in the world. Everyone asks me how my husband’s taking it and I say, ‘ honestly, he gets more excited about it than I do!’ I get home and just don’t want to talk about Albany, but he is so engaged. That’s the key to it.”
Advocating for Astoria’s small businesses
One of Simotas’ big causes is Astoria’s small businesses. “They are the backbone of our local economy,” she says. “They employ many of our residents and they add so much revenue to New York State.” She’s all the more motivated to support them by the fact that her parents are former small business owners.
Yet they face a lot of challenges. To give an example, Astoria’s many restaurants and cafés are often slapped with fines by the health department for not complying with new regulations that have been drawn up just the day before.
“I’ve patronized the same restaurants since I was a kid,” says Simotas. “There’s a pizza store, Grand Avenue Pizza, on 30th Ave and 35th Street. It’s one of my favorite establishments. The owner told me that the Department of Health fined him $ 1400 because he was displaying pizza with meat outside of a refrigerator. It was a brand new regulation that came out.”
The fine ended up costing the owner an additional $10,000. He bought the refrigerator from the first vendor he could find because he was worried about complying as soon as possible, and also had to pay to get alterations made in the restaurant to get it installed.
“Of course, the department has to regulate these issues,” Simotas says. “They should be protecting our health. But it’s unfair to fine somebody on a new regulation and not give them time to comply. They gave him no notice.”
She has written a bill that would prevent the Department of Health from enforcing a new regulation for 60 days, and would also give the businesses written notice of new regulations.
Another important issue for Simotas is protecting tenants. “There are a lot of tenants here, and many things have happened in the past few years that are not fair to them.” The law is currently biased towards landlords and she wants to help change that.
One of the first bills Simotas authored was to ban toxic toys in daycare centers. While she was campaigning last summer she visited a daycare center and noticed that while half the markers the kids were using were labeled “non-toxic”, the other half were not. She says she was surprised that there wasn’t already a law preventing daycare centers from using toxic toys.
Driving time
The camaraderie with other Assemblymembers, and setting herself clear goals to get bills passed are two aspects of Simotas’ job that she most enjoys.
She least enjoys waking up on a Monday morning and having to drive 155 miles to Albany. “Especially when you get onto the throughway and there’s traffic! I’m used to utilizing every minute of my day. So the fact I have to be sitting in my car so long driving is hard.”
Not surprisingly, Simotas has found productive ways to use that time too. She listens to books on tape. She has set up hands-free calling in her car so that she can take calls. And she records her notes and listens back to them during the drive.
Changing the system
As well as working the system to get bills passed, Simotas is also working to change how the system in Albany works. She’s a member of the committee that steers the direction of the Assembly and proposes reforms, and says it was a real honor as a freshman to be put on that committee.
“Something we know we need to be doing is making the Assembly more accessible to the public. Making it more open. There’s a huge need for that.”
Dr Yokaira Espiritu-Santo is a podiatrist at Astoria Advanced Footcare on 30th Ave. (Her patients call her Dr Santo for short). While I interviewed her, she was skillfully treating my feet.
She came to the US with her family when she was two, from the Dominican Republic, and was brought up in New Jersey. She studied medicine at Rutgers University. Then she did her four years podiatry training in Manhattan and her residency in New York Hospital Queens, in Flushing.
Dr Santo says that she does not know the origin of the name “Yokaira.” “A lot of the patients ask me,” she says. “I suppose I should look it up, but really I don’t want to know. It’s my name, it’s me.”
She decided to become a podiatrist because when she was young she had chronic in-growing toenails. After many fruitless trips to her eighty-year-old pediatrician she finally saw a podiatrist, who solved the problem.
“Cured would be the wrong word,” she says, “because there’s never an actual cure for anything, you bring things under control. But he stopped the in-growing toenails recurring.
“I was so grateful and happy that I could wear my sandals and my open toe shoes, and paint my nails. I had wanted to be a pediatrician. But that changed my mind and I became a podiatrist.”
Working on 30th Ave
Dr Hans, who heads up the practice, trained Dr Santo during her residency and invited her to join him when she finished training. They split their week between offices in Manhattan, Sunnyside, and Astoria.
“In the Manhattan office,” says Dr Santo, “everyone wants the quick fix. They have the mentality of ‘fix me as soon as possible, I’m on my lunch-break, or I just got out of work and want to get home.’” She says people are in less of a hurry in the Astoria office. On 30th Avenue, they treat more elderly people, and patients make their appointments for days that they have off work.
“Everyone that comes through this office seems to be happy,” she says. “Everybody has a different story. Everybody comes from different walks of life. I see one patient, who then brings their mom or their father or their girlfriend. It turns into a family event here at times. I might treat a whole family in one day.
“I appreciate the fact that they trust me and that they refer other people to come here. That’s pretty cool.”
Talking to the patients is one aspect of her work that Dr Santo really enjoys. She also likes the fact that they leave the office feeling better than when they came in.
She and Dr Hans treat a whole range of foot problems: heel pain, occasional surgeries on bunions or hammer toes, and preventative care for diabetic patients, so that they won’t have to lose their feet in the future due to poor circulation or infections.
They treat ankle sprains and fractures, often caused by running. And if a patient is wearing shoes that aggravate their problem, they let them know. “For runners we usually recommend New Balance sneakers because they come a little bit wider and they have better arch support.”
Tough schedule
Dr Santo lives with her partner in New Jersey, having moved there after nine years living in Manhattan and then Queens. She spends two to three hours a day commuting through traffic. “That’s killing me!” she says. But despite that she still would not want to move back into the city.
Once at the office she spends 12 hours there and treats between 20-30 patients. The hardest part is the paperwork. For each patient she sees, there are 10-15 minutes of paperwork, up to 30 minutes if the patient is new. She takes a lot of the paperwork to finish at home.
Dr Santo takes a short lunch break but usually spends it in the office and has food delivered from one of the 30th Ave. restaurants.
Once a month, she and a girlfriend who works in the hospital meet on a Monday night for supper at the Indian restaurant, Ghandi. “I love that place. Even if it means eating late – and sometimes waiting around on my own for her if she finishes after me – I make it happen, at least once a month.”
What’s next
“I definitely want three kids, and I have to start soon!” says Dr Santo. “I want two girls and a boy. I already have their names and everything.”
Career-wise, Dr Santo says that in the future she would like to have her own practice: “It would have state-of-the-art everything. And lots of rooms. I would work there three times a week, and do surgery one day a week. I might join a residency program where I could train other people to become podiatrists, do teaching lectures here and there.
“Perhaps some trauma work too. But the problem with trauma is that you always have to be on call with your pager next to your hip. So I’d probably just do trauma call once or twice a month. That’s my ideal. Oh and I’d dictate all of my charts instead of handwriting them. (laughs).”
How does Dr Santo plan to make this happen? “It will take some time, and a lot of energy.”
Jonathan Ellis and Georgina Young-Ellis by M-City's mural on 30th Ave
Just beyond George’s Auto Repair at the far western end of 30th Avenue are some walls covered in graffiti. But this isn’t usual graffiti tagging. The walls form the Welling Court Mural Project, and the murals on them were painted by graffiti artists from all around the world.
Welling Court resident Jonathan Ellis came up with the initial idea for the project. I met with Jonathan and his wife Georgina Young-Ellis to hear about graffiti, the neighborhood, and block parties.
Both Jon and Georgina are originally from Los Angeles, but they met in New Mexico where they lived for a while and had their son. Georgina had always wanted to move back to New York, where she had studied drama in the 1980s. Thirteen years ago they did. They lived for three years on Astoria’s 12th Street, then after many months of house-hunting bought their house on Welling Court.
Welling Court
Welling Court is a small street that loops in a half-moon from 30th Ave to 12th Street, close to East River.
Georgina says,“When we bought the house ten years ago, Welling Court was a bad street. There were a lot of good people on it, who are still there now. But there were also crack houses. One was right next door to us. We just kept being persistent about calling the police when that was going on.”
She says that together with their neighbors they have turned it into a family neighborhood, “without gentrifying, without throwing anyone out. Except for crack-heads and prostitutes.” A lot of kids live along the street. Given that it doesn’t have much traffic they play soccer along it when the weather is warm.
The community at Welling Court is mainly Mexican – the neighborhood is referred to locally as Little Mexico. “We really value that,” says Georgina. “Being from the south west and having come here from New Mexico, we felt at home.”
Each December 11th local residents hold a fiesta for the Virgin of Guadalupe. They build a shrine on the street, bring out piñatas and lots of food, and have music that goes on well into the night.
Jon and Georgina spend a lot of time in the neighborhood: other than Georgina’s teaching of English as a second language, their work, as artists, is based at home. They are currently working to get their feature-length screenplay produced. Jon recently published a book on weight control, and Georgina, an e–novel. Georgina also acts, and Jon designs websites.
The mural project
Jon says: “I’d been seeing gang-tagging getting worse and worse and worse, in the neighborhood and all around it.”
“It was just a graffiti magnet,” Georgina adds. “It was ugly. And kind of sad. We never knew when they were doing it. It would just appear.”
Yet Jon says that he had also “always kind of admired graffiti. When it was nice! I saw a piece of programming on CBS Sunday Morning that was about an event in Paris each year, when graffiti artists from all over the world converge and do their works.
So I got it in my head that there was no reason why we couldn’t somehow manage to pull that off on Welling Court.”
He spent two years trying to get people to work with him on the project but found it hard to get them involved. Then a friend suggested he contact a Brooklyn-based group called Ad Hoc Art. Ad Hoc invited thirty graffiti artists to come and paint the walls around Welling Court.
“We had to get permission from every business whose walls are used,” says Jon. “That took a while. There was a little resistance. Especially from the school bus company. They didn’t know what to expect. And there’s a hierarchy there that was hard to get through. But once I was able to talk to the main person there, she was interested and said go for it.”
One artist, M-City from Poland, came a few months before the others, in December 2009. A neighbor had an empty apartment that M-City stayed in for a few days while he worked. Jon and Georgina were away at the time on vacation.
“When we came back home from vacation it was very late at night,” says Jon. “We were in a cab. We drove up along Welling Court and I was so disappointed, thinking, ‘oh it didn’t happen.’ There was nothing on Welling Court. Then the next morning I walked out and on 30th Ave of course there was this magnificent piece of work. He’d painted a different wall to the one we were expecting.”
The other artists came from Brazil, Chile, Denmark, and elsewhere – and some were local New York City artists. They arrived on May 19 and by the end of Saturday 22, eight walls had been covered with murals.
At one point while they were painting some people who worked for the bus company but didn’t know that the artists had permission, tried to intervene.
Jon says, “Apparently people who were in the neighborhood watching the artists literally stepped in and stood up for them, and said this is great, we want it. To me, this project is all community building. And as it turns out the bus company are now really forthcoming about allowing us to control the outside of their walls.
“People are coming in from outside the neighborhood to photograph it, to video. Music videos are being made on the street. It’s bringing a different sense of what a block is.”
“And that’s without any sort of Williamsburgian gentrification,” says Georgina. “It’s not like we’re a community of all artists, where everybody’s thinking ‘let’s make this into art mecca.’ This a community of mostly working people, largely immigrants. They all are just excited that their street is not going to have ugly graffiti but instead will have something pretty interesting, unusual, and eye-catching.”
Many of the artists said that the murals would probably get tagged soon after they were painted. But almost a year has gone by, and many of them remain un-tagged.
This June the project will happen again. There’s more wall-space to be covered. Also many of the artists are going to come back and re-paint over the areas where they have already painted.
The block party
Jon and Georgina had organized a block party – the Welling Court block party – three times before the mural project. Everyone along the block contributes food: hamburgers, Mexican, Peruvian, Brazilian, Greek food.
Then when the artists came in 2010, they combined the painting with the block party. People from all over New York showed up. Some, though, came just with their own drink.
“It wasn’t that they were taking things from anybody else,” says Jon. “But you know, they just brought drink for themselves. I really would like to instill this year that feeling that we’re a broader community and that we’re all sharing.
“And if they can’t share food or drink, I’d ask that they make some contribution to the artists. The artists are there doing an incredible thing not just for Welling Court and the blocks around it, but for all of Astoria. And indirectly for all of New York.”
Development in Astoria
For many years Georgina has belonged to a group called Long Island City Alliance, which brings people together around issues like graffiti and over-development. She says that the alliance played a big role in helping to get a new down-zoning introduced in Astoria.
The zoning restrictions make it harder to build tall buildings on blocks that are dominated by two-family homes. They allow larger buildings on streets where some already exist, like 21st Street.
Jon says, “Developers in some areas realized that the down-zoning was going to be inevitable. Builders came in and tore down some 150-year old homes. They knew that the community wouldn’t like it so they literally would go in and knock a house down in a day.”
He says that some development is good as long as it’s done right. Examples of what works, in his view, include the Astor Bake Shop, where we had this conversation, and Vesta restaurant on 30th Ave and 21st Street.
He says of Astor Bake Shop: “It was daring for him [chef-owner George McKirdy] to open this place up. To have that forward-thinking idea that this could work here, without changing the neighborhood. And it does work. It fits into the neighborhood. People who live here come here and support it and love it. I wouldn’t mind seeing more of that.”
Another example Jon gives is the Piano Factory building on Vernon Boulevard by the river. The inside of the building was gutted and turned into condominiums but the outside was completely maintained.
Georgina agrees that a balance is needed. “The tradition of New York City is development. You can’t really say no, we are not going to build buildings and develop. But I’m optimistic because of the progress we’ve already made in really keeping a handle on it. Keeping it under control, guiding it. I’m optimistic that this area and other small areas in New York City can grow and develop in a good way.
“And that we can do it without driving people out of their homes and rentals. That’s a big thing for me. Jackson Heights is going through something like that. There are cool local communities, where the more people who want to live here, and the more wonderful little restaurants get built, the more rents go up and the more that people who were living there a long time get driven out. Then big box stores come in and suddenly it’s not so desirable any more. It’s this whole wave of things that happen.
“I feel like right now in Astoria there’s an awareness of that wave, and an awareness of how to try to counteract it. So far I see it going in the right direction.”
Jonathan and Georgina’s blog “Searching for Sincerity” where they rank places on a “sincerity scale.” Their 10 factors of sincerity include: locally owned (as far as they can tell); not connected to a large corporation; friendly service; value; quality; they love what they’re doing.
From right to left: Denis Curtin, Bill Nevins, Danielle Pagliaro, Mary Devitt
From right to left: Denis Curtin, Bill Nevins, Danielle Pagliaro, Mary Devitt
Last Tuesday afternoon a group of long-time 30th Avers was gathered in Corner Delights Coffee Shop, on the corner of 30th Ave and 44th Street. They were:
Denis Curtin: He came to America from Ireland in 1958, and moved to Astoria in 1960.
Mary Devitt: Her parents came from Ireland, and she has lived in Astoria for 44 years.
Jeanne O’Melia: Her mother and father both came from Ireland in the early 1900s, and met in New York (about which, more below). Jeanne was brought up in Corona, lived in Jackson Heights a while, and came to Astoria in 1978.
Bill Nevins: He was born on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, and moved to Astoria in 1960 with his grandmother. For the past 31 years he has lived on 30th Ave itself.
Danielle Pagliaro: She was born and brought up near 30th Ave. Danielle works at Corner Delights.
Below are details from an animated conversation in which one memory triggered another, and another.
*********************************
Denis: We meet here every day. If one of us doesn’t show up, the other one will call to see what they’re doing.
Jeanne: We talk and we eat, we talk and we eat.
Mary: And we tell jokes and we laugh.
Jeanne: Mary tells the greatest jokes.
Denis: You can find us here four, sometimes five hours a day.
Street games
Danielle: When I was a kid here we used to have awesome block parties. You would come outside in the summer and every block had people on the streets, kids. Whether you lived on this block or that block, people knew who you were. If you got seen doing something wrong, you’d be caught by the ear and dragged back to your mother.
Mary: Each block had its own baseball team and own football team, and they played each other.
At six o’clock you’d hear the mothers calling out the windows, “Johnny, Billy, get up,” telling their kids to come for dinner.
You never had a kid being bored. People used boxes and old wheels to make go-carts. And then there was the bottle caps game. We melted colored crayons into the caps to weigh them down.
Bill: And Johnny Ride the Pony.
Mary: There was a lady on our block called the witch, because she didn’t want kids playing there. She would throw water out of her window onto them.
Danielle. I think every block had a witch. And a cat lady.
Bill: The schoolyards used to be so much bigger than they are now. Public School 70 – that had the greatest yard anywhere.
Changes
Denis: Astoria has always been good. When I came in 1960, I was a boy. I went to high school over in Sunnyside. It was all working people. The prices were good. And it was centrally located. You were in the city in 10 minutes.
I married, and divorced, and have three boys – now they’re all grown up and married. My ex-wife lives in the same apartment she was born in, at 30th Ave and 42nd Street. And her father had moved there when he was 12 years old.
Mary: When we came here in the 1960s, the neighborhood was German. German, Italian, and Irish, but more German than anything else.
St Joseph’s Church here was founded by the Germans. Then of course you’ve got Kaufman Studios on 34th Avenue, the Steinway Piano Factory and Steinway Street.
A lot of people have moved out to the suburbs now. Like the Germans moved out to Middle Village. The Italians went out to Whitestone.
You get quite a lot of religions here too. You had quite a lot of Jewish people in Astoria. There were also Lutheran churches and schools. And then down towards Ditmars there were mostly Greeks.
Bill: Steinway Street used to be a very expensive street. People would come from Manhattan to shop there. And this was like a vacation spot, like being in the country. There used to be a Woolworths. That was the best store in Steinway. It had old wooden creaking floors. You could get anything in there. You could buy goldfish. Anything.
Danielle: I used to go with my grandmother to get yarn, just so I could have the meatloaf and apple pie at the counter.
Mary: There were a lot of ice-cream parlors in Astoria too. They sold egg creams [a drink made with chocolate syrup, milk and soda water].
Denis: One of the wonderful things was the Triboro Movie Theater. The one that had the stars in the ceiling. It was like the universe when you looked up. It was heart-breaking to see it pulled down. They knew it was a landmark but they ripped it down, overnight. Now it’s apartments.
Bill: Along 30th Avenue there were a lot more bars. From Steinway up to here I can think of seven bars that used to be here. Now they’re gone, and there are more cafés instead. There used to be German delis too.
Mary: Phil’s Kosher restaurant on Steinway was great. And the Steinway Bakeshop. And Schaller and Weber, “All German Meats”. Oh and the bakery down near the train, Norgards Bakery.
Bill: Mount Sinai Hospital on 30th Ave was Astoria General Hospital before. Actually, Mr Drago built that. [The father of Rosario Drago, of RP Drago Funeral Homes on 30th Ave]. They’d joke that the father killed them and his son used to bury them. Rosario Drago has died now, and the funeral home is in different hands.
There was a lot more green space. I remember a farm just here. And there was also a farm between 21st and 22nd Streets, and Broadway and 34th Avenue. There was an English-style castle opposite it, with turrets and everything. When I did my newspaper round when I was about ten, they gave me that castle to drop the paper off at. I was afraid of it. But when we heard that the guy there died, we became braver. They’ve torn it down now.
I have a barn in the backyard of my house where they used to keep horses. When I moved in there 31 years ago they still had the four stalls inside the barn.
Denis: Up where La Guardia airport is, that was called North Beach. I don’t remember it, but the old timers talk about it. They would go swimming up there. That was like going to the countryside too.
Buildings
Bill: 30th Avenue used to be much lower than it is now. When you walk out the back of my house, you have to go a long way down. That’s the original level of the street. They used to have the sewers on that level too – they didn’t dig holes to put the pipes in, they just put them right there.
The houses along the streets off 30th Avenue, they’re Matthews Houses, built by the Matthews family. They went up around the 1920s, after the elevated trains came. They’re all made with yellow bricks from Pennsylvania.
You used to have to heat them with coal. There was the front fireplace and the back fireplace. You had a space in the basement where you could keep your coal. My father used to say that if you saw no coal in a space, the people in that apartment were very cold.
Danielle: There were windows between each room for ventilation.
Denis: Down near the river you have all the old mansions. The mansions from the sailing days. Some have the captains’ walkways on the top, where the wives would watch their husbands arrive on the sailing ships.
Jeanne
I used to live in Corona, which was a very good place at one time. I was born there. I could tell you every store, everything about Corona. Then I moved to Jackson Heights, and then I came down here.
I moved here because my mother was getting old. She couldn’t climb the stairs any more. We had been in a walk-up apartment for 20 years but we couldn’t stay. My sister was here and she invited us down. My mother lived to be a hundred.
She came from Ireland, and my father too.
She came in about 1914. She was going to school to be a nurse. She would go at night. My dear father, he worked at nights too. There was the token booth man at the station. My mother would come through there to get on the train. And my father too. And the man behind the booth, he said to my father, “you know there’s a nice young Irish girl who comes through here every night, she goes to school. Maybe you’d like to meet her”.
And that’s how my mother met my father! They got married. My mother never became the nurse. She was a nurse to all of us. She had six children.
Finally – two more things about Astoria
Mary: One of the best things about 30th Avenue, is you’re near to all the conveniences, to shopping, to churches, to the subway and so on.
And you have a wonderful mix of people here. That keeps us all grounded.
Carlos Sanclementi could not talk long for our interview because work was calling; he had to go and play billiards with one of his customers.
Carlos has owned Astoria Billiards Club since 2004. It’s a cavernous basement space on 30th Ave between 35th and 36th Street, which many years ago used to be a bowling alley. Customers can play billiards, pool, snooker, table hockey, backgammon and chess.
Carlos bought it from one of his wife’s relatives. The relative had grown tired of managing the billiards hall. And Carlos, who had been working for 25 years with an import-export company, was ready for a change.
“What I really enjoy about my work here,” he says, “is that no-one’s my boss. I make the decisions. And of course my wife as well, because we run the business together. It’s much better than how it was for 25 years – even though I’d become a department supervisor – hearing ‘Carlos do this, Carlos do that’ all the time.”
Carlos is from Cali in Colombia and moved to the US in 1966. He rarely goes to Colombia now because he has few relatives still there. “The last time I went was eight years ago. But I do want to go before too long. I have various houses and properties there. I want to check that the agency that looks after them is doing everything it says it’s doing.”
Carlos and his wife Marta commute to the billiards hall from their home in Flushing. They do the first shift, from 1pm till around 10.30pm. She works at the counter where people pay for their games and buy food and drinks. He does the paperwork in the office, as well as playing a game of billiards with anyone who needs a playing partner. “If they turned up and didn’t have anyone to play a game with, they wouldn’t come back!”
Usually one of Marta’s sisters and a friend of theirs do the night shift – Carlos says they always have a man and a women on duty at one time. “We stay open until whenever the last players leave. If there are five tables playing at two in the morning, you can’t go round and tell them to wrap up and go.”
The customers are mainly American, and many Mexicans. “Some of the regulars,” says Carlos, “come here every day to play.” And on that note off he went to play the game with his waiting customer.
This morning I found Yiorgos (George) Haridimou in his auto repair shop barbecuing two huge skewers of pork with friends and customers.
George is from Cyprus. But even though it was Greece’s independence day yesterday, 25 March, he said the barbeque wasn’t in honor of that. “We just have a barbeque once in a while. Maybe we’ll have another one tomorrow, to mark independence day!”
George is an avid supporter of the Athens-based AEK soccer team. He’s a president of the AEK Fan Club of USA and was proudly wearing one of its sweatshirts when I spoke with him (he’s third from the right in the photo).
He moved with his family from Cyprus to New York in 1982, growing up first for a few years in Yonkers before moving to Astoria. He wanted to be a mechanic since he was a boy. He started the business 25 years ago, and bought his building on 30th Ave near 12th Street in 1998.
“I set up the business here because the zoning laws allowed you to start up an auto-repair shop,” George says. “It was more industrial. Now it’s starting to become more residential.
“That’s a good thing. The neighborhood is much better than it was before, even than 10 years ago. There used to be a lot of crime. It wasn’t the nicest part of town. 21st Street was like the boundary, with the bad area on this side of it.
“Some of the old industries have gone. There used to be a lot of marble places that you don’t see around any more. And next door, there used to be an electrician’s. Now it’s an apartment building. But I’m going to stay here, this is my own building. I’m not going away.”
Khaled Shallah is from Arwad, Syria’s only inhabited island. He trained and worked for many years as a boat mechanic. His work on container ships took him to “all the places you can imagine,” he says, from South America, to Europe, to Asia, to Africa.
The boats he worked on carried all kinds of things. One had a shipment of live lambs from Romania.
Khaled says that he enjoyed life at sea, being far away, and close to nature, and beginning to feel like wherever he was, was home. But eighteen years ago he came to settle in the US. He started a new life from scratch. He worked at a cousin’s restaurant in Manhattan and for a while in another restaurant in Texas. Back in New York, eight years ago he set up Pita Hot on 30th Ave.
His inspiration for Pita Hot came from a combination of seeing the cooks preparing food on the boats he worked on and his cousin’s Manhattan restaurant. The menu includes falafel, hummus, lamb- and chicken-filled pita pockets. All the food is things that Khaled likes himself. “If there’s something I don’t like, I don’t sell it, seriously,” he says. “If I don’t accept it for myself or my kids I won’t sell it.”
Pita Hot’s small space is filled with the sound of sizzling on the grill. The walls are densely decorated with postcards, calendars and ornaments from the Middle East. Customers take their food out or eat it at one of the small café tables. For each waiting customer, Khaled or one of his co-workers dunks a small piece of pita into a jar of hummus on the front counter – a Pita Hot signature gesture.
Khaled doesn’t work fixed hours. “I usually come in to open the shop, to make sure that everything’s in place. Then I come back and forth during the day, and we stay open late.”
He says that if you stand in the shop for just a couple of hours you could see people of 40 different nationalities pass by. “From Syria, I just know a couple of kids. The Arab community here is mainly Moroccan, Algerian and Egyptian. There are some Tunisians, Yemenis, Palestinians and a few Lebanese. That’s in addition of course to others – Greeks, Italians, Russians, Yugoslavians…”
He has never had any trouble in his shop. “People are so friendly here. For some reason Astoria people are nicer, better than in Manhattan. If you have ever worked in Manhattan, it’s very different. When you approach someone there, they think you want something from them. Here the culture’s much more relaxed. Much more European.”
Despite feeling completely at home in Astoria, Khaled says that in an ideal world he would have brought his kids up for the first years of their lives in Syria, moving with them to the US when they were a bit older. In the US they go to school too young, he says. They go young, but while there they learn much less than if they spent that time with family and friends during their early years.
Khaled does not know how long he will be in Astoria. Maybe one day he will move to the Midwest – the space and nature there appeal. “This is New York,” he says. “Does anybody know how long they will be here?”
Natalia Paruz has lived just off 30th Ave since 1998, and in Astoria for longer than that.
The saw
“My name is Natalia Paruz, but everybody calls me the Saw Lady because I play the musical saw.
The saw has a very angelic sound. A lot of people say that it reminds them of the sound of an opera singer. I like it because the sound is so ethereal and spiritual. I also like the visual. Not only the fact it is a saw, which is kind of jarring because people don’t think that a saw would make such a beautiful sound. But also because when you play a saw the entire instrument moves in the air and makes a sort of wave shape.
I got into saw playing by chance. About 17 years ago my parents and I were in Austria. We went to see a show for tourists and in it there was a guy playing a saw. That was the first time I had encountered this instrument and I was mesmerized.”
Natalia had found what that she wanted to do. Previously she was a professional dancer, but her dancing career was cut short when she was hit by a taxi in New York. She had been at a loss as to what to do, until she saw the saw player.
“I went backstage to ask if he would give me a lesson. He said no. So I was forced to be self-taught. That turned out to be a very good thing because I can say that I did it all on my own.
I came back here to Astoria and I borrowed a saw from somebody who had been using it for woodwork. I discovered how to make a sound with it. But it could only make six notes because it was an old and rusty saw. So I went to the hardware store that used to be on Broadway and 44th Street, and bought a new saw. Sure enough, the new saw had no rust on it so I was able to get a whole octave of notes.
Throughout the years I have collected more and more saws in my quest for the ultimate-sounding saw. Finally I got the one I use now, which was made in France. It’s quite long, 32 inches, which means it has about three and a half octaves altogether.
Astoria
I moved to Astoria because my boyfriend Scott – now my husband – lived here. When I first moved in with him I didn’t know anybody beside Scott. At first I felt kind of lonesome because most of my friends were in Manhattan.
Then I picked up a local newspaper that was given out for free in banks. I opened it and realized there were all these events taking place in Astoria. I went to an event organized by the Greater Astoria Historical Society. All of a sudden I started meeting people and had friends.
I fell in love with Astoria because it feels so much like a small village where everybody knows everybody. Now I have so many friends here that I hardly ever bother going into Manhattan any more, except for my busking.
Subway busking
I once tried busking in a subway station in Queens. But I was approached by the police almost immediately and was told that I can’t do that. So the police are not as nice to buskers here as they are in Manhattan.
I know another busker who tried busking at the Steinway Street subway station. It just so happened that at the same time there was a murder right there. That sort of put people off wanting to play at that station. It was just a coincidence. It’s not like people get killed here all the time.
Busking on the New York subway is so much fun that it’s addictive. The people, the proximity of the people is intoxicating. I get so much energy from all the people who come to talk to me. If I play on a stage, I’m up there in the lights and the audience is down there in the dark and I don’t really get to see their faces and their reactions. So it kind of feels isolated for me as a musician.
On the subway I see the transformation on people’s faces as they are watching me, listening to me. And they come to talk to me, to ask me questions, or tell me about themselves. There’s this exchange of energy. It’s as if the music is the impetus for communication.
Subway encounters
Sometimes I might be playing in the subway and someone who’s a little scary-looking might be approaching me. I will think oh no, he might be trouble, perhaps he’s going to steal from me. And 99.9% of the time the scariest looking people end up being the nicest, kindest people. Playing in the subway really taught me not to judge people by first appearances.
There are so many encounters every day on the subway. I put them on my subway music blog. If I was to describe just one really striking encounter it’s this one. I was playing at Times Squares subway station, and there were a bunch of people around me. On one side of me was a blind man. He had a cane and you knew from his face that he couldn’t see anything.
He was listening to the music. His face transformed into a big smile and you could really see that he was enjoying himself. On the other side there was a lady, who had nothing to do with the blind man. She noticed how he was enjoying the music. She came to me. She bought my CD. She went over to the blind man and she put the CD in his hand and she said to him, ‘this is the music that you’re listening to right now.’ That was so incredible. The lady didn’t know him or owe him anything. She did this act of kindness to a total stranger.
A musical mother
I was born in Israel, though as a child we traveled a lot. My mother was a concert pianist who gave a lot of concerts in Europe. And my father was a research scientist, so he had to do research in different universities around the world. We lived in different countries for a year here, two years there.
As a concert pianist, at first my mother kind of frowned upon my playing a saw. She especially frowned upon the fact I was teaching myself. She thought that you can’t just learn music by yourself. You have to go to a proper school.
One day her agent was coming over to our house to work with her. I asked my mother if she would mind if I played for the agent. She reluctantly agreed, because she was so sure that he wasn’t going to like it. I played for him and he LOVED it! Right away he said ‘oh, we must incorporate you into your mother’s concert.’ He was so enthusiastic about my playing and that changed her approach. I was a part of one of her concerts and the audience just went wild.
Musical saw festival
Nine years ago I started the Musical Saw Festival in Astoria. When I started it there were four other saw players beside myself, and three people in the audience. The festival has grown over the years to include 55 saw players and more than 400 people in the audience.
A huge part of the growing factor is the local community. All the neighbors come. When the time comes in July you’ll see my flyers everywhere – all the store owners around 30th Avenue agree to put the flyer in their front window. Round the time of the festival last year I went to the Key Foods supermarket and the cashier was asking me, “so how many saw players do you have this year?” Everybody is enthusiastic about it in the neighborhood, which means a lot to me.
Bells
The saw is my main instrument but I also play the bells. They’re a lot more difficult to carry! I play a set of 65 pitched cow bells. I lay them on an eight-foot long table and there’s a special foam that goes on top of the table. I play mostly ragtime music on those bells. They have a very happy sound that lends itself very nicely to ragtime. And I play a set of English handbells, which belong to Trinity Lutheran Church here in Astoria. I play those as a soloist and also with their group.
I can totally see myself staying in Astoria. We’re not going anywhere. We love it here.”
Vasilios Ioannou: “This was the first fruit shop along 30th Ave.”
Bobby:
Bobby Kartsagoulis helped to set up Eliniki Agora Fruit and Vegetable (otherwise known as the 30th Avenue Fruit Market) in 1972. He had moved to the USA from Greece in 1963, living first in Canada before he moved to New York.
The store sells fruit, vegetables and nuts, primarily from the US: from California, Georgia and Florida. Bobby’s own favorite fruit is oranges. “They were everywhere in Sparta,” he says. “They are the king of fruit.”
He says the Greek community in Astoria may be getting a bit smaller but it is still strong. Many of the people he knew when he first moved to Astoria still live here.
The neighborhood has “changed too much,” he says. “When I arrived most people were Greek and Italian. Now there are people from all over.” He says he continues to enjoy Astoria for its cafés, and the fact that you can easily find Greek food products.
