World in a City Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York

Chapter 1 So You Thought You Knew Astoria ... For half a century, Astoria in Queens has been a neighborhood of cafes where dark-haired Greek men sip strong coffee and smoke strong cigarettes while talking in Greek late into the night. It is a place of quiet sidewalks lined with tenderly fussed-over brick and shingle row houses, where a solitary widow in black can be glimpsed scurrying homeward as if she were on the island of Rhodes. The cafes are still teeming, the houses tidy. But the Greek hold on the neighborhood has slowly been weakening. Successful Greeks have been leaving for leafier locales. As a result, there are moments when Astoria has a theme-park feel to it, a cardboard facade of a Greek Main Street with cafes named Athens, Omonia, and Zodiac and Greece's blue and white colors splashed everywhere, but a diminishing number of actual Greeks living within. That's because other groups have been rising up to take their place. On a Friday on Steinway Street, one of Astoria's commercial spines, several hundred men from North African and Middle Eastern countries were jammed into Al-Iman Mosque, a marble-faced storefront that is one of several Muslim halls of worship that have sprung up in Astoria. Some wore ordinary street clothes, some white robes and knit white skullcaps. There were so many worshipers that thirteen had to pray on the sidewalk, kneeling shoeless on prayer mats and touching their foreheads and palms to the ground. When the prayers were over, El Allel Dahli, a Moroccan immigrant, emerged with his teenage son, Omar, telling of the plate of couscous and lamb he had brought as a gift to the poor to honor the birth that morning of his daughter, Jenine. "I am very happy today," he told me. He could also have been happy that, as his visit confirmed, the immediate neighborhood was turning into New York City's casbah. Not only was there his flourishing mosque, but down Steinway Street, as far as his eyes could see, there were Middle Eastern restaurants, groceries, travel agencies, a driving school, a barber shop, a pharmacy, a dried fruit and nuts store, a bookstoretwenty-five shops in all. In the cafes, clusters of Egyptian, Moroccan, or Tunisian men were puffing on hookahstall, gaudily embellished water pipes stoked with charcoal to burn sheeshah, the fragrant tobacco that comes in flavors such as molasses and apple. Sometimes these mentaxi drivers, merchants, or just plain idlersplay backgammon or dominoes or watch Arabic television shows beamed in by satellite, but mostly they schmooze about the things Mediterranean men talk about when they're together soccer, politics, womenwhile waiters fill up their pipes with chunks of charcoal at $4 a smoke. In classic New York fashion, Steinway Street is a slice of Arabic Algiers on Astoria's former Main Street, renamed after a German immigrant who a century before assembled the world's greatest pianos a few blocks away. And it is not just Middle Easterners and North Africans who are changing the neighborhood's personality. Those settling in Astoria in the past decade or two include Bangladeshis, Serbians, Bosnians, Ecuadorians, and, yes, even increasingly young Manhattan professionals drawn by the neighborhood's modest rents, cosmopolitan flavors, and short commute to midtown Manhattan. More vibrant than them all seem to be the Brazilians, who have brought samba nightclubs and bikini-waxing salons to streets that once held moussaka joints. When Brazil won the World Cup in 2002, Astoria's streets were turned into an all-night party, and when the team lost in 2006, the streets were leaden with mourning. New York can be viewed as an archipelago, like Indonesia a collection of distinctiBerger, Joseph is the author of 'World in a City Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York', published 2007 under ISBN 9780345487384 and ISBN 0345487389.