The Last Holdouts in the Neighborhood
LOUIS SAVARESE, the son and grandson of butchers, was raised to know the difference between a rib-eye roast and a cross-rib roast, but he is the first in his family to appreciate the finer points of cow hooves and chicken feet.
The Savarese family has run Michael’s Prime Meats on Nostrand Avenue in Flatbush, Brooklyn, since 1931. As the neighborhood changed from a mix of Irish, Jewish and Italian families to a solidly Caribbean enclave, the fare has changed as well.
“Forty years ago, we wouldn’t have a cow foot,” Mr. Savarese said, pointing to a bucket of them. Goat meat, oxtail, Jamaican curry powder — these are the gradual changes that have allowed Michael’s to stay open as so many of its neighbors have closed to make way for wig stores and West Indian bakeries. “We’re the last one,” Mr. Savarese said, slicing into a side of beef.
In a city where Jewish neighborhoods turn Puerto Rican, then African and then something else, Mr. Savarese belongs to the sparse ranks of holdouts who have held firm amid the city’s churn, even as newcomers have remade the streets around them. They dig in for many reasons: love of place, loyalty, optimism or sheer stubbornness. Nostalgia grounds some; inertia others. But all of them can still imagine, as they look out on their reshaped blocks, the neighbors and businesses that left decades ago.
At Michael’s, a woman carrying two shopping bags pushed open the door on a recent afternoon and asked, in a Caribbean lilt, for the price of the oxtail. It was $6.29 a pound, she was told. “Lord have mercy,” she said, backing out the door.
Mr. Savarese’s disparate tribe of holdouts includes an Irish bar owner in Brooklyn’s version of Chinatown, an artist hanging on in a zone of shoppers and tourists, and a drum maker who still creates them by hand. Taken together, they offer a twist on New York’s famous promise of reinvention. Theirs are stories of staying put.
“I call it the diehard effect,” said Joseph J. Salvo, the director of the population division of the Department of City Planning. “There are people who will not leave. Irrespective of the change that is occurring, they regard that as their home.”
“The smaller the number gets,” Mr. Salvo added, “the stronger the diehard effect.”
ONCE upon a time — actually, about 40 years ago — two brothers from Ireland bought two popular bars in Brooklyn, where longshoremen and firefighters played darts and bought their friends round after round. The families still own the bars, and the brothers, if they were still alive, would recognize much about them: shamrock posters, weathered dartboards, old men nursing morning beers.
But thanks to New York’s fickle demographic tides, the two bars have found themselves in very different worlds, with very different fortunes.
The Soccer Tavern, in Sunset Park, has flourished, adopted by the Chinese community around it. Meanwhile, the Lief Erickson in Bay Ridge — its name a vestige of the Norwegians who settled in the neighborhood — is languishing amid a growing population of Arabs who frown on alcohol.
“Chinese people drink,” said Julie Walsh, owner of the Lief Erickson, which sat nearly empty on a recent afternoon. “If every Middle Easterner around here would be spending money, the place would be booming.”
Over in Sunset Park, the changes are impossible to miss. Census data show that the area’s Irish population fell by half, to about 1,347, from 1980 to 2009, while the number of Chinese grew more than tenfold, to over 26,000.
But even more striking evidence can be found among the dart trophies that line the back wall opposite Jimmy Gillick, daytime bartender and keeper of the house corned-beef-hash recipe. A scratched plaque from the NYC Dart League lists the champions for 1998-99: Farley, Luno, O’Sullivan, Connolly, Hennessy, Price.
The winter 2009 trophy: Mei, Chan, Zhu, Manczuk, Farley.
“When we walk into other bars, they say, ‘Here comes the Chirish team,’ ” Brendan Farley, the bar’s owner, said in a thick brogue.
Other changes have crept in. A Chinese calendar hangs on the wall. Chinese New Year is one of the bar’s biggest nights. On Christmas, the tavern hosts an international pot luck dinner; the Chinese regulars bring in a whole roasted pig, and Mr. Gillick cooks up his hash.
Irish or Chinese, his customers speak a common language of tipped glasses and back slaps. In their own dive-bar way, they have broadened one another’s worlds.
“I didn’t even know what bok choy was,” said John Bleszcz, a retired city sanitation worker, sitting at the bar the other morning.
“It’s a mild cabbage,” answered Steve Constantin, a few stools down. “Or a mild radish.”
About a mile away, Mr. Farley’s cousin, Ms. Walsh, waited for customers, who rarely trickle in from the nearby mosques, halal butchers and hookah shops.
“We got them, and they don’t drink and they put people like me out of business,” she said. “That’s what happens.”
WHEN Ivy Brown moved into a fourth-floor loft in the meatpacking district of Manhattan in 1985, the blocks around her building were a desolate precinct of transvestite prostitutes, sex clubs and slaughterhouses.
“Nobody lived here,” Ms. Brown, 49, said. “It was nasty. It was gritty. It was gross.”
Friends and family were afraid to visit her apartment, on Hudson Street near 14th Street. Her electricity was spotty. But over the years, this self-described “nice Jewish girl” grew to love her adopted neighborhood, where she cycled through 17 roommates and was free to make art and, eventually, open a gallery that she still operates in her living room.
She gave her old dresses to the prostitutes, who made sure she got home safe. She befriended the bouncers and stopped eating meat, even if she grew to almost like the smell of animal blood. She was home.
But Ms. Brown, a birdlike woman with a pixie haircut, stylish glasses and always-moving hands, has spent the past decade watching her neighborhood slowly vanish. “Things start to disappear,” she said. “We lost the laundromat and the shoemaker and the hardware store.”
What was once the Locker Room, a sex club where patrons checked their clothes at the door, is now a cosmopolitan bar with pressed-tin ceilings. J’s Hangout, a gay club in her building into which men used to vanish for days, is now a splashy Mexican restaurant with blaring dance music and tacos that cost $18. Stretch Hummers and off-duty bankers have replaced the meat trucks and swingers. The Whitney Museum of American Art is moving nearby.
Ms. Brown said she used to feel as if she were living in a surreal movie. From her window, she could see butchers “in white coats covered in blood, warming their hands over fires in oil cans as pig carcasses are flying by.”
Now she has a view of the Apple store, where lines wind around the block whenever a new gadget is released. “I’m used to seeing some things outside,” she said, “but not white people in sleeping bags.”
She has become something of a hero to stalwarts; a blog dedicated to “Vanishing New York” has cataloged her memories. She has thought about moving, but not seriously; her rent-stabilized apartment and its 18 windows would be impossible to match.
Ms. Brown pines for the old days — “I cannot believe I miss that stench!” — but she understands the futility of New York nostalgia. “If you embrace this city, you have to embrace the fact that it’s not going to stay the same,” she said.
Instead, she is waiting for the neighborhood to change again. “Somewhere else is going to be the area, and everyone will go there,” she said.
And until then, she added, “I’m still holding on.”
AT this year’s Miss Norway competition in Bay Ridge, only 2 of the 13 contestants were from Brooklyn. They both lost.
A generation ago, not only would the entire slate have hailed from the borough, but most would probably have been from the Bay Ridge neighborhood, the hub for Norwegians in New York, said Arlene Rutuelo, a pageant organizer who doubles as the neighborhood’s de facto cultural ambassador.
Ms. Rutuelo and her mother, Helene Bakke, run Nordic Delicacies, a business that has become much more than just a shop for cod liver oil and lingonberry jam.
As the neighborhood’s Norwegian-American population plummeted, to 1,135 from a high of tens of thousands around World War II, according to the most recent census estimates, and nearly every other Norwegian business in Bay Ridge closed, Nordic Delicacies became a Scandinavian clearinghouse. People call requesting recipes for dishes their grandmothers used to make. They ask for the date of the annual parade, and for the phone number of the Swedish Consulate. So many people asked for souvenirs that Ms. Rutuelo set aside a counter, next to the cold cuts, for miniature flags and traditional Scandinavian troll dolls.
“We’re the official Norwegian information center,” she said.
When the store opened in 1987, the plan was for Ms. Bakke to cook the head cheese and salted lamb rib, using recipes from her childhood in Kvinesdal, Norway, and for Ms. Rutuelo to run the business. Bay Ridge “was a Norwegian village,” Ms. Rutuelo recalled. “Every business you could think of had a Norwegian.”
Today, her neighbors include a falafel shop, a sushi bar, two Polish diners, a Russian bodega, a Mexican grocery and an Indian restaurant.
On a recent afternoon, a customer walked into Nordic Delicacies and eyed the pickled herring, next to the fish balls in brine, before settling on the pea soup.
“I wouldn’t have thought 25 years ago that we would be the last one left,” Ms. Bakke said. “I never would have imagined.”
IN Cali Rivera’s workshop in the South Bronx, layers of smoke and grime that are older than his grandchildren cover the heaps of jumbled tools he has used to make countless drums of every pitch and size for more than 40 years.
His business, J. C. R. Percussion, has stayed open year after year despite pressure from all sides. Development around the new Yankee Stadium threatened to push him out, but he stayed firm — and rooted for the Mets. When rents rose and old neighbors left, he dug in even deeper.
But his lifelong battle extends beyond the borders of Highbridge, a neighborhood of bodegas and fried-plantain shops, to the economy of cookie-cutter factories, outsourced labor and even modernity itself. In an era when youngsters play the drums on iPhone apps and pop music is made on laptops, Mr. Rivera, hunched over a welder’s flame in a smoke-filled closet, is a holdout against time.
“Everything you see here, I put it together,” he said, surrounded by cowbells, bongos and faded photographs tacked to the wall. “It was created by me!”
Most of his competitors have their drums made in factories overseas, but Mr. Rivera’s instruments are made in his basement workshop, where his assistant clatters and bangs to a blaring salsa soundtrack.
“If you don’t do it by hand, it doesn’t go coo-coo,” Mr. Rivera said, smacking a cowbell he made that morning. “It goes blegh-blegh.”
The neighborhood has changed as many Puerto Ricans have left, to be replaced by Dominicans, Mexicans and Africans. But new neighbors have made for new customers. Downstairs, Mr. Rivera’s assistant worked one day on a set of Ashiko drums for an African musician.
“I’m not going to be rich, never,” Mr. Rivera, 61, said. “But it satisfies me.”
His spit-and-sweat operation seems galaxies away from 21st-century New York. His drumheads, stored in a bathroom, are the stretched skins of mules and goats from Venezuela. To loosen them up, he soaks the skins in a bucket in another bathroom, beneath the urinal.
Mr. Rivera starts most sentences with a curse word and ends them with a wheezy laugh. His stoop serves as a local clubhouse where men drink beer and tell jokes in Spanish.
Mr. Rivera was born in Puerto Rico and came to Highbridge in the late 1950s. He began making cowbells in his apartment, then switched to a studio on Ogden Avenue. He took over his current space, once an Irish bar, about two decades ago.
Business has been slow lately, and his daughter has been nagging him to give up the shop. But orders still come in, and customers still stop by to play the timbales and discuss salsa.
“This is the only place I got,” Mr. Rivera said. “This is what made me happy. We’ll keep banging.”
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Sources: Black Economic Advocacy Party, NY Times, Youtube, Google Maps
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