Wednesday 26 October 2011

Colour me Brooklyn

Living in diverse Brooklyn is like traversing through different worlds and the whole colour spectrum.

On a chilly autumn day in New York, the steamy laundry I go to is almost like a tropical haven. I like Island Bubbles on Rogers Avenue, mainly because the friendly storekeeper greets me with a sunny smile and a ‘yes, Mami.’ Her accent and cheery disposition make me want to hum a Bob Marley tune.

West Indians and African Americans are the dominant ethnic groups in my patch of Brooklyn, Crown Heights. Go just six blocks west to Prospect Heights / Park Slope and the demographics change startlingly, as illustrated in this handy racial and ethnic distribution map created by the New York Times. Enter 11216 in the zip code box.

Park Slope Hair Salon on Flatbush Avenue, located on a green-dotted block on the map, was my destination on Monday. I was determined to treat my locks to some tender loving care after six months of backpacking and foregoing luxuries such as a cut, colour and dry.

Spend a couple of hours in a hairdresser’s chair and inevitably you get the back story. The shopowner (and, for now, sole hairdresser) is named Marat. He opened the shop late because it was his son’s bar mitzvah that morning, he announced proudly, as he brushed colour on my hair.

A Russian Jew, Marat travelled with his parents to the US as refugees, over 25 years ago. He met his wife, also a hairdresser, while on vacation in Israel. Both astute entrepreneurs, they now own three hair salons, a spa and a wedding gown shop. Meanwhile, Marat’s brother runs the drycleaning business nextdoor. He popped in for a chat and didn’t miss his window to promote his services to a captive audience. The hardworking family is proof that anything is possible in the land of opportunity.

Russians are a small minority in Brooklyn, comprising just 3.8 per cent of the population. There are however plenty of Jewish people around.

Hasidic Jews, walking in groups, have stopped my Australian husband and Swiss friend on the street several times, asking, ‘Are you Jewish?’ They of course don’t approach me because an Asian can’t possibly be Jewish. One of these days I will tell any white companion of mine to say yes, so we can find out what the mysterious bearded men are after. Asians make up 9.3 per cent of the Brooklyn population, a decent portion but seemingly small compared to the Jews. Out of all Brooklynites who identify themselves as religious, a quarter are Jewish.

Also on Monday, I met with a redhead originally from California, Casey, about a social media business she runs with an Ethiopian lady Garnett and a white ex-professor Mike. We met at Garnett’s lolly shop on Franklin Avenue, easily the street that is gentrifying the fastest in the neighbourhood.   

Diagonally opposite the lolly shop is Chavelas, hands down the best Mexican restaurant in the area. A Chilean friend of mine, and my visiting Swiss friend who is married to a Mexican, are both impressed with the authenticity of the cuisine. I’ve eaten there four times in two weeks, including at midnight last night.

Convenience stores run by Hispanics are ubiquitous on Brooklyn’s street corners. The stores are called bodegas, which did confuse me at first, because I’ve bought dishwashing liquid, newspapers and milk from the one nearest me, but have yet to spot wine on the shelves.

Other than English, the most common language spoken in Brooklyn homes is Spanish. New York’s subway trains have signs in English and Spanish. Target’s instore signs are also in Spanish.

In the melting pot that is Brooklyn, Australians are considered exotic. Aussie singletons, are you looking for love? Come to Brooklyn and you’ll find out what it’s like to be French. Case in point – online restaurant reviews about a cafĂ© called Milk Bar on Vanderbilt Street make for an entertaining read. The broad accent and laidback attitude of the Aussie wait staff score favourable mentions amongst the clientele. The coffee’s not bad either – I tried it last weekend.

One of the oldest ‘ethnic’ groups in Brooklyn has nearly disappeared. Also on the weekend, I visited Brooklyn Museum, a welcome change of pace after too much wining and dining. On the top floor are installations of Dutch houses that had been uprooted from sites all over Brooklyn and carefully restored by curators. The Dutch settled here in the 1600s. Now only 0.2 per cent of Brooklynites have Dutch ancestry.

Again on the weekend, on my way back from a Caribbean-themed Zumba class (the instructor decided to freestyle), I got caught up in an animated conversation between an older black ex-DJ cleaning out his house via a yard sale on his stoop, and a young white, self-confessed music geek. They were expounding the superiority of record players over iTunes, especially for tracks by jazz legends like Herbie Hancock. They doled out advice on where to buy the gear (corner of Atlantic Avenue and something) and how to set it up. Dropping a needle on a record is more interactive than pressing a button, they claim.

Last week I took the subway out of Brooklyn to Broadway, to see Mountaintop, a moving and cosmic production about Martin Luther King. It was interactive too, in places. When Samuel L Jackson, who plays the reverend, addressed the audience with ‘Can I get an amen?’, we answered back, like an obedient congregation in one of those Harlem churches that tourists like to visit. In fact, here in Brooklyn, it seems there is a church like that on every second block. On Sundays, your spirits can be lifted just from strolling around and listening to the good god-fearing folk belting out gospel songs.

This week I am exploring surrounding neighbourhoods, not by choice. Because we only sublet our apartment for a month, and asked for an extension too late – yes, we are kicking ourselves over this – we are looking for another apartment. Our search took us to Greenpoint today. The Polish are the dominant ethnic group in this area. It’s only a few stops away on the subway but the colours of Brooklyn change dramatically again.

Saturday 15 October 2011

New York, how do I love thee

This week a recruiter asked me what someone from Australia (with its miraculous 5% unemployment rate) is doing looking for a job in New York. Fair question. The number of people unemployed in the US, at 14 million, is equivalent to two-thirds of the population of Australia. 

‘It’s the centre of the centre,’ I answered, paraphrasing Zadie Smith’s Autograph Man. He agreed and proceeded to give me sage advice on the current market, from one Brooklynite to another.

New York, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
Ash, me and Aussie buddies Sam, Laura and Matt on the Brooklyn Bridge


I love that I had the recruiter at Brooklyn. His parents immigrated here about 100 years ago. For even longer than that, it’s been act one, scene one of the drama of many American dreams since the industrial revolution. My own cousin settled here back in the 1980s, back when Jay-Z still lived in the borough as a rapper keeping it real (not in Tribeca next to DeNiro). Now writers, artists and designers are colonising this borough faster than you can say American Idol. The changing social fabric is causing some ruptures in the community. A civic meeting is being held this weekend, to allow longtime residents to air their concerns about the new demographic of my temporary neighbourhood.

Mostly the locals just go with the flow. There is, after all, a tradition of being uprooted and displaced and settling elsewhere in this area. They watch the artistes and hipsters walk by in their vintage gear, and liberal young families pushing their mixed race kids along in expensive strollers. My husband Ashley gets a regular wassup from the guy in the hardware shop on Rogers Avenue, who seems to work full-time outside on the driveway, a self-appointed welcome wagon for passersby. Kevin from the funky T-shirt shop About Time on Franklin Avenue (get your Brooklyn souvenir shirts here, hip tourists), his wife who runs the lolly shop across the road and their friend Mike the ex-professor are helping me look for a job.

The place grows on you. On our second day here we ventured out of our brownstone through a less friendly block along Bedford Avenue, which was dotted with pimped up four wheel drives where thug looking types were watching us shiftily while talking tough to each other. The police doing the rounds on the block, stopping to question the thugs, confirmed our fears and made me feel less guilty about inadvertently racial stereotyping. After that experience paranoia temporarily set in – did that old man loitering on the street corner have a drill so he can break into a car, I wondered as I quickly walked past him, dismissing his friendly hello with a nod. I hoofed it out of there without glancing back. See no evil, hear no evil. Today we strolled past him again. What a difference a few days make. I am now willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

But I cannot drop my guard. Making headlines for weeks now is a series of sexual assaults in the area. The police nabbed a key suspect just this week. On the New York news channel, voxpops show female residents getting on with life – they are stoic Brooklynites after all – albeit they don’t walk the long blocks home in the dark without a can of pepper spray or a good male friend.

But I digress. This is about how much I love New York.

I love that my friend Samantha has lived here for the past three months, just because it was on her bucket list. As it turns out, the city is not for her, I’m afraid – she’s a beach girl, she likes fresh open spaces, New York is grimy, you have no personal space – but she toughed it out and now gives visiting friends walking tours around Manhattan like a local. I’ve met talented Aussie artist Miriam whose work has been exhibited in DUMBO, currently the most fashionable neighbourhood in Brooklyn. She loves New York too and our little patch in Brooklyn, Crown Heights. I love that artists are drawn to this city and the art world is not as cliquey as in Sydney. For a town that is best known for its tendency for capitalist excesses – Occupy Wall Street has not really shown us anything new, other than that under 30s are not all apathetic  – there is an awful lot of non-financial activity lurking in the more interesting enclaves of New York, where people still starve for their art. Until, that is, they turn 30, value earning a regular income and decide to pursue their art as a weekend hobby.

New York, I shall love thee better after I arrive in Sydney, because alas I cannot remain unemployed here for too long. When even a fellow Brooklynite cannot help me out, because his financial services clients are expected to shed 10,000 staff next year, in all likelihood I will have to love New York from afar.
PS Longer blog today is courtesy of my new laptop with a proper keyboard. The IPad has its limits.