If a
visitor to my borough of Queens in New York City were to stroll along the
streets of my neighborhood, he might encounter me out for a walk, white hair
and all. The steep hills promote great calf muscles for pedestrians, and both
the Long Island Railroad and Queens Boulevard (the twelve- to fourteen-lane
“Avenue of Death”) provide geographic boundaries for many of the homes of a
particular ethnic mix in mid-Queens.
And
what a mix it is.
First,
a little history. Rego Park is an entity or village named and largely built by
the real estate development firm Real Good Construction Company beginning in
the 1920s. Prior to that time, the area was mostly farmland or fields, and was
part of the great Hempstead Swamp first settled in 1653 by Dutch and English
farmers as agricultural land. Eventually, the colonial farm families leased
their property to Chinese farmers, who grew crops for the Manhattan Chinatown
markets.
Queens
is far from the myriad attractions of Manhattan, reached by seemingly endless
subway rides—frequently lengthened by a variety of delays due to poor
maintenance and decades-old trains—or numbing, congested car commutes. And Queens,
like the borough of Brooklyn to its south, forms part of the western end of
Long Island, containing highways and commuter trains traveling toward the outer
reaches of the summer playgrounds of wealthy Manhattanites, joined by the
Hampton Jitney buses transporting still more residents, summer employees, and
beach lovers.
Queens
is the most ethnically diverse urban area in the world, with between 176 spoken
languages in the public schools to as many as 800 spoken languages in the
borough, many almost extinct and no longer found in their places of origin
throughout the world. Fewer than 50% of Queens children under five years old
speak primarily English in their homes. Nearly one-quarter speak Spanish as a
first language, and about 10% speak Russian or Bukhari (Jewish Russian Uzbeki,
a cousin to Farsi). “It is the capital of language density
in the world,” said Daniel Kaufman, an adjunct professor of linguistics at the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The greatest number
of Chinese-speakers outside of China proper live in Queens, or about 18% of the
borough’s population, plus a number of other Asian-language speakers, including
Indians, Koreans, and Filipinos.
Living
in the midst of such diversity can be a challenge. Most Latino immigrants know
enough English to get by, and the younger Bukhari generations have been in the
country long enough to become fluent in spoken English. But the elderly
Bukharis who emigrated with their children are often lost and isolated, or
associate only with each other, and the great numbers of Chinese who have been
settling in Rego Park to escape overcrowded Flushing further east in Queens
(let alone the well-known but shrinking and gentrifying Chinatown in Manhattan)
seem to have arrived from the mainland more recently. Their command of English
is just about nonexistent for the older generations, and the younger set
exchange spirited comments in Mandarin or other Chinese dialects. The youngest children
are growing up bilingual, the usual tradition of immigrant children, often
translating for their parents.
The
city children’s services language access policy, by executive order, requires
that essential public documents be printed in English, Spanish, Chinese,
Russian, Haitian Creole, Arabic, Korean, Bengali, Urdu, and French. Some of
these languages are more prevalent in Brooklyn or the Bronx, or even Staten
Island and Manhattan. The non-Hispanic Caucasian population now constitutes a minority
of the 8.4 million New York City residents, and in Queens, the most populous and
second-largest borough, nearly half the population is foreign-born.
Alas,
many immigrants are unfamiliar with American rules and regulations, especially
for vehicular traffic (nor do many of them seem interested in learning those
rules and regulations). And the neighborhood where I live is so congested that
auto owners may circle the block for an hour or longer to park their cars
legally. It is common for pedestrians to be physically threatened by impatient
drivers at intersections who often circle those intersections while hoping to
find a legal parking space, affecting the safety of hapless pedestrians trying
to cross the street. Loud car honking and double parking are endemic.
This
writer brooks no threatening vehicles. That is, although I realize that many
Rego Park drivers are unfamiliar with the words “pedestrian” or “right of way,”
and may not have encountered stop signs or traffic lights in their native
cities or towns, they surely understand the concepts involved. Moreover, I am
not easily intimidated. If I think I am in the right entering a crosswalk on
foot—and I walk slowly with a slight limp—but some impatient driver attempts to
flatten me with a car, I will catch the driver’s eye and hold up my hand in a
“stop” position, and continue on my way.
Unfortunately,
this is not always effective. And it is probably foolhardy. I may end up like
the Roadrunner cartoon character splayed out flat on the pavement.
That
is, some drivers play “chicken,” starting and stopping close to me as I cross the
street to see if I will move aside so they may enter the crosswalk while I am
still walking in it. Usually, pretending not to see these bullies will keep
them at bay, but more than one has circled around me in the crosswalk with a
vehicle, missing me by inches.
In
such a case, if I can reach the car I will bang on the trunk with the flat of
my hand as the car moves by to let the driver know this is verboten. (I try to
take into account the repressive/permissive societies in the drivers’ countries
of origin that encouraged this kind of direct action, coupled no doubt with
bribes and other indicia of many third-world or former U.S.S.R. populations.)
Generally, when events go this far, the driver (95% of the time a young male
driver oozing testosterone) will pause for me. But there are times when a car
has sped up inches from me and I recently screamed in fright when one of these
child-like men used this tactic to try to intimidate me.
One
young woman nearly ran me over during a turn into my crosswalk while speaking
on a cell phone. When I told her that it was illegal to talk and drive, she
looked at me blankly and continued her conversation.
And
often one of these drivers will stop his car (frequently blasting rock, hip
hop, rap, Spanish, Bukharan, or Arabic music), open the door and step out to
give me a piece of his mind. When the drivers realize I am not a young stud
like them spoiling for a fight but a senior citizen trying painfully to walk
across the street, they tend to give up and return to their cars. One screamed
F___ Y__ at the top of his lungs, letting the sound echo through the block as
he drove off with his arm out the window and his index finger pointing skyward.
I am then tempted of course to respond in kind, but playing with fire can get
you burned, so I tend to limit my response to slapping the trunk of such a car
as it drives by.
It
is hard to adapt to a neighborhood where profanity is profuse in public, and street
noise rarely stops. That’s what a resident of a lower middle-class neighborhood
must expect in the electronic age in particular, where people have for years been
typing out (often illiterate) cursing accusations and exclamations against anyone
who posts an opinion that differs from that of the writer. Thus has anonymity
of the Internet raised the stakes and made profanity (misspelled and
mispunctuated) more the rule than the exception, verbally as well as
typed on the Internet,
at which I shake my head as much at the truly poor English as at the
unbridled sewer language that has become common and predictable in the purported
egalitarian electronic era.
But
I digress.
Being
the building and neighborhood scold means more than confronting misbehaving
auto drivers. It encompasses:
(1)
Writing down plate numbers and descriptions of parked cars with car alarms that
may go off every hour for days on end, no doubt purchased used from former
Manhattan owners whose replacement vehicles have better alarm systems. I may
leave a note on the windshield of such vehicles telling them to get their
hair-trigger alarms fixed or face a report to the police. One such owner was
watching me write him such a note from an adjacent location and started his car
remotely inches from where I stood, startling me.
(2) Reporting
other street problems to the police, such as the placement by a stressed
superintendent of a full-sized refrigerator by the curb for recyclable pickup
the next day. I had already advised the super that he had a legal obligation to
secure the door, to keep children from suffocating inside due to curiosity.
That provided no response except a nasty remark, so I noted the street address
and reported the problem to the police. Some hours later, I checked the
refrigerator and saw that a chain had been fastened around the door. A young
life potentially saved.
(3)
Contacting utilities that have done work in the roads outside my window (used
jackhammers to dig into the street to gas or electric lines, cable lines, water
or sewer lines, and the like) and then left an unfinished worksite covered with
one or more very heavy large steel plates (either emblazoned
with the name of the utility doing the work or identified by a small saw horse bearing
the utility's name next to the curb). Often the work is begun at the end
of the workweek and the plate(s) left on the street through the weekend or
considerably longer awaiting completion of repairs. For many of these plates,
all four corners are not level with the street so that when a heavy vehicle
such as a small truck or even an ordinary car drives over it, the plate may
resound like a bomb going off, and this happens day and night. Hence, I find
myself at odd hours checking the sites to determine the culpable utility and
then make the requisite telephone call to get the errant plate adjusted. We
don’t tend to have explosions in Rego Park, but when one of these plates is
being subjected to a series of vehicle drive-overs, it can sound like a war zone
(and wake the entire neighborhood in the middle of the night).
(4)
Policing the halls of my co-op building from the intrusions of soliciting
strangers. Dozens of menus may litter the hallways, left by employees of
neighborhood restaurants. Worse, there is a con outfit calling itself IDT
Energy that illegally gains access to homes, claiming that it can discount gas
and electric costs if the resident will provide copies of recent Con Edison and
National Grid electric and gas bills and then sign an authorization form. There
is plenty of anti-consumer fine print in the sign-up contracts. This is, of
course, a scam, but many elderly immigrants are so easily convinced by someone
in a suit with an ID badge that they can pay lower rates that they let these
people into the building and permit them to have free access to all the
residents.
When
I encounter these people, generally four or five aggressive young people
swarming through the building on a weekday afternoon when most of the younger
men are out working, I remind them that they are illegally trespassing on
private property and must immediately leave the building or I will call the
police. The last time this happened, quite recently, four men and one woman
screamed abuse at me and initially refused to leave. As I yelled at them to get
out, other residents came out of their units but did not help me, being wholly
unacquainted with the problem (and possibly not understanding English anyway),
although it has existed for years. The leader of the pack held up a video
camera as he refused to budge and filmed and threatened me. He confronted me
physically. By this time I was in the hallway with my keys and my phone, having
locked my door behind me.
It
took quite a while to move these five people off the third floor and down to
the lobby and toward the entrance. Finally, having reached the local police who
urged me to call 911, I telephoned the police emergency number and, at that
point, the group of scam artists went to the building next door after attempting
to ridicule me to concentrate their efforts on cheating our neighbors down the
block. It took another fifteen minutes for the police to respond, and I was
warned never to come out of my unit to “escort” these thieves from the
building.
I
can be pretty loud and aggressive when I feel it is warranted, and would do it
again. And no doubt will. Especially since my building management and board of
directors have ignored this problem for many years.
This
is my promise: To be a royal pain toward anyone who is illegally in my building
trying to sell anything.
But
maybe it’s time to get a can of mace. Or pepper spray. Or both.
This
might net me a medal (or a bullet) some day.
You
can’t be too careful.
Maybe
a good camera would help. Rego Park is not the garden spot of Queens. Or New
York City generally.
It
is, instead, the recipient of huge clouds of carbon monoxide that waft up from
Queens Boulevard (and from within the subways under the road), or as my niece,
a transplant nurse, once advised me, not a place where lung transplants are
accepted. Nor, for that matter, are any lungs from New York City considered
appropriate for transplants. The air pollution, while considerably healthier
than Beijing or other megalopolises, is downright unhealthy much of the time
and just about always next to the main roads.
This
neighborhood should probably pay me a salary since I have become its watchdog,
watchman, watchlady, or (best of all) its safety guard. I may not escort small
children across the road to attend school, but I keep my eyes open and don’t
hesitate to speak up. It’s too bad that Curtis Sliwa moved away from Forest
Hills down the road a bit a few years ago. I could use a few Guardian Angels to
patrol more regularly.
Readers?
