The Rego Park Vigilante: C’est Moi!

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?