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There has been a storm. Near our front door a phone cable trails across the street. Here in Astoria tangles of overhead power and communications cables are slung from wooden pole to wooden pole and I am always amazed they function. A man on his way to work suggests I call 311 about it – he cannot because he is in a rush – so I do, and feel good-neighborly-about it while also conscious that usually it would be me rushing down the street to work and savoring the fact I am not. Back in the apartment I put things into our bag for the day (blanket, diapers, wipes, notebook) and hear a fire engine approach then drive away. When we go back outside the cable has been tied up.
We walk to Astoria Park and sit for a while on a high grassy verge next to the running track, overlooking East River. Above our heads the traffic over the Triborough Bridge thunders into Manhattan and the Bronx (no-one has adjusted to calling it by its new name, the Robert F Kennedy Bridge). Like Flushing Meadows Corona Park, this one has the stamp of Robert Moses. He commissioned the bridge, and, himself an avid swimmer, also the city’s largest open-air swimming pool at the center of the park.
Below us the river rushes. In fact it is not really a river at all though, but a straight that links Long Island Sound with Atlantic Bay: the force of the ocean courses through it. It has tides. Its surface is scurried with eddies and stirred by currents. It has a dark underbelly. Just upstream from where we sit, over a thousand passengers of the General Slocum pleasure steamboat died when it caught fire in 1904, in the city’s worst disaster before 9/11. Downstream in Brooklyn, the bleached bones of patriots who had died on the sixteen British prison ships in Wallabout Bay – later the Brooklyn Navy Yards –would wash up regularly after the revolutionary war.
A hodgepodge of bodies jogs around the running track. This track is undiscriminating. There are svelte runners, flabby runners, young and old (the latter walking). A middle-aged couple for whom this is clearly a regular routine strolls in comfortable silence alongside one another. Ethnically the runners reflect Astoria’s mix, that is to say, a bit of everything, with a Greek, Italian, Latino and Middle Eastern emphasis.
We go down to the river’s edge and head North along Shore Boulevard. Conrad soon falls asleep in his stroller. The tide is low. Fallen branches, flotsam and jetsam from the storm are scattered across the sidewalk: the fragility of this city-meets-river fringe is more evident than usual. A single seagull stands sentinel by a sign marking the spot of the General Slocum disaster. There is an underling whiff of sewage, explained when we reach the top edge of the park by a notice entitled “wet weather discharge point.”
We reach the southern flank of the immense Con-Ed power station, whose presence is marked on maps of the area as a great blank gray swathe. New Yorkers may no longer depend on the river directly for sustenance but it sustains them in other ways: providing cooling water for multiple power stations is one of them. There are no people around and the strong sun feels desert-like as we move along 20th Avenue, power plant on our left and a row of rented garages on the right. Gradually there are signs of life, starting with the diner Two Greeks to Go, perched on a corner alongside a gas station, where I buy a bottle of water. “The Truth Hurts” shouts a New York Post headline. The previous day the tape of Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney was released, in which he dismissed 47% of the American population as dependent on government because they do not have to pay income tax and declared them irrelevant for his campaign.
Opposite the diner are three institutions: The Federation of Italian American Organizations of Queens’ soccer pitch (sponsored by Con Edison); Live Meat Market, with red painted signs that announce chicken, rabbit, guinea pig, lamb, goat and Halal meat; and Loumidis Foods factory whose slogan is “Bringing the culinary treasures of Greece to you.” I keep walking fast, headed towards the Steinway piano factory which I have heard so much about but never seen, and wanting to reach it before Conrad wakes up again.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Henry Steinway, who had changed his German name Steinweg to Steinway on advice of friends who said it would be better for business, moved his piano factory from Manhattan to a site in Northern Astoria that was more or less an empty space. He built not only a factory but a whole village, with housing, foundries, and a mansion for his family, which has been on the market since soon after I moved to Astoria.
The wood for making the pianos used to be shipped to the factory’s back door where it bobbed in floating pens: walnut, pear, spruce, rosewood, mahogany. Now it is trucked in, but the factory is still active in much the same way as when it opened. Craftsmen transform the raw materials into the sleek finely tuned vessels whose notes grace concert halls throughout the continent (Steinway pianos sold in Europe are made in its factory in Germany). The meticulous process reportedly culminates with the elderly Wally Boot whose grandfather worked at the factory and whose job is to test and tweak the finished pianos. A note on his door reads “Pianos enter this room looking like a piano but leave sounding like one.”
One day I will visit the factory and see all this for my own eyes. For now, we just see the low red brick building from the outside before turning around and walking South. We rest and Conrad has his milk in a tiny patch of shade in Ditmars Park. Then onwards down Steinway Street, including the stretch known as Little Egypt that is lined with hookah bars and that earlier in the year had erupted in celebration at the toppling of Mubarak. We turn right down 30th Avenue which takes us home.
During 2011, I had interviewed one person a week along the Avenue. I posted the interviews on a blog I called “30th Ave – A Year in the Life of a Street.” The project was inspired in part by the fact that in 2008 the “Genographic Project” of National Geographic magazine had taken DNA cheek samples from passersby at the 30th Avenue street fair and found traces of every human ethnic lineage among them except for one (that of Khoisan hunter-gatherers in southern Africa). People often mention Queens’ diversity when describing the borough and leave it at that. But what are they saying? As author Junot Díaz puts it in an interview, “Saying a distinction is different from drawing a conclusion from that distinction…[I]t's okay for us to be able to talk and say, ‘I'm a person of color. This is a person who's white.’ And that's not a bad thing. It's saying that that means something, that that somehow is deterministic. That's the problem.”
My project was, in its small way, about listening to and collecting individual voices from the neighborhood. Among them was Halim who founded a café called Harissa: “You don’t feel like an immigrant. Because everybody is,” he said of Astoria. And the Ecuadorian crossing guard Julia Bravo, who helps children of multiple backgrounds cross the road to school. “Son niños, son iguales,” she said. There may be as many stories of the city as there are inhabitants, but more connects them than differentiates them. Successful neighborhoods are the ones that recognize that fact.
Part 5: "Astoria (night): Projection"
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