‘We are here now’: Back to the future in NYC

A view people shopping in the open market on Delancey Street, Lower East Side, New York City, in 1905. Pushcarts line both sides of the street. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

I recently spent a few days in New York City, visiting two neighborhoods that are part of my personal history: the central Brooklyn neighborhood where I was born, and the Lower East Side of Manhattan where I lived for over a decade of childhood.

New York catches a lot of shade from those whose experience is limited to a periodic visit for a Broadway show. And it is true that the New York I know has been chaotic, overwhelming, and periodically, locally dangerous. But it has also held the spark that ignited creativity and enterprise in almost every arena — most notably music, theater and all of the arts as well as finance and fashion. The city itself remains one of the most central influences of my life.

New York’s vibrancy is an almost 400-year tradition. Very much like our state of Rhode Island, the life of New York was, and is, founded on immigration. The influx of immigrants from the rest of the country, and the world, fuels the verve and creativity that, to my enormous pleasure, seems to remain intact.

The neighborhood of my childhood in the early 1960s on the Lower East Side of Manhattan was filled with Irish, Jewish, Black, and Puerto Rican families. Our grandparents were immigrants and became shop owners and garment workers. Our parents were working as mail carriers and clerks and going to school at night, often on the GI Bill, to become teachers, social workers and lawyers. Some were also artists and musicians. We lived in tenements or in the co-op apartment buildings that the unions built to create affordable housing for their members.

Today, the neighborhood remains eclectic and vibrant, with some of the old clothing and fabric stores from the “rag trade” still in place, along with small storefronts of emerging clothing designers and shoe-box art galleries. Also the best vegan ice cream .

At the Tenement Museum on Orchard Street, we were reminded that things have changed since the 19 th century, but some other things persist: New York City apartments are still tiny, and small businesses are very often the first step into the middle class for immigrants.

In Kensington, Brooklyn, where many family members of my grandparents’ generation settled in the very early 20 th century, I bought whitefish salad and pierogi in a Polish deli.

“You are Polish?” the proprietor asked me.

“Half,” I responded. “The other half is Ukrainian.”

She gave me a long hard look. “That’s OK. We are here now.”

The neighborhood is incredibly diverse, including the children and grandchildren of Jewish and Irish arrivals who emigrated from Europe in the 20 th century, and more recent immigrants from Pakistan, Central America, the Caribbean and more. Also hip young families, and other New Yorkers, leaving more fashionable, expensive neighborhoods to seek larger apartments.

A few blocks from the deli a Yeshiva advertises for students, literally across the street from an Islamic center advertising for programs teaching Quran.

She gave me a long hard look. and then said, ‘That’s OK. We are here now.’

Standing on the corner, I wondered if I should allow myself to have some hope for the future of the Middle East if we can coexist in this way here. I definitely allowed myself a rush of pride in New York, and in America.

Because as the deli owner suggested, we are all here now.

One gift you can get — if you choose to accept it — from living in a community or a country comprised of people who have chosen to come from somewhere else, no matter what the reason, can be an ingrained comfort with our differences. Or at least a willingness to not pay that much attention to them.

In all the ways that Rhode Island is profoundly different from New York, there is this hint of similarity between my birth home, and my adopted one. Perhaps that is why my family felt so comfortable here in the smallest state.

Or maybe our comfort with difference set us up to feel at home. Either way, a planned five-year sojourn has turned into a 30-year commitment, and counting.

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