From Elmhurst to Bensonhurst

When I moved to New York 30 years ago, I was excited by the "otherness" of it—all the people who didn't act, speak or think like me, the menace in the air, the grittiness. It was like being in Africa or Asia—or Mars. I felt I was living on the edge. And it was an edgy existence for a girl from suburban California. New York was poor then. Rents were cheap, so cheap it made sense to move rather than repaint when things got grungy. There was a garbage strike. And a transit strike. And a blackout. It was no war zone maybe, but civil society didn't always hold. Things fell apart. There were cockroaches and rats and people who lived out of grocery carts and cardboard boxes and made their living picking through the trash. Dirty and tattered, New York was as real as the velveteen rabbit.

Other and I explored the city's neighborhoods with the urgency of tourists: Coney Island, Brighton Beach, Bensonhurst, Staten Island, Astoria, Spuyten Duyvil, Washington Heights, Roosevelt Island, Liberty Island, Fort Tryon, Harlem, Chinatown, Little Italy, Curry Hill. We went to museums and parks, but mostly we wandered the streets and ate the food. It was like living in a dozen countries all at once, and we fantasized about finding an apartment in each neighborhood we visited. 

In the end, after a few years in a starter apartment—a seventh-floor walkup!—in the honky-tonk Italian section of Greenwich Village, we moved to a loft in what seemed like a mysterious no-man's-land in a nondescript area just off the Bowery between the East and West Village. We liked the mean, hardscrabble look of the warehouses, trucking garages, sewing factories, wholesalers of buttons and banners, bodegas. For a long time, the only residents were a lot of drunks, a handful of artists and working-class hispanics—and us in our secret jewel of an apartment.

Sadly, like so much of Manhattan, the area went upscale and glam a few years ago, and Other and I are feeling out of place and out of sorts. Lately we've been talking about where we might want to live next. We're not serious (yet), but last weekend we scouted out Elmhurst, Queens, a great hodgepodge of Thai, Indonesian, Indian, Mexican, Peruvian, Chinese, Korean, Argentine, Singaporean, Vietnamese and Afghan cultures. For the first time in a long while, mine and Other's were the only white anglo faces in sight. The food at Upi Jaya (gado gado, BBQ chicken, banana fritters) was pleasantly strange. The clothing—saris! salwar kameez! The tchochkes—amulets! It was all good. So next week, or the week after, we'll try Bensonhurst. 

Even if we never move, we're traveling again. And for the price of subway token, we're all over the map.