Even in the Ironbound

My first visit to my family’s village in Greece made me feel like I was in another world. Having grown up in suburban New Jersey, going to the island of Chios was a bewildering experience. I was surrounded by people who took life at a leisurely pace and who all knew and watched out for each other. There were cafés where everyone from teens to elders would hang out late at night drinking coffee and making conversation, and little chapels every few streets where you could go in at any hour to light a candle and say a prayer. Yet it all felt so familiar, resonating with something deeply rooted inside me.

My father’s family emigrated from southern Italy to Newark in the late 1800s. My mother’s parents emigrated from Greece to Newark in the 1950s, but after my mother was born they decided to move into the nearby suburbs to raise their family. Though my father’s parents vowed to stay in Newark’s largely Italian North Ward until their death, my father moved into the suburbs with my mother upon getting married. His decision was driven in part by the ideal of upward mobility that is part and parcel of the American Dream, but also by a natural impulse to get away from the violence and discord he experienced in Newark in the late 1960s.

So, after growing up in an upper-middle-class, predominantly white suburb outside of Newark, I was accepted at a Catholic university in Manhattan. There, I was exposed to a worldview and living space that were vastly different from what I had become accustomed to in the mostly secular and insular suburbs.

Living in a dorm on Manhattan’s Upper West Side gave me a taste of city life in all its differences from suburbia. But it wasn’t until I ventured out of the city’s gentrified, cosmopolitan sections and into its many ghettos and ethnic enclaves that I began to understand what was lacking in the environs of my childhood. I remembered visiting the Greek enclaves of Astoria in Queens and what remained of Newark’s Italian section as a child. But living in New York I could freely visit neighborhoods that were home to a vast array of communities still connected to their heritages. Of course, Astoria was a frequent stop, in addition to the Puerto Rican “El Barrio,” Dominican Washington Heights, the Bronx’s Little Italy (the “real” one), the Eastern European Lower East Side, Peruvian Jackson Heights, the Chinatown of Flushing, and the Little Egypt of Steinway.

Photograph by Emmanuel Ogbonnaya / Unsplash.

The cultural cohesiveness of these neighborhoods fostered a vibrancy, sociality, and spontaneity that was unknown in my life in the suburbs. The constant presence of people in the streets, the smell of food wafting through the air, and the proximity of residences to businesses (many of which are locally owned) captivated me. I was filled with a painful yet sweet longing to belong to such a place, or perhaps to return to the Greek village of my ancestors.

Growing up in suburbia brought its share of alienation from my family roots. The drive to remove commerce from residential areas inspired ugly strip malls, and the lack of people hanging out fostered greater anonymity and isolation. Sure, I had “fun” as a kid, but I now felt that those highly organized versions of fun – playdates, town-sponsored sports teams, and extracurricular activities – lacked an organic spontaneity and conviviality that I longed for. The pressure on families to assimilate and forget their cultural roots is exacerbated by the landscape of suburbia, where manmade foundations prevent the planting and growing of trees with deep roots. Upon moving to the suburbs, immigrants tend to lose their traditions, customs, beliefs, temperaments, and general ethnic “flavor.”

The suburban monoculture, which is quick to dissolve cultural particularities, will dampen our desire to develop lasting, meaningful ties to people and place. After graduating college and returning home to New Jersey to start my first full-time job in Newark, I realized I had no desire to go back to the suburbs. I had had enough of the feeling of atomization – of being uprooted and isolated, of the long, lonely trek on the highway from home to work. I decided the best alternative was to move into the Ironbound.

Formally known as the East Ward and also called Down Neck, as it borders the Passaic River like a goose’s neck, the Ironbound has a rich history. Originally a vast farmland home to the Lenape tribe, and largely unused upon Newark’s establishment as a Puritan colony in 1666, the area became a hub for factories and manufacturing during the Industrial Revolution. Germans were among the first wave of immigrants who came to work the factories in the early 1800s. Soon after, others – Poles, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Irish, Italians, and more – built enclaves of their own in the neighborhood.

As these immigrants made more money, they moved out to other parts of the city. By the 1930s, the area became known as Little Iberia: the Spanish and Portuguese had bought up the majority of the property, revamping the architecture in the Iberian style, and opening numerous restaurants, churches, social clubs, and sports leagues that catered to the new population. During the “white flight” from Newark’s other neighborhoods, the Spanish and Portuguese communities stayed put.

As the rest of the city was ravaged by poverty and violence due to housing and economic policies that disadvantaged once thriving black communities, the Ironbound made a name for being charming and lively. Many would flock to Ferry Street, the main avenue, to patronize the fine Portuguese and Spanish restaurants. While the Portuguese still made up the majority of the neighborhood’s population and owned most of the property, Brazilian, Ecuadorian, Salvadorian, and Mexican immigrants began to make enclaves of their own in the area. Though not without tension, the various communities learned to weave a cultural patchwork that only added to the neighborhood’s vibrant flavor.

Life in the Ironbound was everything I expected it to be and more – for better and worse. From the moment I set foot in my new apartment, I savored the aroma of fresh bread and BBQ chicken in the air, the building’s Spanish-style façade with an azulejo tile of Saint Joseph fixed into it, and the sound of music playing from cars and open windows. I didn’t have to walk far to find coffee shops offering reasonably priced café con leche, empanadas, galão, pão de queijo, and pasteis de natas, which patrons would sip and munch while seated outside, casually chatting and smoking cigarettes with other locals.

In addition to the traditional Spanish and Portuguese restaurants, there were Brazilian rodizio steakhouses and street food spots, many of which had live bands playing Samba, Forro, or Sertanejo on weekend evenings.

The streets were lined with cherry blossom trees which, in the spring, would rain pink petals whenever the wind blew strongly. On hot summer afternoons, people gathered at Independence Park to walk, grab some cuchifrito from a food truck or a refreshing piragua, and play a pickup game of soccer or volleyball. The park and eateries were among a variety of spaces that catered to socializing, which also included social clubs, event venues, and community organizations. Local businesses were also heavily involved in community affairs, as were the numerous churches.

Religiosity was present on almost every street corner. From the tiles of saints on the façades and sidewalk shrines featuring statues of Our Lady of Fátima or of Guadalupe, which would prompt passersby to cross themselves or mutter a prayer, to the processions and festivals that brought people in droves to the streets during the summer, spirituality penetrated daily life in the Ironbound. Catholic churches dominated the neighborhood, offering Mass in English, Portuguese, Spanish, and even in Italian and Polish, to which former residents who left for the suburbs would return occasionally for memorial Masses or baptisms. There were also several Brazilian Evangelical and charismatic communities, as well as a few mainline Protestant ones.

In addition to religious street festivals there were cultural festivals and parades – Brazilian, Ecuadorian, and Iberian – where people could be seen drinking, eating, and dancing into the wee hours of the morning.

My commute to work was a twenty-minute walk, and on days I was feeling lazy, a four-minute drive. One of the benefits of living where I worked was bumping into my coworkers. These gratuitous encounters – which occurred in the gym, church, barbershop, and restaurants – could lead to catching up on workplace gossip or even to an invitation to dinner at their place. Hanging out with friends was often as spontaneous as randomly walking over to their apartment and knocking on their door. No need to “pencil in” an appointment three weeks from now, as was the usual case in the suburbs or in Manhattan. One could easily just bring a ball to the park to kick around with a friend, walk to the corner to get a beer, or chill outside while listening to one of the bands play music.

A spirit of neighborliness was standard, as I could also knock on a neighbor’s door just to chat over coffee and a cigarette, or to ask for extra eggs. I was able to count on my neighbors to watch out for me. One time my elderly Spanish neighbor in the apartment next to mine alerted me to the person who kept taking “my” parking space (though it officially belonged to no one).

Yet life in the neighborhood wasn’t as glamorous as I had thought it would be. Within my first month there, one of my neighbors drunkenly hit my car while trying to squeeze into a tiny spot next to mine. Another time, I forgot to lock my car and someone stole money I had in the glove compartment. My tiny apartment was charming, but I shared it with mice and other pests, which the moody landlord had little interest in exterminating.

One of the most compelling factors of the Ironbound’s landscape was the presence of numerous “third spaces,” where people would informally hangout, make conversation, or offer social support to each other. Such spaces, Ray Oldenburg writes, “sustain the life of neighborhoods,” and are distinct from “large, highly structured organizations, on the one hand, and from families and other small groups, on the other.”

In his commentary on Oldenburg’s book The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts and How They Get You through the Day, Christopher Lasch states that third places aren’t only useful for “getting you through the day,” but also for encouraging conversation, which is “the essence of civic life. Conversation is most likely to flourish, according to Oldenburg, in informal gathering places where people can talk without constraint, except for the constraints imposed by the art of conversation itself. Like Emerson, he believes that conversation is the city’s raison d’être.”

Neighborhoods rife with third places “nurture an interest in people and their infinite capacity to amuse and enlighten one another,” as Oldenburg puts it. The same thing could plausibly be said of the shopping mall, often touted as a new version of Main Street. But malls serve corporations, not the community. Lasch’s critique of suburban mall culture hits home for me, as I spent a disturbing amount of my adolescence in North Jersey malls. “Main Street offers a ‘cast of characters,’ the shopping mall a ‘drifting amalgam of nonpersons.’” Rather than promoting community, argues Lasch, the suburban way of life “rests on a critique of community,” as community poses a threat to individualistic pursuits and comforts.

Eventually, changes in my career led me to leave the Ironbound, but I’ll always look back at my time there with gratitude for what it taught me. I still hold plenty of reservations about suburbia, but I’ve come to understand that no matter where one lives, one can choose to try to foster a lifestyle that gives space to those human needs I came to recognize in myself while living in Newark.

I’ve sought out cultural organizations in my current neighborhood that allow me to celebrate my heritage and to learn about and appreciate the traditions of others. I participate regularly in the life of my local parish – especially in the lively saint feasts, where spontaneous joy and pandemonium break out into the streets. And in an effort to immerse myself in the affairs of my neighborhood, I’ve familiarized myself with local politics and spent time in third places.

Perhaps one of the most important things my time in Newark taught me was the value of attempting to retrieve and foster one’s sense of rootedness and interconnectedness. Seeking ways to feel connected to my family’s history, my cultural traditions, my spirituality, and the people I live and work with has filled in the painful void created by atomization and deracination, and is something that people can do regardless of where they live.

Over time, I’ve come to accept that I can’t just pick up and return to the Greek motherland, in part because I now understand that the real virtue of knowing one’s roots is to enable us to share our lives with others in “thicker,” more substantial ways. I now look for ways to share my heritage with people I love who come from different backgrounds. I’ve made it a point to take my friends for a tour of the remaining landmarks of Newark’s Italian neighborhood or to get Greek food and attend a liturgy at the local Greek church in my current neighborhood. I’ve even taken several of them to stay with my family in Greece. Returning to the United States, I find myself lingering less on nostalgia for the idyllic Greek island life and more on the gratitude of having friends with whom I can establish thick, meaningful ties.