Officially

Matt Levy

As I read the calm and calculated NY Times article ("Psst . . . Have You Heard About Bushwick," 3/5/06) about my neighborhood of three years, I cringed slightly, as the broken glass scattered sidewalks outside my subway stop were called part of an "up and coming" area. These loaded terms about hyperventilating real estate markets in Bushwick, a post-industrial landscape of knitting mills, cardboard boxes and glassware, with the requisite tenements and pre-fab houses, is a delicate subject among residents, new and old. Earlier this week I was speaking with Tony Asaro, of Asaro Bros. Italian Food Wholesalers, on the corner of Irving Avenue and Jefferson St, established since 1941. Tony's a real character, talks a mile a millisecond while shuffling boxes of pasta and jars of stuffed cherry peppers around his shop.

"Words are superfluous," he tells me, incredulously, while slicing a huge wheel of Ricotta Salata, "it's the body that talks."

Tony was telling about all the spectacular changes since Bushwick's bad news days. Bushwick, which means 'heavy woods' in Dutch (and 'refuge' in Mexican slang) started out as a German neighborhood. From the 1840s through WWI, Bushwick became stuffed with breweries, especially a twelve-block stretch with at least 11 breweries, between Scholes and Meserole, and from Lorimer St to Bushwick Place, in today's East Williamsburg. After the Great War, anti-German sentiment forced many of the residents to leave Brooklyn for Ridgewood, Queens, and safer refuge in Westchester. Hence, the Italians arrived, and with them, Tony's family. Tony was going on about how the place was rife with vegetable markets, laticerias and factories where many of the residents were employed.

"No one had to leave the neighborhood; it was a real family place." But with the influx of Black and Puerto Rican families, the Italian families moved to larger homes in more residential, less urban neighborhoods, like Arthur Avenue in the Bronx and huge swatches of Staten Island. But Tony stayed with his shop.

He stayed through the riots and fires of the legendary and dangerous 1970s, stayed through the 1977 blackout where 145 storefronts along a 30-block stretch of Broadway under the El were looted and 40 were burned to the ground. Tony's shop was affected by the 1979 redistricting of zip codes, where the residents of his block, a block away from the Brooklyn-Queens border, petitioned for a Ridgewood zip code, 11227, instead of the more dangerous (by association) of Bushwick's (and my) zip, 11237. He stayed through the resurgence of the neighborhood through business improvement districts; the private developers who rebuilt bombed-out houses, and the construction of new housing units for families, mostly from the Caribbean islands, families that could no longer afford to live in Crown Heights. Tony lived through it all.

And on midnight of May 31st, he will stick around no longer. Tony will close up his shop for good; the owners of the building, a Dominican couple, are turning the space into a childcare business.

"I'm going into controlled activity. It's this phrase that I coined. I'm not retiring; I couldn't retire; I wouldn't know what to do with myself. But I'm gonna walk through that door, scale in hand, and head south. Who knows where I'll end up? Hopefully, at my house."