A common sensation among the residents of Bensonhurst is the feeling of living in the middle of nowhere. “It’s so far away from civilization,” laments Stephanie, a recent transplant from Sunset Park, as she exits the D train at the 18^th Avenue station. For commuters like her, the over one hour-long train ride from the city to this remote corner of Brooklyn often resembles a journey between worlds. During the trip to 18^th Avenue, as the Coney Island-bound D pulls out of the tunnels and onto elevated tracks, commuters watch as houses with clotheslines in their backyards and high schools with football fields pass in an out of their view, anomalies to those who are most familiar with the vertical architecture of Manhattan. As the train draws closer to the stop, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge materializes into view, a reminder that in many ways, Bensonhurst is an extension of “the forgotten borough.”

Despite its population of over 150,000 and the seeming denseness of its main thoroughfares, solitude dominates the atmosphere of the neighborhood. Walking along Bay 16^th Street or another one of the neighborhood’s ocean-themed streets, it would not be uncommon to encounter few other pedestrians. To find signs of human life, one must venture down 18^th Avenue or 86^th Street, where the disparate and separate cores of the neighborhood lie, 18^th Avenue representing the old and 86^th Street the new.

Bensonhurst experienced two waves of Italian immigrants in the 20^th Century: one prior to World War II and another one in the 1950s. Known as the Little Italy of Brooklyn, it is still famous for its significant Italian-American population. However, as non-Italian immigrants flow into the neighborhood and the Italian population ages, Italian-Americans now make up less than fifteen percent of the neighborhood’s total population. Like its Manhattan counterpart, Brooklyn’s Little Italy has become smaller and smaller, as the area comprising it has dwindled to a single street. 18^th Avenue from Bay Ridge Parkway to 86^th Street remains the last reminder of Bensonhurst’s Italian past. Riding the B8 bus through the avenue, one cannot help but notice the abundance of Italian flags waving on poles on street curbs outside Italian-American owned businesses. Many of the proprietors who currently manage these businesses do not speak the language of their grandparents and great-grandparents, who originally settled in Bensonhurst after emigrating from Southern Italy and set up these shops. However, by operating the pizzerias, bakeries, and cafes that line 18^th Avenue, also called Cristoforo Colombo Boulevard, they continue a tradition that has long been a pivotal aspect of Italian identity: food. Enter Villabate Alba Bakery on the corner of 18^th Avenue and 71^st Street, and the gleam of shiny marzipan cakes perfectly molded and painted to resemble fruit will catch your eye. The line for cannolis snakes out the door. Further down the avenue, at 18^th and 85^th Street, the smell of fresh-out-of-the-oven pizza entices passerby as they exit the train station, deciding that they do not have worry about preparing dinner after all. Bensonhurst’s Italian-American pride culminates each year in the “Festa di Santa Rosalia” street festival during late summer. Named for Santa Rosalia, the patron saint of Palermo, for ten days, 18^th Avenue enlivens with red, white, and green banners and the sounds and smells of street vendors selling zeppoles and Italian ices.

At 86^th Street, Brooklyn’s Little Italy ends and a new enclave begins. Unlike 18^th Avenue, 86^th Street does not have a single ethnic identity, making it difficult to nickname. Some argue that it is an annex of Brooklyn’s main Chinatown on 8^th Avenue in Sunset Park, and indeed, there are many groceries, take-out joints, sushi restaurants, dollar stores, nail salons, and other Chinese-owned businesses lining its streets. However, as store and restaurant awnings continue to go up, bearing names in Cyrillic, Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, and Polish, it becomes increasingly apparent that 86^th Street is not a homogeneously Chinese enclave. While groups from China and the former Soviet Union dominate the neighborhood’s foreign-born population, Bensonhurst is also home to a significant number of immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Puerto Rico, Albania, Pakistan, and the Middle East, as indicated by the diversity of businesses and languages on 86^th Street.

For many of Bensonhurst’s recent immigrants, who are numerous (according to former mayor Michael Bloomberg, in 2013 Bensonhurst had the second highest number of immigrants in New York City after Washington Heights), Bensonhurst is New York. When asked about why he has no intent to learn English, Begzod, my grandfather’s home attendant and a 23-year-old immigrant from Uzbekistan, answers, “Why should I? Everyone here speaks Russian.” Living in a neighborhood that has a Russian supermarket that sells imported goods, several mosques, a Brooklyn Public Library Branch with books in multiple languages, and a few Central Asian restaurants, many of Begzod’s social needs are met within the neighborhood’s boundaries.

For the children of immigrants, on the other hand, the neighborhood’s remoteness, desolate streets, and lack of affluence can be confining. Through my mother, Begzod explains to me that his 16-year-old brother regularly stays out with friends until the early hours of the morning on weekends, drawing the ire and worry of his parents. “He doesn’t like it here. He always wants to hang out in Manhattan,” he explains. Unlike Begzod, his brother arrived in New York at a crucial age for his cognitive and sociocultural development. Begzod explains how his brother picked up English at school with ease and increasingly feels the need to fit in with American society.

For those who commute between Bensonhurst and more prosperous parts of the city for work, the lack of major retail stores, yoga studios, and Whole Foods can make the neighborhood feel empty and inconvenient. Relatively low rents and lack of financial stability prevent many of these college-educated 20 and 30-something-year-olds from moving out of their parents’ houses or out of the neighborhood and into areas like Brooklyn Heights. Many of them speak only English fluently, a language that is barely heard on the neighborhood’s streets. They use Bensonhurst as crash pad, retreating here to sleep on weeknights while traveling elsewhere for social and intellectual stimulation.

Stephanie is one these nocturnal residents. She grew up in Bensonhurst in a Chinese-American family. After earning her degree in music from UCLA, she returned to New York and settled in Sunset Park, a neighborhood that borders affluent Park Slope and that has slowly begun to gentrify. Lack of career prospects and an unstable flow of income forced her to move back home with her parents. “I like Bensonhurst, but I don’t want to stay here forever,” she remarks as we exit the train station. It is 11 p.m. and she is returning from a gig on the Lower East Side, guitar slung across her back. She would have liked to play the later set as well, but her job in retail, which begins at 8 a.m., prevents her from staying out too late. “My parents were nice about letting me move back in, but they made it clear that I couldn’t stay for free,” she explains. When asked about why she wants to eventually leave Bensonhurst, she explains that she wants to live closer to the indie music scene. “I also have the feeling that if I keep living in my parents’ neighborhood, I have failed to rise above their position in life,” she explains.

Although Bensonhurst lacks the cultural resources to appeal to Stephanie’s generation, it still boasts the Belt Parkway Promenade, a pedestrian and biking path along the water stretching from Bay Parkway to Bay Ridge, which appeals to the generation’s health and recreation-consciousness. Though the trail is not nearly as user-friendly as those in DUMBO or Central Park, with craters, gravel, and sand lining the way, no clearly defined divisions between the cycling and running paths, and the smell of cigarettes and illegally-gutted fish filling the lungs of runners gasping for breath, its scenic views of the Verrazano Bridge and Staten Island across the water, especially during sunset, make for a breathtaking run or ride.

Works Cited

“The Festa Di Santa Rosalia, a 70-year Bensonhurst Tradition, Will Go on as Scheduled This Year .” NY Daily News. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 May 2014. <http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/bensonhurst-festa-di-santa-rosalia-year-article-1.1432257>.

“Mayor Bloomberg Welcomes 100 New U.S. Citizens .” NY Daily News. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 May 2014. <http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/mayor-bloomberg-welcomes-100-new-u-s-citizens-article-1.1552071>.

Santos, Fernanda. “For Italians in Brooklyn, the Faces and the Voices on the Streets Have Changed.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 06 Jan. 2009. Web. 07 May 2014. <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/nyregion/07italians.html?_r=0>.

United States. New York City Department of City Planning. Population Division. Nyc.gov. N.p.,

Feb. 2012. Web. 7 Mar. 2014.

<http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/pdf/census/census2010/t_pl_p1_nta.pdf>.

“And over there is the synagogue where I went to pre-school,” Jules says, pointing at a magnificent brownstone. Our walk along Union Street in Park Slope is approaching its end as we near Prospect Park. For him, the journey has been filled with nostalgia. “I had a group of three friends while at pre-school, and for my fifth birthday, I invited them all over to my house,” he reminisces. Jules continues to ramble about his batman birthday cake, the games they played, and gifts that disappeared into the folds of time long ago, but I stop listening. I remember all of my own early birthday celebrations where it was just me, my mother, my sister, and maybe a couple of cousins. Inviting school friends over to our house was strictly forbidden, even though many of them lived in our building. My mother’s insistence on insularity in our household stemmed from her fear of the unknown. Unlike many of the larger minority groups in New York, Turkish immigrants were too few and too scattered in the early 2000s to form an enclave of their own, giving them no choice but to settle among other groups. Our building, located at the crossroads of Borough Park and Sunset Park, offered an eclectic mix of Bengali, Puerto Rican, and Chinese families. To my mother, however, they were all part of the other, and therefore, they were unwelcome in our apartment.

            We slow down as we approach the opening to Prospect Park. Our walk began on Union Street and 5^th Avenue and would continue into the depths of the park. Although Jules and I had both attended middle school in Park Slope, he had been a lifelong denizen while I rarely ventured beyond 5^th Avenue. Along our trip, I absorbed the novel sights in solitude while he barely noticed the opulence surrounding us. I took in the century-old townhouses, worth millions more than when they were originally built, and the high-end shops that my mother wouldn’t dare set foot in. To Jules, however, the gourmet ice cream shop signaled nothing more than the simplicity of fond childhood memories.

            As we walked past the Park Slope Food Coop between 6^th and 7^th Avenue, Jules explained to me the social and business models behind the establishment. I marveled out how disparate families could unite to contribute their share of labor every week in order to provide more affordable organic groceries to all members. Such practices would not flourish in Sunset Park, a neighborhood which lacked a sense of community and where every family kept mostly to itself. Watching the employees leave the Coop, wearing their work uniforms and carrying bags of groceries, I recalled my mother shopping at the C-Town on 8^th Avenue in Sunset Park. She would carefully watch as the price of each scanned item appeared on the computer screen, convinced that the cashiers were trying to cheat her. Upon returning home with the groceries, she would check the receipt to once again ensure that everything was in order, and she wouldn’t hesitate to return to the supermarket if she found an error. Reflecting on her distrust of the institutions and people of our neighborhood, I wondered amusedly about whether my mother could function as an employee and shopper at the Park Slope Food Coop.

            Continuing on our uphill trek, I noticed that Park Slope was incredibly clean for a neighborhood filled with young children and dogs. I realized that in this neighborhood, children were taught from an early age about the value of recycling and the negative effects of littering. They were taught that the neighborhood belonged to them and that they had to help keep it clean in order to continue to live in a nice area. None of the residents out walking their dogs had left their homes without plastic bags. Their sense of responsibility towards Park Slope allowed community gardens and green spaces, bike paths, street art created by elementary schools, and flowers planted next to trees to thrive. Many of its inhabitants fostered personal relationships with their local bookstore owners or coffee shop baristas and had the funds to frequent artisanal gelato shops that sold their goods for $10 a pint, which allowed Park Slope to be dominated by small businesses at a time when most other neighborhoods were overrun by corporations.

            I grew up with a phobia of dogs, a fear caused in part by my mother’s own fear of them, which was a vestige of growing up in a country where stray, rabid dogs are quite common, and in part by the fact that I was raised in an area where owning a dog often meant that you were a drug dealer. Walking in Park Slope, where dogs abounded, I initially felt panicked and begged Jules to cross the street every time we encountered one. However, I began to relax slightly when I noticed that random strangers would approach dog owners and ask them to pet their dogs. Instead of barking, the dogs would respond playfully. Oftentimes, children as young as three would approach dogs that were as tall as they were and pet them, which both astonished and embarrassed me.

            We have finally entered Prospect Park. Jules guides me to the path on the right, which leads to some of the wilder, more forest-like parts of the park. It is early spring during our last semester together in middle school, and the isolation provided by the park comes as a pleasant relief from the culture shock I just experienced. Just as my mind begins to relax, Jules revisits an uncomfortable topic. “When will I meet your mom?” he asks.

            “I don’t know,” I answer honestly. “You know that she doesn’t allow me to bring home friends from school.”

            “Yeah, I find that really weird,” he replies.

            As we continue walking along the increasingly narrowing path, I deliberate over whether there will ever be a good time to introduce them. Besides her qualms about having strangers over, my mother would highly disapprove of me dating before completing my education. And how would she react to a non-Turkish boyfriend? Clearly, I can’t introduce them for another couple of years … or the next decade.

            We finally arrive at the point where the path ends and we are completely surrounded by trees in the early stages of bloom. I wouldn’t mind remaining here for the next century.

I immigrated to the US in the summer of 1996. Because I was only one years old at the time, I do not remember what it was like to be a recent immigrant and I was largely spared the burden of having to adjust to life in a new country. My parents, however, still struggle with it seventeen years later.

When we first arrived in New York, my family lived with my aunt and her family in their apartment until we found lodgings of our own. My aunt’s family lived in a tiny, two-bedroom apartment, and for approximately a month, it had to accommodate six adults and one baby, leading to a very crowded situation. The feeling of claustrophobia was further aggravated by the fact that my parents had spent their entire lives in rural villages, where they had grown accustomed to vast, open spaces. Once we had the means to move out and rent a place of our own, we settled in a one-bedroom studio located on the border of Borough Park and Sunset Park in Brooklyn. I spent the next sixteen years of my life in that neighborhood and I attended elementary school four blocks away from our first apartment.

When I first started kindergarten, I did not speak English, although I wasn’t aware of this at the time. On the very first day of school, I recall that a faculty member entered my classroom and began to call the names of some of the students. I had no idea why these students were being selected, but I remember badly wanting to be chosen myself. When my name was called, I was elated, and I dutifully followed the teacher and the other “chosen ones” to a separate, smaller classroom. I was unaware that I was being taken out of my regular class because of my severe lack of proficiency in English. Because we played games and had fun in this ESL program, I did not notice how quickly I picked up the language. Within a few months, I stopped attending the program because I had caught up to my native-speaking classmates. My age allowed me to learn English more or less osmotically while at school, even though I was exposed only to Turkish, Russian, and Bulgarian at home. In contrast, my mother, who was in her mid-thirties at the time, actively and consciously struggled over many years to learn the language after enrolling in an undergraduate program.

While my English got better, I gradually spoke Turkish less and less and I forgot Russian and Bulgarian altogether. This concerned my mother. To combat the loss of my Turkishness, she enrolled me in Turkish school, which I attended on Saturdays during my last three years of elementary school. Although I did learn to read in Turkish while attending this school, my oral skills did not  improve, mostly because I was a stubborn and rebellious child who enjoyed doing the exact opposite of what my mother wanted me to. Upset that I had to relinquish my beloved Saturdays, I resolved that even though my mother could force me to attend Turkish classes, she couldn’t make me speak the language. I made an active effort not to speak Turkish, even during Turkish class. Today, I possess basic reading and conversational skills and I speak Turkish with a heavy American accent.