Reporting Red Hook

It’s a clear and cool August morning, and a pickup match is underway at the Red Hook Recreation Center soccer field.  Dressed in mix-matched t-shirts and shorts, employees of the Queen Marie Italian Restaurant on Court Street face off against workers for a local construction firm.  As the game nears its end, players hurl insults and call out victory cries in Spanish.  The restaurant workers win, 5-3.  

On the sidelines, men hang blue plastic tarps over grills and picnic tables while women husk corn and slice limes.  Hand-painted signs advertise tacos, empanadas, ceviche and horchata. Smells begin to emerge—smoldering charcoal, deep-fried starches, grilling meat. The scene has a very improvised feel, and yet, nothing about it is new. “Some of them have been here for 35 years,” according to Waldemar Ceballos, Vice President of the Guatemala Soccer League.  “They are here every weekend in the summers.”  Originally, the food vendors came because the soccer players were there, but now it seems that the players are here, at least in part, for the food. “Everybody comes to play and eat,” says Ceballos.

Unlike the players in the early-morning pickup match, members of the Guatemala Soccer League wear team uniforms, and their games are refereed. The league has been around since 1974, and was, according to Ceballos, the first Latino soccer league in the city. “It’s just for fun, not professional,” he says, though a few players claim to have played professionally in their home countries.  Ceballos himself is originally from Guatemala—he emigrated in 1974 to escape his country’s long civil war—but the league’s players are from all over the world.  In the early days, almost all the players were Hispanic; now a wider variety of nationalities are represented. Most teams have a predominant ethnic identity that sometimes doubles as a team name, but they’re all mixed.

Earlier this summer, the Parks Department informed the league’s beloved Latin food vendors that their temporary permits, expiring September 8^th, would not be renewed.  This sparked the fury of adoring locals and made waves among foodies citywide.  Sen. Chuck Schumer even stepped in, calling the vendors a “Brooklyn treasure,” and asking the department to let the vendors remain. Parks officials agreed to allow the stalls to stay open until the end of this season—October 28^th—after which the city will open bidding on concessions and the vendors will have to compete for the right to sell their delectable goods.  Even this uneasy respite was short-lived. On August 8th the Department of Health got involved, issuing a list of requirements that the vendors say could prove too expensive to implement.

Passions run high and speculation is rampant in the park.  “They want to bring in big chains so they can get their tax money” said Ceballos.  “This is going to be a problem for our players.”

As the games get underway, representatives from the health department wander from stall to stall, opening and closing coolers, poking under aluminum foil covers, asking questions and taking notes.

The first official match of the day is played between Team Yugoslavia, comprised of immigrants from the Balkan countries, and Club Deportivo, which is “about half Spanish and half North African,” according to Sami Ameur, a Deportivo player who came to Brooklyn from Algeria four years ago.  Ameur says he’s always been a fan of the Spanish football team Real Madrid, but now that he lives in the U.S., he follows American football and baseball more than soccer.  “I’m a Yankees fan,” he says.

Yugoslavia scores the first goal in game one, but the end result is a win for Club Deportivo.  The next match, between Mexican and Egyptian teams, is somewhat tense.  “There’s a lot of resentment on the part of the Egyptian team because the referees are mostly Hispanic,” a fan explains. The match ends with a Mexican victory but the hint of tension dissipates as Ecuadorian and Salvadorian players take the field.  The players seem to appreciate the inter-ethnic camaraderie that the league engenders. “That’s the thing about football,” says Ernest Garcia, a former Guatemala League player who is watching from the crowded stands. “Like they say at the World Cup, ‘one round ball unites the world.’”

Though the games enthrall audiences, most people seem to have come for the food.  “I’m from California, and I’ve been really struggling to find good Mexican food, so a friend told me to come here,” says Boerum Hill resident Chris Michael.  “You gotta try the pupusas—second blue tent from the left,” Ceballos advises.

The food vendors’ saga seems likely to have a happy ending.  With lines up to 40-people long waiting for huaraches, the vendors have ample support in the community. After the barrage of questions, Health Department representatives offer a few simple tips and move onto the next stand.  According to an official statement, “The Health Department is working with the Department of Parks and Recreation and Red Hook food vendors to help assure the safety of the food prepared and sold at the Red Hook soccer fields.”

“We are okay!” said Reina Carrillo, while flipping tortillas at her family’s stand. “She asked us some questions, but we had no violations, no nothing.  It’s okay for now, but we don’t know what will happen next year.”  

Across from the Red Hook Container Terminal on Columbia Street, two elderly men sit at a card table that’s been set up out on the sidewalk. One is slouched over, asleep in his folding chair, a Spanish-language newspaper crumpled in his lap. The other is eating rice and beans from an aluminum take-out container and smiling widely at the passers-by. They look a bit out of place amidst the upscale restaurants and trendy cafes that line the block, but they seem to feel right at home.

“I came here from Puerto Rico in 1959.  I was one of the first!” said Ocasio Figaroa, the more alert of the two.  “We lived in an apartment on Amity Street, and I went to P.S. 29.”  Figaroa is a relic—a member of the first Puerto Rican community in Brooklyn and one of the first in New York, a community that was once thriving but is now mostly vanished or invisible. “I had all my adventures on Columbia Street,” he said, “there were bars with happy hours; music, dancing, beautiful women.  This was all Boriqua.”

“The first Puerto Ricans ended up on Columbia Street because the boat that brought them landed here,” said Manuel Ortiz, a Puerto Rican-American and director of the Carroll Gardens Association.  They stayed in the Columbia Street District—defined as the area between Atlantic Avenue and the Gowanus Expressway, the BQE and the waterfront—to work in the docks. When containers and hydraulic lifts began replacing manpower in the 1960s, most of the jobs moved to New Jersey, where there was more space for large container ports. “They used to pick us up from here and bus us to Jersey,” Figaroa explained.  “I worked on the ships in Bayonne until I left for Vietnam.” With few jobs, the neighborhood experienced a long period of neglect and decline. “Columbia Street became a real abandoned neighborhood,” said Ortiz. 

A recent article in the New York Times laments the fact that Columbia Street has yet to see the level of revival visible on neighboring Smith and Court Streets in Carroll Gardens.  The waterfront is still occupied by the container terminal and is inaccessible to the public; the promises of a Columbia Street Urban Renewal Plan remain unfulfilled.  But the neighborhood, alive with restaurant goers and young couples pushing baby carriages, has changed enormously in the past decade or so. 

“There used to be something called Puerto Rican village—it was an empty lot on Columbia Street where people would build their shacks,” according to Jerry Armer, a former chairman of the local community board. Locals recall a shantytown of hand-built wooden and tin-roofed structures that stood in the neighborhood for decades. No one seems to remember exactly when the settlement appeared, but around a dozen people still called it home until 1994, when it burned to the ground in a blaze that killed two people.

“When I first bought by house here, my dad really discouraged me. He was like, ‘That’s Red Hook!’ It was considered a tough neighborhood.” That was 8 years ago.  Now, Maritsa Beltre owns a restaurant on Columbia Street and sends her daughter to P.S. 29. “Some of the old Puerto Rican men come by and tell me how this used to be a bar where they met their sweethearts,” she said.  But asked if she’s noticed any remnants of the Puerto Rican community she said, “I don’t think there’s really anything—on this street, everything is pretty much new.”

The Iglisia Cristiana Pentecostal on Summit Street just off Columbia still holds bi-lingual services.  Reverend Rene Baez said that the church used to be almost all Puerto Rican, but that now it’s a mix of Hispanics and African Americans who come over from the Red Hook housing projects.  According to Baez, the Puerto Rican community hasn’t vanished, it’s just become less visible.

“We’re assimilated now.  My own kids speak Spanish, but some of the kids who grew up in this church don’t even speak a word of it,” Baez said. “We’re not really immigrants; we were never immigrants, we’re patriotic U.S. citizens,” he said.

Some Puerto Rican-Americans prefer to embrace their dual identity. “We are Americans of course, we serve in the military and everything, but generally a Puerto Rican will tell you that he’s a Puerto Rican first,” said Ortiz.

According to Reverend Baez, many Puerto Ricans in the Columbia Street District bought their homes decades ago, so they aren’t affected by increasing rents spurred by the gentrification of the neighborhood.  But that’s not true for everyone. A sign in the window of a local real estate agency offers a one-bedroom apartment for $1800 per month. Ocasio Figaroa, the man eating his lunch at the card table, has suffered from seizures ever since he went to Vietnam, and the $910 a month that he receives as a disabled war veteran is not nearly enough to afford a place to live the neighborhood where he grew up.  He usually sleeps at his brother’s house in Staten Island, but still spends his days on Columbia Street.  “God put me in Brooklyn,” he said, “that’s where I had all my good times, all my loves.  They’ve been fixing it up and it’s even better now, way better.”