Growing up in Astoria in the 1950s was, at its least, a microcosm of middle class urbanity. Ethnically, the neighborhood was as mixed as my mother’s chicken a la king. There were lots of Germans and Italians, almost as many Greeks, Irish and Hungarians, plenty of Polish, with fewer Chinese (and practically none of the other Oriental (Asian these days) nationalities). In terms of religion, it was mostly Roman Catholic but there were plenty of Protestants and Jews. Since no mosque was in the area I doubt there were many followers of Islam. There probably were Lutherans, Episcopalians, and maybe Baptists as well, but to a Jew like me, Protestants, Lutherans, etc., were all Christians who thought the Jews killed Christ.
I remember being about seven years old and this nine year old kid, Raymond came up to me with his friend Dennis and said that I was lucky the Catholics let me keep breathing. Anytime they wanted to they could just put my lights out. It was an experience that I didn’t soon forget. It also reinforced the persecution stories that I had been hearing from my parents and grandparents since I was old enough to understand the spoken word. I think Raymond became a Burns guard, after being turned down by the police department.
It was a section of Queens which, in the 1950’s, was in transition from a neighborhood of row houses and vacant lots to a teeming industrial area with apartment houses and housing projects of all types. In 1954, there were so many vacant lots that you could see ten blocks from my third floor window. By 1960, within three blocks of my house, they had built an elementary school, a junior high school, a bowling alley, three warehouses, a factory, and plenty of attached two family houses.
The Ravenswood projects were intended to house the lower middle or upper lower class families. They were six blocks away. Plenty of people scammed the housing authority and wound up with new apartments that cost them a fraction of what they would normally have had to spend for those accommodations. These were the days when a housing project was a nice place to live whether you were poor or just pretending to be poor. The 20 or so buildings were all six story maroon brick structures with playgrounds, benches, flagpoles, working elevators, heat that actually warmed the apartments, hot water that never ran out, and just about no violent crime except for the occasional domestic dispute.
The Queensview development came a few years later and was more of a middle and upper middle class development. The buildings were ten floors high (really tall for those days), and the apartments were larger and brighter than those in Ravenswood. Professional people were happy to get apartments in Queensview. It seemed that most of the Jewish people at the Astoria Center of Israel, my synagogue, lived in Queensview (although I’m sure that plenty did not).
Just about all these nationalities, religions, and classes of people had a similar preoccupation. They all wanted to make improvements for themselves and their families. It was, like all middle class neighborhoods, a place where people dreamed of better lives.
Also, lest I forget, there were the Black (in those days ‘Negro’ or ‘colored’) sections. In addition to Ravenswood and Queensview, there were two other projects within this melange of humanity. The Astoria and Queensbridge projects were built in the shadows of the two bridges that seemed to enclose Astoria . The Triborough Bridge towered over the Astoria projects and the 59th Street Bridge ran right above the Queensbridge projects. These were both places that I was told to avoid. I guess they were also places where people dreamed, against far greater odds, of attaining better lives.
And, as in most mixed neighborhoods, there was plenty of ethnic, racial and religious prejudice. Most Whites wanted to keep the Blacks out of their part of the neighborhood. The Italians stayed away from the Polish. The Greeks were a community unto themselves. Everybody kind of ignored the Chinese. And the Irish just got drunk and hated everybody. Nobody liked the Jews either. All in all, it was your average urban middle class mixed neighborhood where most people worked hard to get what they wanted and fought just as hard to keep it. Now you might accuse me of stereotyping these people and I am sure, for example, that all the Irish people weren’t getting drunk all of the time, but I lived there and that’s the way I remember it.