Mother Russia has long been ensconced in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach, feasting on pirogi, borscht and the tang of salty air reminiscent of Odessa. But her assimilated children have been planting colonies across the New York area, and one of the largest is flourishing on Staten Island.
Staten Island’s Russians — even if many are really from Ukraine or other lands of the former Soviet Union — number 22,288 by the most recent census estimates, or more than 50,000 by their own estimates, which would make Russians one-tenth of the island’s population. As immigrant strivers, they moved to Staten Island for the affordable houses, good schools, suburban feel and pace, even a boardwalk in South Beach that can match Brighton Beach’s in length, if not in ambience.
But they have not escaped the ethnic encounters often associated with urban migrations, including grumbling by natives that the newcomers are taking over. This has surfaced most vividly as a result of a Russian-run community and day care center’s plan for a new 10,000-square-foot building that it promises would be for all Staten Islanders.
It will become another “Russian thing,” one skeptic, Joanne Bennetti, a 60-ish retired beautician, said at a meeting of the South Beach Civic Association. “You don’t know what it’s like to feel like a foreigner in your own neighborhood.”
Janele Hyer-Spencer, a local assemblywoman, who arranged for $4 million in state funding for a new Staten Island Community Center, said the tensions reflected the discomfort of some old-timers with the rapid influx of immigrants — Liberians, Albanians and Mexicans as well as Russians — into a once-sleepy, relatively homogeneous island.
According to Ms. Hyer-Spencer and the police, there has been a spate of hate crimes in recent months, including one in April in which a Mexican bakery worker’s skull was bashed. In June, large numbers of islanders turned out to oppose plans to build a mosque in a former convent, a plan that was eventually withdrawn.
“We are experiencing, across the island, a demographic shift of monumental proportions and the cultural conflict that is an outgrowth of that shift,” Ms. Hyer-Spencer said.
Meanwhile, the plan for the community center, to replace a derelict amusement arcade, has turned into a muddle. Though funds became available two years ago, the State Dormitory Authority has yet to approve the building. Ms. Hyer-Spencer suggested that she had exhausted her efforts to convince local civic associations that the center would be multicultural, not just for Russians.
“Because of so much cultural conflict, it’s impossible to move forward,” she said.
Joseph McAllister, the president of the South Beach Civic Association, said that based on what he had learned so far, he was opposed to the center because cars picking up and dropping off children would clog traffic. Moreover, he said, no details have emerged about parking on the site or about the building’s size.
Mr. McAllister says he does not, however, side with those who express antagonism toward newcomers, pointing out that most residents have ancestors who came through Ellis Island.
“We’re very diversified in South Beach,” he said.
In the meantime, Arkadiy Fridman, 53, and his wife, Ella, who run the center’s day care and after-school programs and art and music classes out of a cramped house on Jefferson Avenue, fear they have lost a $65,000 deposit for the arcade site.
That has disheartened Mr. Fridman, who started the center to see if he “could combine Russian culture with American culture and create something better.” Half the center’s 100 students, he said, are not Russian.
“They can’t understand how people who came from a foreign country 10 or 15 years ago can build successful businesses,” he said of the critics. “But most of us are educated, and we’re hungry to work.”
Some Russians, like Rabbi Shlomo Uzhanksy, detect a chord of jealousy by longer-rooted blue-collar or middle-class families. That strain seemed to emerge in some interviews. Betty Mateo, 58, an East Shore resident who wanted only her maiden name used, said she was angry that the state had given money to a Russian-founded center when “you see them coming out of the center with their expensive cars and their mink coats.” ....
"When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives." Winter is Coming Now this is the Law of the Jungle—as old and as true as the sky; And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die. As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk, the Law runneth forward and back; For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
