Reply to What’s the best way you could describe growing up on Staten Island or Long Island to me?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Gatsby was new money.

And there is some money on SI.  New money, living in gaudy AF houses. It's mostly blue collar though.  [/quote]

My point is that at this point, the people that book was based on are old money. [/quote]

Immigrants and those in the first and sometimes second generation like to show off a bit and the houses can get a little out of hand, remember the house in my big fat Greek wedding that looked like the Parthenon in the front but it was clearly a high ranch in the back?  Drive around Howard Beach and you’ll see a lot of gold plated fu dogs on front steps even though the occupants are 100% Sicilian.

They didn’t call the north shore the gold coast for nothing, from great neck to Lloyd Harbor there were something like 600 mansions constructed in the early 1900s, most of them have been demolished and subdivided but there is still some deep old pockets there. 
[/quote]

That’s very specific to cultural background.  A house like that might belong to an Italian or Greek family.  An Irish family would never have an ostentatious front of the house or decor.   [/quote]

Did you see the Howard Beach reference? It was sort of a joke because I’ll admit Italians (my people) get out of hand with their decorations but the demographic has shifted and its probably more than 30% Asian now, 40 years ago it was nothing but Italians, Portuguese and a little Irish.  
Flushing has gone from a pretty healthy mix of everyone from everywhere but now the majority of the storefront signs along northern Boulevard don’t even have an English subtitle, it’s all Korean.

Since New York is so compact the island is like a wealth conveyor belt. It’s really cool to see the progression towards the suburbs and it’s been especially interesting to see how different cultures do it. The American experience for Asians and Europeans is really similar, you can watch the Asians do it now in real time, the grandparents came over and sometimes lived in squalor, worked their asses off in some cramped place in Brooklyn, made a little money and moved a little east to get some breathing room, their kids work their asses off in school/work then move a little further east to get even more breathing room, over and over again as their family moves up the ladder they move further away from the city. So many of my friends still had grandparents that lived in fourth floor walk ups in Brooklyn but they grow up 50 miles away in the suburbs of Long Island. [/quote]

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