Brighton Beach – a haven for the Russian-speaking diaspora
For tourists, a city tour can become a brief overview journey through all world cultures. It is best to start it at the Ellis Island Museum, located not far from the Statue of Liberty. The buildings, through whose doors the stream of immigrants flowed from 1898 to 1924, were preserved to perpetuate the sometimes heartbreaking stories of those who rushed to the New World for a better life.
An overview of the garden of cultures can be done in the New York subway. During a 20-minute trip through Queens, for example, you will be transported from the very heart of 'Little Athens' in Astoria through 'Little Bogota' in Jackson Heights to the bustling hive of Asians – Indians, Pakistanis, Indonesians, and Chinese in Flushing.
Taking a similar trip through Brooklyn, you will go from Hasidic and West Indian enclaves in Crown Heights and Stuyvesant-Bedford to Russian Jews in Brighton Beach, which locals call 'Little Odessa'. In the Bronx and Manhattan, you will encounter Cubans and Dominicans in Washington Heights, Hungarians, Czechs, and Germans in Yorkville and the Upper East Side, and find yourself in 'Little India' in Kips Bay.
It is clear that in the city's ethnic melting pot, quite peculiar combinations have emerged: Jews live side by side with Puerto Ricans in the Lower East Side, Colombians and Koreans have to coexist with each other in Flushing, Italians and Chinese occupy the same streets in Manhattan.
Foreigners settling in these areas will hardly find themselves in the thick of real America, which is why, probably, the city still attracts immigrants from all over the world. Despite the difficulties of life (overcrowding, high cost of living, very average living conditions, etc.), the soul is always comforted by the thought that neighbors share your unenviable fate.
In a city of immigrants, no one feels like an outsider. You can always find many people who are in exactly the same situation, even if they arrived from another continent and speak a language unfamiliar to you. The irony of New York life is that an American tourist is more likely to stand out as a stranger in the crowd than a newly settled immigrant. And this, in turn, is a sure sign of New York's detachment from '100% America'.
Another feature that attracts immigrants to New York is that the city still remains the 'land of unlimited opportunities'. The American dream is still alive here, and immigrants strive with all their might to reach dizzying heights in life. It has become a truism to say that as soon as a group of newcomers establishes itself in some line of business, other compatriots follow. For example, Koreans dominate the grocery trade, Chinese have taken over the textile industry, Greeks have taken possession of nearly all coffee shops, and Latin American wine cellars have become almost a symbol of New York.
All stereotypes, of course, are only partly true, because they do not take into account exceptions – people with atypical destinies – and assert that all immigrants start their careers from the lowest socio-economic rung. The Japanese specialists, Hong Kong businessmen, and energetic 'Euro-moguls' from France, Italy, and Germany who once flooded into New York hardly fit the image of immigrants from the beginning of the last century who fled to America to 'breathe the air of freedom'. Most of them come to New York to protect their capital from unfavorable economic and political climates, not to mention the large profits they can gain from investing in the American economy. In the end, it doesn't really matter what drives them here. The main thing is that they are here, and their number grows every year.
Many consider New York to be the least American city in the country, perhaps because the effect of the so-called melting pot – the blending of different cultures and customs into a peculiar American hybrid – has not taken such visible forms in this city as in other American cities. New York immigrants do not melt into a homogeneous cultural 'puree'; they carefully preserve their national identity and language, creating social institutions within their ethnic communities.