NYT on North Riverdale

NYT on the demographic shift in the NYC neighborhood of North Riverdale:

On the east side of the street, North Riverdale seems as solidly Irish Catholic as it has for generations.

At Mary-Anne’s Irish Gift Shop, displays include Waterford crystal figurines, child-size kilts and journals embossed with Celtic knots. At the Riverdale Steak House next door, posters promote a live televised viewing of the Dublin-versus-Tyrone soccer match. Up the block, students trot through the corridors at St. Margaret of Cortona School, which still occupies part of a 1911 stone building and recalls a time when the area was simply known as St. Margaret Parish.

But on the other side of Riverdale Avenue, there are unmistakable signs of change. It is a story echoed often in the city: the quiet rustle in an entrenched neighborhood when a newer community arrives.

In North Riverdale, the turning point is often traced to the opening of a shiny, seven-story Orthodox Jewish academy called SAR High School in 2003. Since then, nearly every eating establishment at the Skyview shopping mall next to the school, including a delicatessen, a pizzeria and a sushi restaurant, has become strictly kosher. Last year, Noah’s Kosher Supermarket opened in a vacant corner of the mall, stocked with cheese from England and delicacies from Israel. In December, a kosher Dunkin’ Donuts arrived.

Rabbi Nachman Cohen of Young Israel Ohab Zedek, North Riverdale’s only Orthodox synagogue, said he had seen an upsurge in membership in the last 18 months, which he attributed to the influx of kosher restaurants.

“That’s a sign of vibrancy, when you see kosher establishments opening up,” Rabbi Cohen said. “It’s a major impetus.”

Although the rest of Riverdale has long had a sizable Orthodox population, the influx of Orthodox Jews in North Riverdale is new. In the eyes of some old-timers, the shift represents both the natural flux of a neighborhood and a stark change.

Mary-Anne Connaughton, the owner of the Irish gift store, has seen a growing number of Jewish customers eager to buy her Nicholas Mosse pottery from Kilkenny and wool sweaters from Donegal.

In 2003, Danny Kordova, who has owned the Skyview Delicatessen for 25 years, upgraded his restaurant to glatt kosher, the highest level of kosher stringency. The change required that he buy new dishes and more expensive meat, and pay for daily rabbinical supervision. But business has increased since he made the change, he said, with the deli both retaining its regulars and attracting new customers.

“You don’t have to be Jewish to eat a glatt kosher frankfurter,” Mr. Kordova said as he rang up a customer’s half-pound of smoked turkey.

In some quarters, however, the changes haven’t mattered as much. One such location is the Riverdale Greentree restaurant, where a row of gray-haired men were quietly drinking beer at the bar on a recent afternoon.

“There’s a new demographic, so to speak,” said Danny Green, a retired firefighter keeping an eye on a televised horse race at the bar. “The community wasn’t appraised of what was going on, but basically, it’s live and let live.”

As he was speaking, the high school was just letting out, and suddenly the street was filled with teenage boys wearing knitted yarmulkes atop their floppy hair.

Neighborhoods change. It's been happening since time immemorial (and the grumbling it can elicit from members of the demographic getting outnumbered has likely been going on since time immemorial as well). The demographics of a neighborhood can shift in what seems to be a very short time frame. We've seen it here in the Five Towns, where there has been a large influx of Orthodox residents, trending to a more right-wing bent. Many times, both here in the Five Towns and in North Riverdale, the borders of an existing Orthodox neighborhood naturally expand due to increased demand for real estate but a lack of supply. Sometimes a demographic seems to abandon a community almost en masse as they begin to feel outnumbered.

Any front-line reports from other neighborhoods that have seen a recent similar demographic shift?