Walking Tour: Brighton Beach (with sidetrips to Manhattan Beach, Sheepshead Bay and Gravesend)

Brighton Beach has a long history, but its status as Little Odessa dates from just the 1970s. The relaxation of emigration laws by the Soviet Union saw around 30,000 Russian-speaking Jews settle here and they in turn attracted more Russian-speakers (though perhaps not so many ethnic Russians) after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Today, the neighborhood is one of the most authentically “foreign” in the city.

Take the Q train to Ocean Parkway, and you're at the start of Brighton Beach Avenue. There are not a lot of cultural activities in the neighborhood for the casual visitor – no museums, for example. But the key draw is definitely the vibrant street life, and the exoticness factor from hearing Russian being spoken all around you. Rather than rush from place to place, your best bet really is to just walk along the avenue and take it all in.

Brighton Beach Avenue is home to a huge number of Russian businesses. The first ones truly interesting for the casual visitor are certainly St. Petersburg Books (230 Brighton Beach Avenue) and M&I International Foods (249 Brighton Beach Avenue), and, a bit further down, Russian DVD (269 Brighton Beach Avenue). All are great spots for souvenirs and unique gifts.

Nearby is the famous supper club National (273 Brighton Beach Avenue), but for something a bit more casual try Varenichnaya (3086 Brighton 2nd Street), just around the corner.

You will certainly not want for food in Brighton Beach. Highlights further down Brighton Beach Avenue are Primorski (282 Brighton Beach Avenue), Ocean View Café (290 Brighton Beach Avenue) and Cafe Arbat (306 Brighton Beach Avenue).

At Brighton 4th Street, you can turn right and walk out to the boardwalk where there are a few Russian restaurants with outdoor seating with views of the ocean. Check out Tatiana Grill (Boardwalk at Brighton 4th Street) or Volna Restaurant (3145 Brighton Fourth Street).

Other restaurants celebrate the cuisines of other groups from the former Soviet Union, particularly Georgians, and even Moldovans – Spoon (615 Brighton Beach Avenue) bills itself as the only Moldovan restaurant in the city.

Fed and with shopping bags in hand, you can now head back to the subway station, or go a bit farther afield:

To take a peek at Manhattan Beach, continue along Brighton Beach Avenue, cross Corbin Place and continue along Oriental Boulevard. At the corner of West End Avenue is a branch of Anyway Cafe (111 Oriental Blvd. (at West End Ave), and between Oriental and Hampton on West End is Ukrainian Entertainment (132 West End Ave. Walk up to Hampton and turn left onto Corbin Place, where nearby you'll find Babi Yar Triangle, a small park with memorials to victims of the Holocaust as well as the Jasenovac World War II concentration camp in Croatia.

And if you're up for something a bit more adventurous try the border area between Sheepshead Bay and Gravesend. The Q will get you to Gravesend Neck Road station, and right there is another branch of

Anyway Cafe (1602 Gravesend Neck Road). Not far, at the intersection of Gravesend Neck Road and Sheepshead Bay Road, is a true cultural experience: the Russian Baths of NY (1200 Gravesend Neck Road), with a Soviet hockey theme and a small restaurant inside.

A little further away, at the intersection of Coney Island Avenue and Avenue X is the supper club Rasputin (2670 Coney Island Avenue at Avenue X) to cap off your evening with dinner and a show!

Little Odessa on Gridskipper

The kids over at Gridskipper put up a useful map and guide to Brighton Beach - New York's Little Odessa - this week. Most of the sea-side neighborhood's 350,000 residents are from the former Soviet Union, and virtually all of the local shops and restaurants cater to the community.

Among the sites featured are the grocery store M&I International Foods (249 Brighton Beach Avenue), supper clubs National (273 Brighton Beach Avenue) and Rasputin (2670 Coney Island Avenue), the massive St. Petersburg Book Store (230 Brighton Beach Avenue) and a few restaurants.

The major find, however, is Gambrinus Bar (3100 Ocean Parkway). Though all of Brighton Beach carries the tag "Little Odessa," this is the real deal: it is modelled after an actual bar in Odessa with the same name. Among its other draws, it features a German-style beer hall just off the boardwalk, with the requisite array of beers.

Promenading Brighton Beach

This past Sunday, the New York Times explored the former-Soviet tradition of the evening promenade as it has been transported to Brighton Beach, in Paul Berger's "The Promenade, Soviet Style."

The writer hit the boardwalk on a Sunday afternoon and found a scene full of Russian types:

"The benches are typically filled by old women armed with multicolored umbrellas, which they use to protect themselves from the sun. In Russian towns, these babushkas, as they are known, often gather on seats outside apartment buildings, but on the boardwalk they are at center stage. The crowd they survey almost always includes young men shaped like battering rams, with impossibly square heads and haircuts to match. A congregation of wiry, suntanned biznesmeni, dressed in black, is seldom far away, clinching deals on cellphones."

Promenading is a tradition in most cities of the former Soviet Union, if for no other reason that it provides something to do that does not cost money. Berger attributes the continuance of the tradition in Brighton Beach to the same reason, though points out that a number of Russian restaurants (Tatiana, Volna, etc.) are found all along the boardwalk.

Photo: Chang W. Lee for The New York Times

Brooklyn's Belarus II

A couple weeks ago, we got an email asking after Belarusian-owned restaurants or restaurants serving Belarusian food, and we were stumped. Last Thursday, however, the kids over at Gothamist came to the rescue with their discovery of Belarus II (495-497 Neptune Avenue, Coney Island/Brighton Beach, Brooklyn), a real live Belarusian deli!

The store is three blocks from the boardwalk, open 24 hours, and offers freshly-made ethnic delicacies such as potatoe pancakes and pickles.

Slavic Sheepshead Bay

Earlier this week, Forgotten NY spotlighted Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, home to a couple of thought-provoking Slavic sites.


First up, check out Babi Yar Triangle (Corbin Place and Brighton 15th Street), a park named after a 1941 pogrom led by Nazi Einsatzgruppe soldiers and Ukrainan militiamen at Babi Yar, near Kyiv. Nearly 34,000 Jews were killed in just two days, and over the course of the 778 days of Nazi rule in Ukraine a ravine in Babi Yar became the final resting place for over 100,000 people - Jews, Roma, handicapped people, Soviet POWs homosexuals and others. This park was dedicated in 1989.


Sheepshead Bay is also home to the only Holocaust memorial park in New York City, dedicated in 1985.

The monument in the park also commemorates the mass killings at Jasenovac, a concentration camp run by the Croatian Ustase from 1941 to 1945. Hundreds of thousands of Serbs, as well as Jews, Roma, anti-fascists and others were put to death there, and Jasenovac has been a wedge between the Serbs and Croats ever since.
The neighborhood is also home to the Bethel Russian Baptist Fellowship (2310 Voorhies Avenue), and the (gay?) bar Secrets (1321 Avenue Z between East 13th & East 14th Streets). And in nearby Gravesend Neck you'll find the Russian restaurants Elrisha (2364 McDonald Ave between Gravesend Neck Road & Villa) and Anyway Cafe (1602 Gravesend Neck Road), as well as the Russian Baths of NY (1200 Gravesend Neck Road, Gravesend Neck).

Smoking in Brighton Beach

This past Sunday, the (fantastic) City section of The New York Times delved into the smoking habits of the Russians in Brighton Beach (Urban Tactics: Marlboro Men).

While New York has had a ban on smoking in bars and restaurants for a couple years now, the ban has had a hard time among Russian restaurants in Brighton Beach, perhaps because “As the journalist Alexander Grant wrote in Novoye Russkoye Slovo, the city's main Russian-language daily, in 2003, when the city's antismoking law went into effect, cigarette smoke is to the Russian restaurant as steam is to the steam bath.”

Statistics apparently put the number of Russian-American smokers at 30 percent within New York City, above the city average of 18 percent. The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is trying to bring this figure down, but local Russians don’t seem to be budging.

Conditioned by years of half-baked self-improvement campaigns in the Soviet Union, former Soviets’ here still see such efforts on the part of government agencies with cynical eyes. “But encouraging Russians to stop smoking is like weaning Americans off baseball…,” The Times concludes.

(Photo: Brighton Beach Avenue billboard by Angela Jimenez for The New York Times)

Runglish

Back in May, Russian Bazaar took a look at the Russian spoken in Brighton Beach heavily mixed with English, called Runglish or Runglisky (The inevitable birth of Runlgish – When Russian and English merge). The New York Times folowed up in June with Brighton Beach's Runglish-Speaking Immigrants.

Runglish is essentially Russian with a large number of words replaced with Russified English ones. Words for foods rare in Russia but common here are among the most widespread English bits in the Runglish lexicon. So are terms related to technological advances made after the immigrants left their homeland.

Russian Bazaar rightly points out that Runglish is not just taking place in Brighton Beach among the immigrants in America - it is also widespread among Moscow media who use Russified English words like manazher (managers), metroseksualy (metrosexuals), khipstery (hipsters), rekruting (recruiting) and benefiti (benefits).

The Times article also points out that certain Russian words have entered the English language, such as apparatchik, intelligentsia, commissar and samovar. The English influence on Russian among recent immigrants, however, is clearly greater.

Short Runglish lexicon:

Appointments: Appointmyenti
Cross-Bronx Expressway: Cress Bonx Exprezvey
Driving Upstate on the Highways: Draivuyem v Apsteit po Haiveyam
Hamburgers: Hyam-boorgoors
Ice Cream: Ize Cream
Iced Coffee: Ized Cyawfeh
Know-How: Nou-Hau
Potatoes: Potyaytoaz
Sim Cards: Syim Karti
Sliced Cheese: Slaysayushiy Chiz
Turkey: Tyurki

(Photo from http://www.russnet.org/why/p8.html)

Brighton Beach

The Russian community in Brighton Beach is primarily a Russian Jewish commmunity. It began forming in the 1970s as the Soviet Union began allowing Jews to emigrate; other ethnic groups were more restricted. A second wave of immigration came with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, but quickly petered out as new immigrants avoided the neighborhood for less traditional places.

An 8 October 2003 article from the New York Times, To Young, a Russian Enclave Is Too Much the Old Country, describes the culture shock felt by recent immigrants from post-Soviet Moscow. Since Brighton Beach never underwent the massive Capitalist transformation Moscow did in the 1990s, recent immigrants find themselves standing in the middle of an historical anachronism. Many choose to settle outside of the area, in Bensonhurst or suburban New Jersey.

A quote from Novoye Russkoye Slovo journalist Alexander Grant from the New York Times article sums it up: "It's like an amusement park. "People go there to look but not live. It reminds them of their background. New people who come from today's Moscow — everything is done with a grand flourish there. They see this as provincial."

Perhaps this will be the reason for the Russian enclave's eventual disappearance. Today, new immigrant groups are settling in Brighton Beach, including those from Asia, the Middle East and Central America. However other new immigrant groups who do speak Russian are also coming - just not from Brighton Beach's traditional hohme territories in Belarus, Ukraine and western Russia, rather from the former Soviet Central Asian republics and the Caucusus.

Nevertheless, the Russian patina of the neighborhood remains popular with visitors - regardless of whether they speak Russian. The 23-28 June 2005 issue of Time Out New York featured Brighton Beach on the cover and a massive overview of the area, Moscow on the Boardwalk.

It starts out with a bit of geography: Brighton Beach is sandwiched in between Coney Island and Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn, and is bordered by the ocean and the Belt Parkway. The main artery is Brighton Beach Avenue.

Here's a sampling of the listings Time Out provides:

Shopping.

• St. Petersburg Books (230 Brighton Beach Ave between Brighton 2nd and 3rd Sts, 718-368-4128)
• Kalinka gift shop (402 Brighton Beach Ave between Brighton 4th and 5th Sts, 718-743-4546)
• M&I International Foods (249 Brighton Beach Ave between Brighton 2nd and 3rd Sts, 718-615-1011)

Restaurants.

• Cafe Glechik (Ukrainian; 3159 Coney Island Ave between Brighton Beach and Oceanview Aves, 718-616-0494)
• Cafe Shish-Kebab (Russian/Caucasian; 414 Brighton Beach Ave between Brighton 4th and 5th Sts, 718-368-0966)
• Eastern Feast (Russian/Caucasian; 1003 Brighton Beach Ave at Coney Island Ave, 718-934-9608)
• Mimino (Georgian; 1111 Brighton Beach Ave between Brighton 13th and 14th Sts, 718-934-2600)
• Ocea'n View Cafe (Russian; 290 Brighton Beach Ave at Brighton 3rd St, 718-332-1900)
• Tatiana Grill (American/Russian; Boardwalk at Brighton 4th St, 718-646-7630)
• Varenichnaya (Russian; 3086 Brighton 2nd St between Brighton Beach Ave and Bridgewater Court, 718-332-9797)

Supper Clubs.

• National (273 Brighton Beach Ave at Brighton 2nd St, 718-646-1225)
• Rasputin (2670 Coney Island Ave at Ave X, 718-332-8111)
• Tatiana (3152 Brighton 6th St at the Boardwalk, 718-891-5151)
• Odessa (1113 Brighton Beach Ave between Brighton 14th St and Seacoast Terr, 718-332-3223)
• Atlantic Oceana (1029 Brighton Beach Ave between Brighton 11th and 12th Sts, 718-743-1515)

Also check out Close up on Brighton Beach in the Village Voice, and for more sociological information, Survey of the Use of Russian Language in the Brighton Beach Area of Brooklyn by Yevgeniy Palatnik and Pat DeAngelis.