The migrants in Bedford-Stuyvesant are mostly from Sudan and West Africa, and they have energized the neighborhood’s Muslim community. They bring youthful crowds to its mosques and businesses, but are also in desperate need of assistance and basic services, including food, long-term housing and work authorization.
Their arrival has made places like Fulton Street into community hubs, as well as a stark illustration of the forces transforming New York City in ways both large and small.
Hassan Mohamed, 61, a Sudanese businessperson who helps pay for a daily iftar held in his backyard, came to America in 1987. He has lived in Bed-Stuy, as the neighborhood is known, for almost 20 years, and said he had five friends who were killed in the neighborhood in the 1980s and ’90s.
“I came here when Bed-Stuy was a very different neighborhood. It was very dangerous back then and you couldn’t walk outside,” he said. “It has become a trendy neighborhood now. You see a lot of different kinds of people.”
On one end of Mohamed’s block, a new Shake Shack sits across the street from Masjid at-Taqwa, a mosque that broke away from the Nation of Islam in 1981. At the other end, a condo tower, its windows studded with Monsteras and other fashionable houseplants, looms over the backyards where migrants break the Ramadhan fast.
In the midst of the fitness clubs and the cafes selling oat milk lattes is a row of immigrant-owned businesses, including Mohamed’s. His shop is the kind of jack-of-all-trades emporium found in many immigrant neighborhoods: tax preparation, translation services, computer repair and internet access, with complimentary life advice doled out by the generation of migrants who came before you.
“It is still an African neighborhood, but now it is also a white neighborhood,” said Galal Ali El Tayeib, 61, Mohamed’s business partner and college friend from Khartoum University.
“But the Africans have held on,” he said with a grin. “We are staying here. And now with the new migrants, it has been unbelievable.”
More than 180,000 migrants have arrived in New York in the past two years, and roughly 65,000 of them live in shelters, city officials have said. The city has struggled to provide food and housing for them all, and earlier this month it announced a new policy limiting adult migrants to stays of just 30 days in city shelters.
That surge of immigration has made Fulton Street busier than ever. A halal restaurant owned by Mohamed is doing brisk business selling traditional African American specialties, West Indian cuisine and dishes from the Middle East and Africa. During Ramadhan it also often provides iftar to the mosque down the street, where as many as 300 people eat for free at sunset.
Migration has also turned Mohamed’s backyard into a well-known hangout spot where men drink tea and smoke hookah while they dwell on the past or plan for the future. But during Ramadhan, all that is preempted by the duty of the fast and the bustle of iftar preparations.
Lotfi Ibrahim, 31, came to the shop on a recent morning to warm up after spending the night sleeping on the subway. He had to leave a shelter the day before because he had exceeded the 30-day limit. By late afternoon, he had been recruited into the iftar effort and sat stirring stew over a propane stove.
“I’ll sleep on the train again tonight,” said Ibrahim, who came to the United States from Sudan in December. “It is scary. The police come and tell me to leave, so I go. And then I come back and sleep again.”
Ibrahim sat with more than a half-dozen other young men as they prepared chickpeas, lentils, chicken stew, fresh bread and a huge pot of aseeda, a Sudanese staple made mainly of flour and water.
As one man stirred the aseeda pot with a giant wooden spoon, three others held it in place. Fathy Rahman Abdullah, 34, who came to New York from Darfur, Sudan, in November, turned to the men and laughed.
“Back home, one woman would make all this food,” said Abdullah, who was appointed iftar kitchen chief by Mohamed. “But here it takes six of us!”
Providing free iftar to the poor is common in Muslim communities, and the practice of zakat, or charitable giving, is one of the foundations of Islam. Mohamed, El Tayeib and others on the block said they began feeding migrants long before Ramadhan began and will continue to do so after it ends April 9.
“People come here in the morning and we give them breakfast — eggs, beans, bread, whatever we have,” El Tayeib said. “We put ourselves in their shoes.”
The task of feeding so many hungry migrants is part of the larger need imposed on the city by the arrival of so many people in such a short period of time, and by what the city government and some local leaders have called an insufficient response from both federal authorities and civil society.
“New York City is doing what it can, but it cannot do everything,” Mohamed said. “The federal government has to do more, big corporations should do more, normal people — everyone should be doing something.” —NYT
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