“We started looking in Astoria, and also Greenpoint,” Ms. Weisman said, but could not afford the mixed-use buildings they saw there. What they found in Ridgewood “hit the mark.” The 3,800-square-foot property is near restaurants and a supermarket; the ground level is zoned for commercial use, and there are two floors above, one for each couple.
They paid $1.5 million last November, plus unforeseen thousands more to replace the roof and a collapsed pipe in the basement, where sewage was backing up. Ms. Weisman and Mr. Puglisi, who sold their condo in Douglaston, N.Y., still have to update the bathrooms in their four-bedroom unit before they can move in. But Ms. Weisman has no regrets. Their previous home was a studio.
“Ridgewood is like a whirlpool; it’s always changing,” said Herbert Morscher, a second-generation owner of Morscher’s Pork Store on Catalpa Avenue, one of the few butchers remaining in a neighborhood where there used to be dozens.
Mr. Morscher, 56, is descended from German-speaking residents of Gottschee, a region settled in the Middle Ages in what is now Slovenia. His forebears immigrated to Ridgewood in the 1950s, when it was heavily German and had a solid Gottscheer community.
He has seen them come and go, or come and stay: Austrians, Italians, Rumanians, Serbs, Poles, Mexicans, Ecuadorians, Egyptians, Puerto Ricans, South Asians. “With the young artists and college grads, they like to patronize the local guy; I respect that a lot,” he said. “They love our bacon.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
