Goodbye New York City

Maria, our favorite "Mama," was proud to be a strong Italian, Catholic, mother of three, and a full-time grandmother. She loved to yell at everyone in Italian, and kept an eye on all of us! She smiled for me after a torrential downpour flooded our backyards. Soaking wet, she swept her water down a drain and didn't want help from anyone. She was quite a character!

It's fair to say we left a big chunk of our hearts in NYC. It's the craziest place we will probably ever live! We could write a book about all of the people who lived around us during our 18 month stay on Steinway Street. Here's our condensed version.

We started out with Zeina, a Greek girl and her boyfriend downstairs. She had a great set of pipes and would sing at all hours. They also liked to smoke and it smelled awful in our house. We would keep the windows open for "fresh air" and when Jimmy and Eva came one evening they told us it was POT. We were literally tripping for the first six months of our mission. Thank heavens she was accepted to a graduate program at Cornell!

Upstairs we had two Israeli brothers, Eric and Michael, nice students who had to return to Israel late Spring. They sub lent their apartment to two college coeds who invited ten of their friends to join them! After about 5 weeks, our landlord, who lived in New Jersey, got reports from his son-in-law, (who took care of the garbage) that there were loads of beer bottles in the cans each week. When Sal heard how many were living on the third floor, he quickly evicted them! Two nice young men from Turkey moved in. They told us they were here to learn English. We told them about free English classes being taught at our church. We couldn't imagine how they could live in a place, paying $1650.00 a month for rent plus utilities and not have jobs. We soon found out they were working upstairs all night and won't share details, but they were also evicted.

Downstairs a young couple from Albania joined us. Ariola worked in a cosmetic factory and Gentian was a plumber. They left their home and families in Albania to pursue their own mission of obtaining infertility help in New York. We had lots of opportunities to help them as they had very little monetarily and struggled with great language barriers. Amazingly we had no missionaries in our mission who spoke Albanian. (We used our computer to do a lot of translation work with this couple and our students on our mission). We gave them Albanian Book of Mormons along with our testimonies. By the time we left they had learned enough English that we were able to communicate fairly well and the Astoria Elders were planning to teach them the gospel.

Last Fall, Tod from Utah, and Claudia from Mexico moved in. Tod was finishing medical school and Claudia also was working to learn English and obtain papers so she could work. We were able to teach Claudia and she helped with a Zone Conference dinner and enjoyed visiting with so many young elders who spoke Spanish. They were planning to move to Texas just a few weeks after we left.

We will keep in touch with both of these couples and we will miss them. We were so thankful we had the opportunity to share the gospel with these neighbors. Most all who lived around us were not interested. When we asked if we could visit them in their homes we were told we were "overstepping our bounds."


There are just a few more things about NY we never want to forget. Our apartment was spacious we were told and amazingly clean, although the carpet was awful. If we forgot to close the door to our bathroom, our toilet greeted our guests, all for $2,000.00 a month! (This was my final photo on Steinway Street!)

At 4:00 AM on a Sunday morning a drunk ran into a car parked in front of our house. He was not hurt, but he passed out and had to be hauled to jail in this ambulance. A woman was also hit in front of our house. There was always something going on out there! We got used to a continual scream of sirens, firetrucks, ambulances, and police cars on Steinway, a major street in Astoria. No question, it is "the city that never sleeps!"

Non-stop double parking goes on everywhere in the city. These two guys were doing business in the street for about 30 minutes...typical and picture worthy, but don't ever turn right on a red light or block a box. You'll get zapped...oh no, not a little, a lot! Just ask Elder Hess from Malad.

U-turns in the middle of the street, all in a days work! We would often see a driver pull out from a parking place and block all lanes of traffic, backing up two or three times U-turning. My companion was heroic as he got around the city each day. I can't count the number of accidents he avoided keeping us alive and our Malibu dent free. The Lord blesses His missionaries who serve through out the world, but we experienced it and heard about it over and over from NYNYS missionaries. On our last day while the mission van was parked in our driveway for one last load, someone did a u-turn, (always to nab a parking place) and dented our door. We were almost unscathed...and paid $200.00 a month to park our car off the street.

Birds, flowers, squirrels and the adorable cat that thought he was ours in our cozy backyard that was a haven for us.

It was time! We cleaned and packed and pulled away from 21-52 Steinway Street #2, June 30th, glad to be heading back to our home and family. We also were so sad to leave so many people we loved. We will always cherish the experiences we had and will be grateful that we were able to serve the Lord here. We wouldn't trade it all for the world.

We will always love New York!