Month: December 2010

Underneath the grape arbor on the back patio, Garo Apanian opens his candy-apple-red laptop. “Let me show you the apartment where I was born,” he says. “It’s a beautiful building.” As he taps into Google Maps, Nike, his 9-year-old cat, leaves her chair and pads across the glass-top table to look over his shoulder. The image that appears is of a six-story, nine-family building in Beirut, Lebanon. “My family lived on the first floor,” he says. “My brother…

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When Irina Kom parts the exotic pink and gold silk curtain to reveal her living room-cum-bedroom-cum-dance studio, the incense refreshes the senses like a walk in a spring shower. In the corner, there’s an open suitcase filled with glittering costumes spilling out of its sides. Its image is captured in the trio of floor-to-ceiling mirrors that are the backdrop for a small Buddhist shrine showcasing a photo of Irina’s grandmother who passed with the new year. Prominently displayed on the…

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Lemme tell ya somethin’: Agatino “Tony” Manganaro, who came to New York from Sicily with a pregnant wife and only $25 in his pocket, didn’t get where he is by resting. He worked — his brawn and his brains. A thin, wiry man who wears a thick gold chain around his neck, Tony, who technically retired two years ago, doesn’t like to sit around; he has enough energy to power a battalion of battery bunnies. “Lemme tell ya somethin’,” he says. “I…

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Jules Corkery trudges up the marble stairs hauling a white plastic bucket of compost that’s almost as big as she is. “Welcome to the farm,” she says as she opens the double deadbolt door to her dollhouse of an apartment facing the Astoria Park tennis courts. She hands the bucket off to Robert McMinn, her significant other, as Esmeralda, Penni and Dearie crowd around her feet. “Oh! There’s some poop,” she says as she excitedly scoops the shiny black pearls into…

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