Author: ruhlwrite

It’s a windy day, and the four flags of Casa Galicia are flapping like a flock of geese flying south for the winter. The stately wedding-cake white building on 31st Avenue, wedged between a burger joint and a supermarket crowned by barbed wire, looks like a foreign embassy. Casa Galicia is a commanding presence on 31st Avenue. Inside the private club, where old-timers from the old country play cards and dominoes on square marble-topped tables, President Marcos Roel is standing in the bar watching…

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Not everybody who gets a second chance wants it or takes it. Paco Soto was pretty much set in his ways when the opportunity was thrust upon him, but he didn’t hesitate to move into the driver’s seat and speed into the fast lane. Paco is the founder of Lion Transportation. That’s what saved him. For nearly a quarter century, he had been a sales manager for a Manhattan car and limo service. He thought he had it all — an interesting career, a wonderful wife, a studious son and…

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Rain. That’s what pelted Marco Pereira’s boyhood brain, drop by drop by drop time after time, until it finally sank in. Marco’s theory turns everything upside down. “It was pouring so hard that I couldn’t go outside our house,” says Marco, who grew up in Santos, Brazil, Pelé’s playing field. “The only thing I could do was watch the rippling waves rising in the mini lakes. They had a hypnotic effect. I didn’t know it at the time, but the waves…

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Nine a.m. comes mighty early when you didn’t go to bed until 3 in the morning. That’s why Pedro Gonzalez is hiding behind the brim of his black fedora. You’ll see Pedro at The Furniture Market and Waltz-Astoria. This staying up until all hours is starting to become a habit, but that’s what happens when you do double duty. As soon as the sun comes up, Pedro squints and takes over as manager of The Furniture Market, the gigantic two-level secondhand shop that for nearly two…

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She paints. She writes. She welds. She wears men’s Tony Lama cowboy boots and dangly turquoise earrings that fly through her long black hair when the wind blows. Lisa Zilker loves math, science, literature and getting her sturdy hands dirty down to her short, unpolished nails. Lisa Zilker paints trees, nudes and geometrics. “There is nothing I don’t do,” she says. “I guess you could say I’m a modern-day Renaissance woman.” But wait. Lisa whips out her iPhone,…

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