The Maria Callas connection to Astoria

 

Before she was born, her parents moved from Greece to Astoria. 

Believe It. 

The Kalogeropoulos family’s first home was a three-room apartment in Astoria, Queens, with a view across Hell Gate to the awesome skyscrapers of Manhattan. There was a small park a few streets away with a playground for Jackie. At this time the foreign born and their children accounted for three-fourths of the city’s residents. Groups generally tended to live in close proximity instead of taking the individual plunge into American life. But these emigrant sections gradually disintegrated, spreading to other sections as the more ambitious members bettered their circumstances, albeit among another enclave of their own extraction. In 1923 there were about 25,000 Greeks in New York City. Less than one-tenth of them lived in this area of Queens (originally home to Italian immigrants), which was a blue-collar workers’ community, a level up from the section where Greeks without English skills or steady wages usually made their home upon arrival in America, but not the area where the well-to-do Greeks were by now ensconced. Litza, both arrogant and humiliated, was scornful of her working-class neighbours and Jackie was not allowed to use the playground the area boasted as her mother did not want her to associate with children of ‘a lower class’.