The closest subway stop to the Airway is a half-hour walk away. “That’s the way the building was - everybody knew everybody,” he said.Īway from home, Rivas longs for the landmarks of her daily routine: the Colombian bakery where she got her café con leche, the local Trade Fair Supermarket two blocks from her apartment. Although the tenants who live at the Airway have tried to check in on each other, Rodriguez said they can’t replicate what they once had. Now the 50-year-old just wants to go back to the home he had fought for after his mother passed away during the pandemic (the rent is a very affordable $157 a month). For a time in the 1990s, he was even the superintendent of the building. As a child, Rodriguez would often drop by Rivas and Rojas’s apartment to play with their son. In their small room, a pair of gregarious sun parakeets flutters freely around the room, while a more timid parakeet couple stays close to the cage. One floor above Rivas and Rojas, Jose Rodriguez and his girlfriend are also among the ten families from 89th Street who were placed in the motel by the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Rivas and Rojas, along with more than 40 other families, are still waiting to move back. The fire, sparked by an overheated power strip, injured 21 tenants and left nearly 500 without homes. Since an eight-alarm fire destroyed a section of their six-story building on 89th Street and 34th Avenue in Jackson Heights last April, Rivas and Rojas have been unable to return to the three-bedroom apartment they lived in for 49 years. This is not how they pictured they would be spending their retirement years. Rojas rolls up his pants to show rows of bedbug bites. As the two talk, they keep scratching their legs and arms. Rivas, who uses a walker, constantly bumps into it as she inches around the bed.
In one corner, next to the television, the couple has set up a makeshift kitchen with a hot plate. Inside the motel room where 76-year-old Patricia Rivas and her 87-year-old husband, Antonio Rojas, have spent the past year, Rivas points at mold growing on the ceiling. Less than a mile from La Guardia Airport, on a stretch of Astoria Boulevard dotted with auto-repair shops, gas stations, and fast-food chains such as Popeyes, stale cigarette smoke permeates the hallways of the Airway Inn, and the carpets are blanketed in grime. Antonio Rojas looks over his makeshift kitchen at the Airway Inn.
0 kommentar(er)
