Photos by ELIZABETH A. MUNDSCHENK Muniba Ferhatovic, 12, center, with her next-door neighbors Bachyen Nguyen, 6, left, and Bachngoc Nguyen, 5. The Nguyens and Ferhatovic live on Mary Street and say they play together all the time.

Bosnians build lives where Italians, Irish once lived, dreamed

By LINDSAY BELLER
Observer-Dispatch

When Mina and Suljo Kasumovic bought their house at 762 Mary St., they worked hard to make it feel like the home they left behind in Bosnia.

Within several months, they added fresh paint, colorful flowers and plush carpeting. They draped doorways and shelves in decorative white lace. Pictures of loved ones went up on the walls, including some who never made it out of Bosnia alive.

In December 2002, the Kasumovics joined 10 other Bosnian homeowners on the 34-house stretch of Mary Street’s 700 block. Within the confines of Kossuth Avenue and Albany Street, the couple finally found a place to call home. It is their fourth since resettling in Utica, but they plan to stay for good. “They don’t want to go anywhere until they die,” translates their granddaughter Sejla Cufurovic, 9.

The lineage of their home — and of most others on the block — suggests that their Italian and Irish predecessors had similar intentions. Many crossed oceans and settled permanently on Mary Street, where they brought a strong work ethic, close familial bonds and fierce pride in their homes.

In a sign of history repeating itself, the Kasumovics belong to a growing ethnic community that has put down roots and transformed the demographics and appearance of East Utica.

“They remind me of the old Italians,” says Kelly Mercurio-Bianco, 37, who grew up at 758 Mary St. and now rents from a Bosnian family across the street. “They take care of their property and care about how things look. They make it look like things did when I was a kid.”

Not much has changed since then. And yet, everything is different. Welcome to Mary Street.

Vacant homes at issue

Sejla and her cousins often play in the front yard when they visit their grandparents. But Mina and Suljo worry about the dangers posed by the vacant home next door.

The vacant house, one of two on this block, has peeling paint and loose wiring. The wood porch rots while the ceilings of the vermin-infested building may collapse at any time, according to codes violations issued by the city’s Department of Codes Enforcement.

As grandparents, they see the house as a hazard. And as homeowners, they see it as an eyesore. The rundown property stands out from the other two-story homes on the block, which have tidy vinyl, aluminum or wood siding and manicured lawns.

Despite its condition, the home provides a link to the past of Mary Street. While most homes went up around 1920, neighbors say this was the carriage house for one of the earliest 19th century houses built on the block.

“I remember seeing pictures of the house,” says lifelong Mary Street resident Kevin Talerico, 51, from his regular perch across the street. “There was nothing but farmland all around.”

Neighborhood rich in history

This means the house witnessed the arrival of more than two-dozen, mostly Irish families to Mary Street in the 1890s. The men worked as letter carriers, firemen and spinners. Their families attended St. Agnes Church, established in 1887, down the block on the corner of Kossuth Avenue and Blandina Street.

The Italians started moving to East Utica after the turn of the century. During the next three decades, more than 25 Italian immigrant families began to set up their homesteads in mostly two-family homes they shared with relatives. More families came in later decades.

They worked as laborers, steamfitters and fruit peddlers. Some had jobs at the textile mills on Broad Street while others started mom-and-pop businesses, like Frank Sportelli’s grocery store at the corner of Mary Street and Kossuth Avenue.

As the Italians settled in, the street bloomed with plum, pear, apple and cherry trees. They built grape arbors and made wine in their basements. Street vendors peddled milk, ice and vegetables down the street. Parents felt safe enough to sleep with their doors unlocked and allow their children to play hopscotch and kick the can in the streets.

Joann Longo, a Realtor who grew up at 769 Mary St., says the parents on the block worked to give their children a better life.

“They made it better for their kids to have homes in a better neighborhood,” she says. Many of the children married and moved to suburbs like New Hartford and Whitesboro, or to other cities altogether. When their parents died or moved in the 1980s and 1990s, they started selling their family homesteads.

“The younger generation wanted a two-car garage,” says Lucretia Hunt, who chairs the East Utica Neighborhood Association and is a lifelong East Utica resident. “Our generation didn’t want it, and it went to seed.”

Neglect breeds crime

The neighborhood watchdog group was formed in the early 1990s to fight the increasing deterioration of East Utica, which had fallen victim to absentee landlords, drugs and arson. The entire city faced a declining population and an increased economic disparity.

From 1950 to 1996, the city’s population shrunk nearly 40 percent, from 101,531 to 61,368 people, as Griffiss Air Force Base and several manufacturing companies closed. The toll these changes take can be seen in areas such as Mary Street. “We formed because of survival,” Hunt says. “We had a lot of transients, garbage, violations of codes, gangs. Crime had increased all over the city because there was no nucleus there.”

The plight, however, hardly touched this particular stretch of Mary Street, she says.

“Mary Street had a pretty name,” she says. “It was a safe name.”

Hunt saw the neighborhood begin to improve when the Bosnians started moving to East Utica in the late 1990s. “We are definitely happy with the Bosnians,” she says. “There is a renaissance of people coming in, and they like their homes.”

The newest neighbors

In 1997, the first two Bosnian families purchased homes the block. Sakib and Zahida Duracak bought 771 Mary St. less than a year after they resettled in Utica.

Zahida’s face softens at the memory of neighbors who stopped by to welcome her. Even though she hardly spoke English at the time, she understood the sentiment. “A thing like that you never forget,” she says from her seat on one of the family’s living room couches.

Since then, Sakib has remodeled the attic and built cabinets and furniture from birch and pinewood. He wants to do more but says it is expensive. “I can do it myself, but to repair the house costs a lot of money,” he says.

They live with Sakib’s mother and their two children. Dino, 13, is a John F. Kennedy Middle School honors student, plays basketball and likes to draw. Sadina, 7, plays the piano and listens to American pop music. Their back yard is full of such equipment as a basketball hoop, a slide and a seesaw.

The Duracaks like their home and neighbors but have some concerns about living on the street. They worry about the number of unsupervised children from other blocks who often whiz down the street on bicycles. Sakib wishes the neighborhood had more parks and playgrounds “for the sake of the children.”

He describes two near misses with cars driving the wrong way down the one-way street, a concern shared by Tossia McDonald, of 766 Mary St. “It’s a one-way street, and sometimes you get people zooming down,” says the mother of two sons under 5. “There’s a lot of kids on the street when it’s nice, they’re out from one end to the other.”

But these kids cause trouble, she says, unaware that some kids tore a branch off a newly planted plum tree down the street only a week before. “It’s a quiet block except for other kids who come on their bikes,” she says. “They’re wild. They’re loud and obnoxious.”

As one of a few African-Americans who live on the block, McDonald says she has seen Bosnians tell black children they can’t play with their children. But she and her sons keep to themselves. “They might have their qualms with minorities, but we stay in our atmosphere, and they stay in theirs,” she says.

Misconceptions exist

McDonald, who has rented her apartment for about two years, is frustrated by the city’s economy and plans to leave within the year. She sees Bosnians buying homes on the block and thinks they received financial assistance.

“I don’t agree with the fact that they can come over and buy houses and cars — these people get beaucoup money for coming here,” she says.

The thought that refugees receive money for coming to America is not uncommon, says Peter Vogelaar, executive director of the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees. But it’s untrue.

Refugees receive $400 per person for expenses such as rent, food, utilities, spending money and basic household items during their first month in Utica. After that, they become eligible for public assistance in the same way any other low-income resident would, he says. They receive a loan to repay their plane tickets to the United States. The repaid loan becomes their first line of credit, which enables them to build credit at the banks.

At least one Bosnian on Mary Street feels frustrated that misconceptions exist about their financial assistance. “Would you please tell people that Bosnians pay property taxes?” implores Jasna Ferkic, 20, of 765 Mary St.

The college student says she has been “harassed” by people who believe Bosnians receive tax breaks. However, as soon as refugees obtain jobs and property, they are required to pay the same taxes as anyone else, Vogelaar says.

Ferkic’s father, Hasim, says they pay between $1,700 and $2,000 a year in property taxes. “They think we have everything for free,” she says.

Interaction brings understanding

Kevin Talerico and his father, Gerald, sit on the shaded porch of 759 Mary St. His mother, Ellen, is inside. Gerald was born next door, which is where Kevin lives today. They are, and will stay, lifelong residents of Mary Street. “It’s their homestead,” Kevin says of his parents. “They’d never leave.”

After nearly eight decades on the block, Gerald, 76, feels the Bosnians are good for Mary Street. “I’m glad to see a lot of these Bosnians moving in,” says the retired Griffiss Air Force Base parachute packer. “They seem to be nice people, and they’re all fixing their houses up. Their children are well mannered. They respect their elders and their parents.”

Kevin says interactions with their Bosnian neighbors increased as language barriers broke down. “You’d see them at the corner store and say ‘hi,’ and you knew it was all they could say,” he says. “But it was a progression.”

As if on cue, Hasim walks over. The gregarious father of two calls himself a “Bosnian American” and wears a gray T-shirt emblazoned with an American flag and the slogan, “America: Celebrate Freedom.”

“I moved here because I like my neighbors,” he laughs. “I think we are good neighbors for them, and they are good neighbors for us.”

Mary Teresa Mercurio, 63, agrees. Her daughter Kelly rents an upstairs apartment from Hasim, where she lives with her 5-year-old son Frankie. “He said to me, ‘If she needs anything, I’m here,’” Mary Teresa says.

He stayed true to his word, she says, when he arranged for a friend to give Kelly’s car a new paint job.

Homes selling quickly

So many Bosnians have moved to East Utica that houses are scarce.

“There’s just no more houses,” says Longo, who has sold several homes on Mary Street and in greater Utica to Bosnians. “At least there aren’t any more cheap houses.”

She says the housing shortage has pushed prices up in East Utica, from about $30,000 to $35,000 in the mid-1990s to upwards of $50,000 to $65,000 today.

Factors like more people wanting to buy in the area and Bosnians fixing up their homes have also driven up property values, she says. Bosnians on Mary Street paid an average of $26,000 and up to $40,400 for their homes, according to deeds obtained at the Oneida County Clerk’s office. Although a few Bosnians are buying houses in pricier upper East Utica, most are unable to afford more expensive homes.

“I don’t see them moving up that quickly unless our city gets some good paying jobs here,” Longo says.

She predicts that since many took out 15-year mortgages, “theyll probably keep their homes for the next 20 years and move on.”

Bosnian families on Mary Street, like the Ferkics and the Duracaks, say they have no plans to leave anytime soon. Perhaps sometime down the road, they say, after the kids are gone. That is, Hasim laughs, unless he wins the lottery. “If I win tonight,” he promises, “tomorrow I will move.”

Another day on Mary Street

On a cloudless Sunday, Hasim strolls over to the Kasumovic’s front porch to water their flowers. They are in St. Louis to meet their new grandson.

He hoists the green watering can to nourish the hanging plants but runs out of water before getting to the flower pots. He walks home, refills the can and goes back to make sure the blooms have a bright and certain future.

His daughter says Bosnians have a tradition of helping each other in different ways.

“A lot of people know how to do work with their own hands,” Jasna says. “So you might have a friend who does carpeting and another who does plumbing. The friends help out. That’s how it goes.”

On Mary Street, that’s how it goes.