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Pasta with Helen Marshall
A Twist of Lemon and a Challenge to Markowitz for Hippest Borough

Queens Borough President Helen Marshall may not have the outsize personality of Marty Markowitz, but within her home borough she’s a veritable celebrity. Well-wishers, fans and even an autograph hound stopped the former Assembly member and Council member numerous times on the way to Pasta Lovers, a Queens Boulevard eatery that dishes up hearty servings of Italian fare, instead of her desk, where she usually eats lunch.

City Hall: Do you have any recommendations?
Helen Marshall: The main thing is you have to like pasta. I happen to like pasta with seafood in it. You know what I’m going to get? I’m going to get the linguini with seafood. It’s called frutti de mare—you get that in all Italian restaurants.

CH: Is this one of your favorite places to eat, or is this more of a convenience?
HM: Uh-huh. I have others, nearer my house, but this one is great. Everything is always fresh, very tastefully done, seasoned. I think the restaurants are missing out by being so scarce here. The salad bar that I go to, they don’t really have it ready till about eleven thirty, quarter of twelve. You get there about two o’clock in the afternoon and there’s nothing left. People, they’re looking for great food!

CH: Since you picked a place that has “pasta” in the name, you must not be a carb counter.
HM: Pasta’s actually good for you, you know, not in great abundance. I’ve been on Atkins. A long time ago—I used to lose tons of weight with it. You just eat protein, protein, protein and drink eight glasses of water. And the fat just melts away. I got such heartburn!

[Marshall orders a Diet Coke with twist of lemon, linguini fruitti di mare but without calamari—only shrimp and mussels.]

CH: So what’s your tactic now for eating and staying healthy?
HM: I’m healthy, that’s for sure. But I’d like to be a lot thinner.

CH: Pasta Lovers looks like a typical Queens Greek diner that was transformed into an Italian restaurant—how does that reflect on the borough’s changing identity?
HM: I’ll tell you how it affected me. My daughter-in-law had just given birth to my grandson in California. She did not want my grandchildren to call us “grandma” and “grandpa” because her grandmother and grandfather were still alive. So I start fishing around. Now, my other diner is Greek. And so one day, I said, “Charlie, how do you say ‘grandma’ and ‘grandpa’ in Greek?” It’s “yia-yia” and “papou.” Well that was a big enlightenment to us. Anyhow, I called my daughter-in-law and she liked it. And so my grandsons call us yia-yia and papou. And so that’s the personal effect it has on us.
You have to survive. I remember I took a course in physics and Mr. Klein talked about survival of the fittest. That doesn’t really mean you have the biggest muscles. It means that you adjust and move and create with how things are at the time. Some things we never want to change. But most things in life require an adaptation.
CH: You said your mother was a seamstress, right?
HM: Actually, she helped organize the International Ladies Garment Workers Union—she had worked in those sweatshops. And it was really bad, because in those days it was hard to establish the union. My father would either go for her or with her. But if it was a peaceful march, I could go as a little kid. And thank god for that union. She died at 89 years old, she was in pretty good health the whole time, she had a little pension, Social Security, she owned the house that she lived in. Imagine without unions. We’re seeing too much of that today. That was a very important lesson for me.

CH: Did that affect how you viewed the transit strike, for example?
HM: Yes, yes, yes, oh it certainly did. But you know that strike affected us in Queens probably more than most. The problem is that Queens, you see that Red Bird out there?—(points to a retired subway car that is now an information booth near Queens Borough Hall)—that’s one line that we have that comes from Manhattan out here, but it ends at Main Street, Flushing, which is not even halfway through the borough and it’s on the northern end and people still have to get off and take buses. And on this end, we have the E and the F right here on Queens Boulevard—and that’s all we’ve got! Now we do have another spur that goes off to Astoria. And it’s a big borough, so they got to get on a bus to get to their ultimate destination. And the buses became part of our network. And up until that time, the local bus companies really were like part of the community. I remember Triborough Bus. I knew the bus drivers, I knew the man who owned it.

CH: What are your plans after term limits end your time as borough president?
HM: At the end of this term, I will have been in government for 30 years—isn’t that enough? I’m going to travel, I’m going to enjoy life, I’m going to cool off for about five years. I have plenty to do, don’t worry.

CH: Queens has a huge number of immigrants. Where have you seen the biggest impact of that influx?
HM: Who told you to ask me that question? [laughs] First of all, immigration is part of our country. There’s no other country in the world that you go to like America. In most countries everybody looks alike, they speak the same language, they have the same customs, same food. In America, you have everything together. We were the first home of the United Nations and many of the dignitaries lived right there in Elmhurst. And that might be the beginning, because their children had to go to school and they had to have the kind of food that they like to eat. We have the whole range all over this borough—any kind of food you want to eat we can get you there, any kind of community that you’re looking for we can get you there. Our slogan is, “See Queens See the World.”

Immigration. They talk a lot about it down there in Washington, D.C. but they don’t do anything to help.

CH: What are your thoughts on the day laborers?
HM: We really need to have a hiring hall for them where we could sort of protect them.

CH: For the past several years, Brooklyn has been talked up as the “cool” borough. How has that made you and other Queens residents feel? Will Queens be the next hipster destination?
HM: We already were. You’d be surprised the kind of things that have gone on but we just haven’t talked about it that way. We have a strong art community in Long Island City. We have P.S. 1 there and MoMA was down there, too. They had lines all around the block. So I tried to get [MoMA] to leave an exhibit—at least give us one exhibit a year. Everybody in Queens will have gone to see that exhibit. But it’s a case of their insurance. So what they have done is concentrated all their efforts in P.S. 1 and it’s coming along fabulously. You’re talking about rap—you know where rap really started? In Jamaica. Where I live had Louie Armstrong. Dizzy Gillespie was on the corner. And many people who are really hip were born here, well even Donald Trump. And I challenge Marty [Markowitz] to compare mine to his.

CH: Who’s gunning for your job?
HM: We have to see. I don’t know yet. But you see all these Council people now [laughs]. They’re term-limited. I fought against term limits. I think the term limits should be the people at the ballot box. And you can accomplish a lot when you know you have time to do it in.

CH: Do you have a favorite among the Council people looking at it?
HM: No, you’re not going to get that out of me. It really is too early. We have still three and a half more years. I’ll see who rises. But even those who rise, they may not be the best candidate.

Pictures by Andrew Schwartz