There is good information on the Cameo Pet Shop already. I won’t rehash too much of it, but add what I know from going out there over the years.
One thing about the Cameo, its owner had a subtle dry sense of humor amidst the aqua culture and aquariums, but first its setting in Queens:
RKO Keith’s Richmond Hill Theater, opened in 1929, is still around, and the Cameo Pet Shop was just down the street in the vicinity of the “Richmond Hill Triangle” formed by Jamaica Avenue, Myrtle Avenue, and 117th Street. Historically, I guess you could call it, downtown Richmond Hill.
Today Richmond Hill is known for its large Indo-Guyanese, Indo-Trinidadian and Tobagonian, Indo-Caribbean, and Indian population, particularly Punjabi, immigrants. Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Protestant, Sikh, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim places of worship abound, and is far enough out in Queens to have streets with large Victorian homes, as well as, more modest dwellings, and large apartment buildings as well.
They used to call these neighborhoods polyglot, today they say, diverse, and Richmond Hill is simply, typically immigrant and a first stepping stone neighborhood, and has been that from the beginning. Although the first wave of immigrants stayed a bit longer, they built it. Richmond Hill became the typical starting point, in the city and country, for so many folks, usually grouped together by ethnicity and religion, surrounded by a now politically correct and incorrect world that is so indivualized and customized as to be completely disconnected from what they think they are experts at. Today, basic language, the foundation of communication, can’t even find agreement on its words, let alone from the ideologies thy represent.
Originally, many European families (Italian, Dutch, British, Irish, Scots, Danish, and German) lived in Richmond Hill. In the 1970s, the neighborhood was predominantly Spanish. Today, the south side of Richmond Hill consists mostly of South Asian Americans (Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis) and Indo-Caribbean Americans (Trinidadians, Guyanese, Surinamese, and Jamaicans), who have steadily emigrated to the United States since the 1960s. Richmond Hill also has the largest Sikh population in the city.
It’s remarkable that the neighborhood, so far from Manhattan, out in Queens, could be the home of Morton Gould, Rodney Dangerfied, William Hickey, Jack Keroac, Jack Lord, the Marx Brothers (although born and raised in Manhattan), Jacob Riis, Phil Rozuto and the Gruebel family that owned the pet shop where they shopped. I don’t care what you say, that’s something. Morton Gould? In Greenpoint, all we could claim was Mae West or the drummer with KISS.
Richmond Hill is still Richmond Hill (meaning New York) where civility, even sophistication is still mixed with a direct, unfiltered attitude. Like many Queens neighborhoods, Richmond Hill is a swiftly changing immigrant neighborhood. Some ethnic groups are very large like today’s Guyanese, but they too will move on. I lived in an ethnic Brooklyn neighborhood for most of my life, and it retained its ethnicity for a long time as the exception from the get-go, until gentrification took it out. But places like Richmond Hill, far from Manhattan, is where the continually shifting New York immigrant scene still takes place. No different than the west and south Bronx, that host shifting parades of like ethnicities, continually replaced by another.
One of the most apparent characteristics of long-timers from the neighborhood, is a civility with a directness and sarcasm, often understated, and always there, echoing popular exaggerations of that style perhaps in the Marx Brothers and Dangerfield, who grew up close by in an earlier time.
One day i went out to the Cameo Pet Shop in Queens and these are the shots from that day. The owner, gave me the run of the shop, and i spent a load of time there, wanting to return again. This was 2013 and the shop would close in 2016. Steve Gruebel is the real deal, and, after a very long run, pet fish ownership declining, retirement from the business was looming. Steve showed me that Queens hospitality, let me do my thing, in his shop, that was like no other, where he had been mixing history, pets, wit and humor into the Cameo. The understated humor was real and caustic.
The shop, at Jamaica and 117th, in the family since 1947, was of course, a neighborhood fixture but also attracting many more back in the glory days of aqua-culture. But Steve Gruebel, the last family member until the closing, was know further, by getting a lot of play, out of the fact, that there was a pacus fish who had been living in the shop for 44 years. It was that fish story that encapsulated the style and attitude of Steve and his long-running neighborhood shop, and maybe Queens itself, if not the Richmond Hill section.
Tanked up, this fish actually grew to 23 inches and weighed twenty pounds. It also outlived an average pacus by 37 years, and had eaten more than 175,000 fish during his residence in Queens.
“We feed him twenty-five goldfish every other day.” The idea is fish as pets. His name was Butkiss.
The Cameo Pet Shop on Jamaica Avenue at 117th Street.
Steve Greubel, owner of the Cameo Pet Shop on Jamaica Avenue at 117th Street in Richmond Hills, Queens.
Frankie
A customer checks out Frankie. Young, Guyanese and clearly American.
Discus fish close-up.
Discus habitat.
Discus makes a move.
Goldfish.
Steve, the owner, feeds his stock of fish.
African albino claw frogs.
African albino claw frog.
African albino claw frog habitat.
Lizard.
A Putnam rolling ladder, in the back room.
Frankie, near the door, Steve in the back at the counter.
Frankie keeping watch.
End of the line. But this time it was done by the owner’s own free will and not gentrification, but good honest retirement after a long career in the pet business on the neighborhood level.