By Alysia Santo
Eighteen-year-old Vas Vasolo and nineteen-year-old Hani Kinani are spending the evening at this hookah bar in Bay Ridge to share the sweet flavored “double apple” smoke and to hang out with kids their own age. “We come to this place because we know we won’t find a bunch of fourteen year olds,” says Vasolo, taking a bite of his cheese fries at The Village, a restaurant, bar, and hookah lounge on 3rd Avenue.
Just a few years ago, they were the youngsters they are now trying to avoid. “We knew which places to go where they didn’t ID,” says Kinani. The hookah, a curvy water pipe with multiple hoses to smoke from, is often shared in social gatherings, particularly in the Arab world, where the apparatus is called a shisha. Yet these American teens now see it as a custom all their own. “It’s part of our culture and we’ve grown up with it,” says Vasolo.
Hookah bars or lounges are a growing trend among teens and young adults around the country. Often dimly lit with lights that look like something out of a disco, many lounges feature belly-dancing shows, Middle Eastern bands, bar food, and menus of smoke flavors such as berry blast, mango mist and orange cream.
These shops have proven difficult to control, and Bay Ridge community leaders say they have seen a surge of underage kids using the water pipes, without any way to stop it. At the first Bay Ridge community board meeting since spring, a power point presentation with pictures of hookahs and tobacco was discussed by community board member, Judie Grimaldi. After a summer long investigation by the board, she announced her conclusion, “We have learned that hookah bars fall through the cracks.”
Adel Adley, the manager of The Village, says this isn’t the case at most hookah lounges, “They look at it as something really bad is going on. It’s a very normal process,” he says. Adley says young people come to try it, but that they always check for ID. “Maybe its weird to the American community, but this is an international place. Everybody is curious about other nationalities and what they do.”
An American Lung Association Tobacco Trend Alert from February 2007 calls hookah smoking the first new tobacco trend of the century, and a study from the Journal of Pediatrics found that 23 percent of 18 to 24 year olds say they have smoked hookah.
A recent Florida study found that four percent of middle school students and 11 percent of high school students say they have tried it. With this heightened popularity, these water-pipe parlors are popping up all over the country. Approximately 300 hookah bars opened up between 2000 and 2004 in the United States, many near college campuses according to Smokeshop magazine, and these numbers are puffing on.
The Village opened for business a year ago to a mixed clientele of all ages and ethnicities. Weekends are packed, and the 20 hookahs at The Village are all in use, appearing like mini smoke stacks on the tables. Mounted to the wall is large TV that plays Egyptian music videos, or other music if a customer requests. There is a mix of ethnicities, from Chinese students to a group of middle eastern men playing cards.
Josephine Beckman, the district manager of Community Board 10, which includes Bay Ridge, says about 15 establishments have opened in the area in the past year, with five in just the past few months. Most of the hookah bars are clustered around 5th avenue, which is the center of this area’s Arabic community.
Astoria also has a large number of hookah bars, says district manager Lucille Hartman, with at least a dozen concentrated in the heavily Arabic community along Steinway Street. According to Hookahbars.com, there are 20 in Manhattan. Complete numbers are hard to track, as many of these places are listed as coffee or tea shops and some do not have phone numbers.
Ramy Rezcalla wanted to share his Egyptian roots when he opened The Village a year ago. The front entrance serves as restaurant, with a separate entrance at the side to the hookah lounge. Rezcalla says he loses customers to the competition because it is his business’s policy to only serve people who are eighteen and up.
He described a scene last week when a reservation for fifteen showed up, and thirteen of them were underage. “We kicked them out. Then we see them around the block with like ten hookahs in front of them,” Rezcalla says.
Bay Ridge community leaders scoured the city and state laws for a way to regulate hookah smoking. District 43’s Councilman, Vincent Gentile, and members of his staff thought state and federal laws would apply. “We posed the question, can you enforce if an establishment is selling to minors under the clean air act, and the answer turned out to be no,” says Beckman, “We can’t use what is on the books because the word hookah is missing”, she says.
The community has stepped up its efforts since the complaints increased a year ago concerning underage patrons, as well as wafts of, what some neighbors call, “sickening” second hand clouds. This board is now working with Councilman Gentile’s office to propose new legislation for these smoke shops on the city level. A spokesperson for Gentiles office says that the legislation is in the brainstorming stages, and it is not clear when –or if– it will be introduced.
According to New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the law concerning “shisha” says only registered tobacco bars can sell flavored tobacco and they must retain the packaging if it is removed before sale to a customer. As with all tobacco products, it is supposed to be limited to those 18 and over, but there are no laws against inhaling smoke that is tobacco free.
A new hookah lounge on 5th avenue, Elfeshawy, sells a smoke-able substance labeled, “Hydro: Herbal Molasses”. It says on its package that it is wild berry flavored, and tobacco and nicotine free. The owner, Mr. Hany just opened Elfeshawy at the end of September after an Italian restaurant that was here closed down. He says that he has heard about some places serving kids, but that he does not. Lora Borban, a 23-year-old waitress at Elfshawy, is puffing on her blue colored hookah cord as she explains. “Some people think that it makes you high, but it doesn’t have nicotine. I smoke for fun, whatever. But usually I smoke cigarettes if I really want to smoke,” she says.
Down the street from Elfeshawy is the lounge Tarboosh, which serves a tobacco-based hookah. “This consists of fruit mixed with honey. It’s .05 percent nicotine,” says Eddie Skaf, the Lebanese owner. The average American cigarette is 10 percent nicotine. Skaf says he always checks ID’s, and he welcomes regulation by the city, adding that in the seven years he has been open, his clientele has been mostly other Arabic members of his community, “It’s traditional, especially in the Islamic sector, who don’t drink.”
The water filtered smoke of a hookah pipe is considered by most smokers to be less dangerous than cigarettes. The World Health Organization has said this is a dangerous myth. A WHO report in 2005 concluded that a typical one-hour hookah session involves inhaling 100 times the amount of smoke that would be inhaled in a single cigarette session, which usually takes between five and seven minutes.
Adley says this report doesn’t hold up, since most people don’t inhale and it’s nothing like cigarettes, since they keep their use down to once or twice a week. Hani Kinani and Vas Vasolo agree. “We’re not addicted. It’s not an everyday thing,” says Kinani. Vasolo nods, saying, “I wish the younger kids would stop messing it up for everyone else.” Even if there is a crack down on hookah lounges, these teens don’t seem worried, “I have a hookah at home, so I can still do it,” Kinani says.
More on Youth Trends in Brooklyn:
Pingpong reigns supreme in the Sunset Park Chinese community
Tight city budget deprives teens of summer career development opportunities
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