FROM BOROUGH TO BORO
From Borough to Boro
. . . And back again
By Cassie Bustamante
Photographs by Amy Freeman
When Brooklynites Alec Pollak and Swati Argade took haven in her parents’ Greensboro home in May 2020, they thought they’d just perch there for a short time. After all, Argade’s mother and father were stuck in India, unable to travel back to the United States due to COVID restrictions, but they’d be returning.
Argade, who had grown up just a block away, had sworn she’d never move back to Greensboro. Home, to her, was in Brooklyn, with her husband and their then 9-year-old daughter, Indie. Plus, she had opened a storefront called Bhoomki in 2012, “a Brooklyn-based responsible textile-obsessed brand & laboratory.” (She closed the physical storefront in 2022, but maintains an e-commerce site.) And Pollak, who works in marketing, is a born-and-raised New Yorker. Having grown up in a household that was both Catholic and Jewish, he had never lived anywhere other than Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn — all boroughs of New York City.
But as the pandemic pressed on, it became clear that a return to Brooklyn was not going to happen as soon as they hoped. The borough they called home had become “an atmosphere of fear and the unknown, and it was just tripping us all out,” says Pollak. “Not to mention, just knowing there were these outdoor morgues that they were setting up.”
Four years later, they’re back in Brooklyn, reflecting via Zoom on how they not only warmed up to Greensboro, but, in fact, bought a fixer-upper and found themselves becoming part of a community that, over the decades, seemed not only accepting but welcoming to newcomers. In turn, Argade organized a book club with new — and old — Greensboro friends where the focus was diversity. Women from various backgrounds read works by authors of color every other month. It became, Argade recalls, “this place where we could have conversations around what is it like to be Jewish? What is it like to be Hindu? What is it like to celebrate Christ, you know?”
And though the couple ultimately moved back to their beloved New York City, the experience offered Argade healing from her own past. “I didn’t ever feel accepted growing up in Greensboro,” she says, recalling classmates who ridiculed her and her identical twin sister, Jyoti — the only two young Indian women at Page High School that she can recall. “I was told that I was ugly every single day of my life growing up.”
“It was more shocking that you moved to Greensboro than that Indie and I did,” muses Pollak.
Snuggling on their sofa with their tan-and-white Corgi nestled on Argade’s lap, the two of them look back on their experience in Greensboro — and reflect on to how it changed them and maybe some of the people in Greensboro they left behind.
While sheltering at her folks’ place, Argade’s childhood friend, Soumya Iyer — who remembers teenage Argade babysitting her — planted a seed, suggesting a Starmount Forest home her friend was putting on the market. “‘I know that you don’t want to move here,’” Argade recalls her pal saying, “‘but why don’t you just come and see the house?’”
With the guidance of Realtor Melissa Greer, the couple toured the home on a lark, and, as it turns out, fell in love with it. “It was beautifully done and had this massive backyard, which was a big draw,” says Pollak.
They knew how competitive the real estate market could be. In fact, they’d just gone through the process in Brooklyn and, after putting in 12 offers, were under contract with a place there. (Thanks to COVID, Pollak and Argade were able to break it.) They went full-bore on the Starmount home, putting together a strong offer they were sure would make the home theirs.
“We didn’t get the house,” says Argade.
But, says Pollak, “it triggered something in us.” What else could be out there? they wondered. And what they knew for certain was that they were not ready to go back to apartment living just yet, especially after a few months in the Gate City that he calls “such a breath of literal fresh air.”
The couple quickly went from considering the possibility to urgently wanting a Greensboro home.
“That’s exactly what happened,” says Argade with a laugh.
Plus, they knew investing in a home was wiser than renting in the long run. “A friend once told us, ‘Don’t think of it as spending money. Think of it has a house-shaped bank,’” quips Pollak.
Greer took them to see a couple other homes, including a circa 1927 house on Chapman in her own Sunset Hills neighborhood.
With its penny tile and existing color scheme — blues, grays, blacks and white — “It felt like old-time New York spaces,” says Argade, something she was sure would appeal to her “dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker” husband.
“We saw it at 3 in the afternoon,” says Pollak, “and we were under contract by midnight.”
Curled up together on the family sofa, Argade and Indie are known to often watch the HGTV show of No Demo Reno, which features homes redone beautifully with zero demolition. “And constantly during the show,” says Pollak, “Indie is like, ‘Mama, you could totally do that.’”
He agrees and adds that his wife has always had the ability to design, whether it’s been for friends or in her store, “but never had a full canvas to express it.”
Paintbrushes in hand, the couple got to work and continued the theme of blues — “an homage to denim and indigo,” Swati says, inspired by both Greensboro’s rich fabric history and her own background in sustainable textiles. Farrow & Ball’s Hague Blue now covers the walls in the living room, trimmed by the same shade in a high gloss. In the kitchen, the cabinetry was already blue, paired with a black-and-white checkerboard floor, but the couple painted the walls white with black trim. And on the library walls? “Bell Bottom Blue.” But there was a major problem they soon discovered after moving in that no amount of paint could remedy. “That fall, October and November of 2020, I think it was the highest rainfall on record for those months,” Argade recalls. Their backyard flooded and became “like quicksand.” But that’s not all. The basement filled up with water, too. “We also discovered there was a 2-foot-by-2-foot hole in the brick wall of the basement that was covered up with plywood — and that’s where all the water was coming in.”
Plus, the water flow through the yard created a trench, one that Swati fell in and “pretty much got a concussion.” The couple worried about safety, especially when it came to hosting Argade’s aging parents, who, amidst a full-blown pandemic, would not enter their home, but were happy to spend time in their daughter’s backyard.
Before anything else design-show-worthy could happen, they decided to invest in the landscaping while making the necessary reparations to prevent future water damage.
“It’s a solid house now!” Pollak says proudly.
The silver lining? The backyard was transformed into a dream space where they could watch movies with Indie — including their holiday family favorite, Elf — gather with friends, and plant new gardens, which include Argade’s beloved indigo plants.
When she took that tumble, she serendipitously discovered an old, unused feature: an old-fashioned subterranean garbage receptacle. “I was lying on the ground going, ‘Oh that’s where I could put my indigo vats!’” She laughs about it now.
The intrinsic blue theme of the house even carried into the famous Sunset Hills lighted Christmas balls that conveyed with the sale of the house. “It was funny because so many of the balls that were left behind were Hanukkah blue. Do you remember that?” Argade asks her husband.
Pollak smiles and nods pensively. He had always celebrated both Hanukkah and Christmas. Now, married to a first generation Indian American, he’s added Diwali to his holiday festivities and Argade has adopted his traditions as well. When it comes to their daughter, Pollak says, “We’ve put forward those family traditions.”
In fact, he adds, “We always want her to have a big world or to acknowledge that she has a big world and it is hers to experience.” Together, they provide their daughter with an abundance of cultural celebrations.
The holiday season, for the Argade-Pollak crew, “kicks off with Halloween,” says Argade. Before they even met, they each went all out for Halloween. Then, they were married on Halloween. It’s only natural that Indie embraces All Hallow’s Eve, too.
Shortly after that falls Diwali. Then comes “Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year’s,” says Argade, “so it’s almost like a trickle of holidays through those last two months of the year.” Actually, she says, “We would put up our balls earlier than a lot of people in the neighborhood as we were celebrating Diwali because Diwali is also a festival of lights in the same way that Hanukah is a festival of lights and Christmas itself is a festival of lights.”
Often, the family hosted holiday celebrations in their home so that friends could enjoy what Argade calls this “magical experience every holiday” created by her Sunset Hills neighborhood. It was important to her, as a person of color, to open her doors to people who had perhaps not yet had the opportunity to be invited into a holiday gathering there.
Argade notes that the original deed to the house, which they have, reads “no coloreds allowed, white only.” Now, she says, “there’s a Jew and an Indian that own the house and it’s become this multicultural gathering place in Sunset Hills — it’s a very full circle moment.”
Determined to make a difference in Greensboro, which she calls “kind of my revenge,” Argade both found and created her own community. “You started to integrate yourself into Greensboro society and culture,” says Pollak. It’s true. Argade served on the board of GreenHill Center for NC Art and was involved with the Community Foundation’s developing committee. She returned to the Indian community of her childhood. She started the book club focused on diversity.
Argade was able to “touch and get a handle on” so much in the four years the family spent in Greensboro. “But,” she adds, “my mom was also really amazing at being part of the community and teaching me a lot of those skills. Like, how do you talk about the Indian community? How do you bring people together?”
While her mother cultivated those skills, the house allowed Argade room to build a bigger table and open up space for these kinds of discussions. “Having that amount of space . . . it really activates community in a way that it’s not activated in the same way here,” she says, waving a hand around the family’s current Brooklyn abode.
Pollak, too, got in on giving back to Greensboro. When Sunset Hills sent out a request to the neighborhood for a logo to celebrate its centennial, Pollak, who had graphic design experience, volunteered the chosen design, inspired by his own home’s original windows; he’d noted that they were shaped to look like a sun setting behind hills.
And yet, in June of 2024, the family loaded up and headed back to the Big Apple. “We are kind of interwoven as our tight-knit three-person — well, you count too — three-and-a-half-person family” Pollak says, scratching Viv behind the ears, “that so much is about, well, where is Indie going to go to high school and what does that mean for where we should be.” Ultimately, they felt that Brooklyn was that place.
But, this time, there’s no more swearing she’ll never return. Between her community and house, Argade feels a newfound sense of home in the Gate City. “Leaving Greensboro this time, I felt a huge amount of love and acceptance,” she says with a smile. She currently makes a trip back every six weeks to visit friends and family and check in on their Sunset Hills home.
“We’re perched here for now in the apartment,” says Pollak, “but we’re still very much like, OK, we’re ready for anything. We’re ready to jump, to dive.” Who knows where life will take them next?
Wherever it is, says Argade, “Alec and I always say to each other, ‘Well, you know, my home is wherever you are.’”