Downtown

by Pete Hamill

  Sloan did another McSorley’s painting the same year (McSorley’s Bar) and years later returned to the place for McSorley’s at Home (1928), McSorley’s Cats (1929), and McSorley’s Saturday Night (1930). The five paintings have the same urban warmth that infuses Joseph Mitchell’s New Yorker portrait of the place. But I never felt anything like their obvious attraction to McSorley’s. The sense of the nineteenth century (epitomized in some way by the potbellied stove) stirred my curiosity and urged me to imagine the men who once came to drink there. And visiting the premises put me in closer touch with John Sloan and Joe Mitchell, two artists I revered. But I didn’t like the taste of ale, and there was nothing else on tap. And I was also young: The place barred women, and I wasn’t passionate about saloons where I couldn’t meet women. Youth needs the possibility of romance. In the 1970s, during the most vehement time of a revived feminism, McSorley’s finally admitted women to its dark embrace, but it was too late for me, and probably too late for the women.

  McSorley’s is still open, but there is nothing else on the block that connects the saloon to the distant New York Irish past. East Seventh Street is a Ukrainian center now. Down on the corner of Third Avenue, west of McSorley’s, is the First Ukrainian Evangelical Church and a Ukrainian crafts shop. Across Seventh Street, on the corner of Shevchenko Place, is the St. George Ukrainian Catholic Church, which was once smaller and more charming. The old church was torn down in the 1970s and replaced with this one, which, like so much modern ecclesiastical architecture, seems inspired by Howard Johnson’s roadside restaurants rather than the mysteries of time and faith. Most younger Ukrainian Americans have left the neighborhood for the larger city and the suburbs, but you still see giant gatherings for weddings and funerals. And once, long before he was murdered in 1996, I saw the Second Avenue Deli’s Abe Lebewohl, from Kilykiv, near Lviv, walking down this block with a Catholic priest, the two of them talking in Ukrainian and laughing.

  When I walk uptown, and pass the churchyard of St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery, I flash on A. T. Stewart and the way his corpse was kidnapped, or imagine old Peter Stuyvesant hobbling on his peg leg, raging at Jews and other strangers, or remember my friend Joel Oppenheimer, a proud, tough Jew, bearded, exuberant, filled with love of the world below Fourteenth Street, obsessed with the New York Mets, and leading a poetry workshop in Stuyvesant’s church. Around the corner at 110 East Tenth Street, Stanford White was born in 1853. And in the block between Third and Fourth avenues in the 1950s, there were about a dozen art galleries: the Brata, the Tanager, the Camino, the Grimand, the March, and others. The critic Harold Rosenberg, who invented the term “action painting” to describe the work that others called abstract expressionism, lived on the block. So did the painter Willem de Kooning. I would see them from time to time, walking together, heading west. Rosenberg was more than six feet tall, with a fierce Zapata mustache. De Kooning had the mellow look of a Dutchman who was living in a town that the Dutch founded. On some nights in autumn or spring, you could walk into a gallery opening, with bold paintings on the walls and wine served in plastic cups and women in leotards and sweaters, drinking hard, and Charlie Parker on a turntable.

  On the corner of East Twelfth Street and Second was the Phoenix Theater, where many New Yorkers saw Ann Corio’s wonderful tribute to a dying art, This Was Burlesque, and later Oh! Calcutta! and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and Grease. Originally, it was the Yiddish Art Theater, which is why the Star of David was on the ceiling. The driving force behind the 1,300-seat theater was Maurice Schwartz, also from the Ukraine, who was in turn heavily influenced by the charisma and intelligence of Abraham Cahan, the journalist and novelist who was the editor of the Forward. Across the street, on the southeast corner, was the Café Royal, where the menu was basically Hungarian but where artistic contention was the main dish. In 1953, the Café Royal closed forever and is now a Japanese restaurant, filled with the New York young. I suspect that nobody there discusses the plays of Arthur Schnitzler or the work of Abraham Cahan.

  I still go to Abe Lebewohl’s Second Avenue Deli, where I used to sit over blintzes or kasha varnishkes with Paul O’Dwyer, the tough, laughing, white-haired defender of almost everybody who needed defense. He was one of the last in a line of passionate Irish lawyers that started with Thomas Addis Emmet in the early nineteenth century. Every time he walked into the Second Avenue Deli he was embraced by the owner, the waiters, and half the customers. The other half were from out of town.

  After a few years at 307 East Ninth, I moved next door to 309, where I lived on the first floor right, just up the stoop. The reason was simple: One of the guys from the apartment at 307 got married and was granted the apartment by common consent. The bathtub at 309 was in the kitchen, with a chipped ceramic cover, and sometimes, in desperation, I walked up to the Gramercy Gym on Fourteenth Street to take a shower. I was working nights at the newspaper, trying fitfully to sleep days, but in that small place I first read the great Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis, hosted a few jammed and sweaty parties, and sometimes wore my press card to bed. Down the block lived Edward Hoagland, whose novel The Circle Home showed me many things about writing, and I would see Allen Ginsberg ambling along in poetic (I thought) solitude on sunny afternoons. Around the corner on St. Mark’s Place was the latest version of the Five Spot, where Thelonious Monk seemed to play every night and all the customers dressed like Miles Davis. On that same block lived W. H. Auden, and I would see him, with his gullied face, walking alone toward Second Avenue, but I never had the nerve to speak to him.

  Sometimes I would walk east to Tompkins Square Park and sit on a bench reading and look at all the fine young women and the kids in the playground and the old men reading the Yiddish newspapers. At first, I didn’t know who Tompkins was (Daniel Tompkins was New York governor from 1807 to 1816 and led the fight to abolish slavery in the state), but I loved the park that bore his name. Only a few people, most of them real estate hustlers, were then calling this the East Village. The blocks on the far side of the square were not yet part of the degraded, dangerous place the cops called Alphabet City. Nor was the park a free range for junkies and predators. After five years (and one final flat at 150 Second Avenue), I moved on from the neighborhood, returning usually as a newspaperman, covering what the arson squad called “successful fires” and double homicides. In the sixties, many middle-class kids started coming to the neighborhood, to play for a while at poverty and rebellion. The truly poor resented them, because if they got into any real trouble they could always call Daddy for a check. Most of them were sweet and naive, playing Dylan and the Stones at top volume, cursing the war in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson, and then Richard Nixon. But too many of them found permanent trouble. As a newspaperman, I covered at least three cases of kids wrecked on acid who walked off tenement rooftops.

  There was a band shell then in Tompkins Square Park, and I once watched Jimi Hendrix play there, full of power as he pushed the blues back into rock and roll. It was his neighborhood too, since he lived for a while at 321 East Ninth Street, a few doors east of where I lived, a building where La Mama had its first experimental theater in the basement. The Grateful Dead played that band shell too, with thousands of Deadheads staring at the sky while the cops looked on in wonder and unease. A few of the cops even knew the tunes, humming along with Jerry Garcia.

  But as years passed, life went terribly wrong in Tompkins Square Park. In the 1980s, armies of homeless men moved throughout the city, and many of them found their way to the park. They began to transform it into a permanent encampment, their billets hammered together from wood and canvas and tin. Heroin was everywhere, and, later, crack cocaine, along with every variety of alcohol. The stench of excrement filled the air. Flowers were trampled. Men urinated on the pink marble of the monument to the victims of the General Slocum disaster. The grass wore away and the ground turned to gluey mud in the rain. Trash baskets were used for fires. Parents retreated with their children. Very few old men sat on benches re
ading books or newspapers. Such public human squalor hadn’t been seen since the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression.

  In 1988, after many complaints from those who paid rent in the neighborhood, an attempt was made to clear the encampment, using the police. The subsequent riot should have been predictable. Young cops, many of them from the suburbs, few of them veterans of the armed forces, lost all discipline. Many covered their badges with tape to hide their identities. Heads were beaten. Rocks and bottles arced through the air. When it was over, forty-four people were injured. And the men were still in the park. Now they were supported by others: old hippies, squatters in abandoned houses, middle-aged people possessed of the romance of poverty. They blamed evil landlords, capitalism, gentrification, for all the trouble. To be sure, they didn’t speak for the entire neighborhood. The Latino poets, painters, and writers who had started calling the area “Loisaida” (a latinization of Lower East Side) in the 1970s generally stayed aloof from the quarrel. Those people who had already begun the slow process of gentrifying the neighborhood wanted the park cleaned out, so they and their children could actually use it.

  After a smaller riot in 1991, Mayor David Dinkins closed the park for “renovations.” The homeless men were evicted. A fence went up around the ruins. The band shell was demolished. And then something miraculous happened. The park was brought back from the dead, and the grateful were the living. After fourteen months, Tompkins Square Park was opened to everybody. The damaged paths were repaired. The lawns were reseeded. The trash baskets were used for trash, not fires. Mayor Giuliani’s policy of “zero tolerance” for minor offenses took hold. I wander there now, and in good weather the benches are full and children are laughing and running and the dog people are leading their canine charges to the dog run. A few homeless men wander through the park, but they keep moving. At midnight, the new gates to the park are locked.

  Our neighborhood eased into other neighborhoods, and there were no clear borders of separation, no requirements to show a passport to gain admission. Sometimes we wandered down the Bowery and took a right at Spring Street and entered the top of Little Italy. It seemed changeless then, with its restaurants that stayed in the same locations for decades, its old women in black heading to church, its tough longshoremen and artisans arriving home each evening in varied states of exhaustion. To be sure, there were Mob guys still around then, dressed in car coats and creased trousers and glistening shoes, practicing hard looks, stealing admiring glances at themselves in the store windows. But they didn’t bother visitors. You saw them at tables in Luna’s on Mulberry Street or standing in front of social clubs or piling into Cadillacs.

  There were a lot of teenagers around too, many with nothing to do except blunder into trouble. As late as the end of the 1960s, the dropout rate of Italian American youngsters was higher than the rate for the poorest blacks and Latinos. There were various reasons for this. Many of the original immigrant parents had contempt for education, and that attitude survived into the second generation of Americans. The cliché in Little Italy was the same one I heard in my neighborhood in Brooklyn: I knew a guy went to college and he’s working on the docks. At sixteen, too many of them dropped out and went directly to the docks or a year or so later to the army. But there was a pervasive, generally unconscious bigotry among their teachers too, an attitude that for too long considered the Italian American kids as hopeless cases who with the best of luck might pass the civil service test for the Sanitation Department. Although Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio had attained great popular fame (along with other Italian American athletes and entertainers), there were few political or intellectual models for the kids to emulate. Fiorello La Guardia was the greatest mayor in New York history, but he died in 1945, and although a number of Italian Americans entered politics or became judges by the early 1960s, the Little Flower had no true successors as charismatic figures. Mario Cuomo had yet to emerge as a public figure of eloquence and passion. Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola were still in the dreaming stages of their careers as movie directors. Gay Talese was just beginning his extraordinary career as a journalist, the writer Pietro di Donato (Christ in Concrete) was already forgotten, and Mario Puzo had not yet written The Godfather.

  The tale of the Italian Americans was certainly worth telling. The Italian migration began in the 1880s, around the same time as the movement of the Eastern European Jews. But there were some major differences. Many of the Jews were literate in their own languages, as was fitting for the People of the Book. A healthy number had skills that could be used in New York. Most Italian immigrants were from Sicily or the south. They were contadini, people who worked the land, often in semifeudal societies. Most were illiterate in Italian. In addition, most of the Italians (certainly not all) were young men. They came to America to earn money and then return to Italy. At one point, for every one hundred Italians who arrived in New York, seventy-three went home. After the turn of the century, this was made easier by advances in the technology of steamships. A journey from New York to Naples could be done in ten days. Some of the Italian men made a number of such journeys: to New York for a year or two, where they hoarded money, and then a return for a few years until the money ran out, and then back to New York.

  Still, many Italians settled in New York, and their first stop was often the Five Points and its neighboring streets. Eventually, most of them moved above Canal Street. Their community became known as Little Italy. When I started going there in a serious way, Nick Pileggi of the Associated Press (and later New York magazine) was my occasional guide. From him, and a few others, I learned that I was looking at a world without truly seeing it. Elizabeth Street, for example, was a street of Sicilians. Up near Greenwich Village lived the Italians from the north, Tuscans and Genoese. As it did for the Jews, after 1904, the expanding subway system made other places possible. Italians settled in East Harlem, the Bronx, and South Brooklyn, while Jews found new places from Brownsville to Washington Heights. But Little Italy remained the primary Old Neighborhood. Some families stayed in the same tenements for decades. Others could not bear the thought of leaving behind the coffee and pastry at Ferraro’s or the Café Roma, the cheese, bread, and pastries in a dozen beloved groceries.

  And yet that too all changed. In the 1980s, the third generation of Italian Americans began to leave. They were Americans, after all, and many had now gone through high school to the City University, and then on to medical school or law school. They moved to Staten Island or New Jersey or Long Island, where they could own homes, have American driveways where they could park American automobiles, and have American barbecues on Sunday afternoons in summer. They found no raffish charm in the myths of the Mafia and the dumb stereotypes that came with those myths. Some of the old tenements were sold. Most were rehabbed and rented for sums beyond the imagination of the older residents. As in other parts of New York, some people fell into a new longing for the past: rent nostalgia. “See that place? My aunt used to pay sixty-two dollars a month there; now it’s eighteen hundred!” And then, in the 1990s, the latest downtown immigration wave began to arrive in large numbers.

  The Chinese were bursting out of the old Chinatown, thanks to changes in immigration laws in 1965 that allowed women to come at last to America and help Chinese men form families. The Chinese had American children now, many of them forging ahead in the New York City school system. By 1995, at Stuyvesant High School, one of the city’s elite public high schools, 60 percent of the students were Asian. There were now Chinatowns in Queens and Brooklyn too, connected through the subway system to the old Chinatown, which had been on the downtown side of Canal Street since the 1880s. There were still poor Chinese, still too many sweatshops, still too many Chinese controlled by gangs. But many of the new Chinese had money to invest, in businesses and in real estate, some of it in flight from Hong Kong after 1997 as it moved into unhappy union with mainland China. The Chinese moved north and east, and Little Italy began to shrink. By 2002, the San Gennaro Festival on Mul
berry Street had begun to look like a theme park, with Sopranos T-shirts, Sopranos posters, and Sopranos cookbooks. Tourists bought “Fuhgeddaboutit” T-shirts and ordered ravioli in the restaurants. In the parking lots, there were many cars with Jersey plates. In a shrunken Little Italy, there were more tourists than Italians.

  This was not surprising. On the Lower East Side, as I write, Katz’s Deli is still open on Houston Street, as is the Yonah Shimmel Knish Bakery, the store that has been there since 1910. There are kosher bakeries along Grand Street near the East River. But when I took an evening stroll recently along the length of Hester Street, one of the legendary streets of the New York Jewish past, every single store bore a sign in Chinese.

  Eventually, all our village roads led to the Village. If you lived in Manhattan, as we did, you never said, “Let’s go to Greenwich Village.” The Village was simply the Village, and there was not yet an East Village. If you walked west along Ninth Street and turned left for a block on Broadway, you found yourself at Eighth Street, the main stem of the Village.

  On a summer evening, it was a marvelous show. The sidewalks were dense with people: artists in paint-spattered jeans and T-shirts; bearded poets or bohemian poseurs; gay young men in twos and threes, some of them transvestites; tourists with startled eyes; careening groups of drunken college boys in corduroy trousers and desert boots; black men with white women, and white men with black women; young Holden Caulfields, who would tell you everything if you really wanted to hear about it (and you didn’t); sailors on liberty from ships tied up at the Navy Yard; knots of Ukrainian women free for the evening from the rules of Second Avenue; strollers chatting in French, Italian, Greek, and Spanish from Spain (with a lisp); cops looking casual; panhandlers; con men; Latinos from uptown or the East Side, eating ice-cream cones; motorcycle riders in leathery armor; kids with a basketball, heading for the playground on Sixth Avenue; professors from NYU with the Village Voice tucked under their arms; Irish longshoremen from the West Side piers; delivery boys; sidewalk artists; kids up from Little Italy, full of mockery; young women from the Ivy League schools trying to find University Place and the Cedar Street Tavern, where the poets and the painters did their drinking; musicians heading for gigs, their horns in cases, wearing sunglasses at midnight; peddlers of pot or smack or shaved ice in six flavors.