Eight
Brooklynites have had such a love-hate relationship with Manhattan that we even refer to it as “the City,” as if we lived on the prairie. No amount of Brooklyn pride could change the fact that Manhattan had two dubious distinctions over the rest of New York. One—rents were higher. Two—compared to Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and even the Bronx, in the eighties, the heroin trade on the Lower East Side was off the hook. Everything else about the neighborhood was, too.
I saw a fifties science-fiction movie on TV once when I was a kid. In the movie a lost civilization builds a miles-wide underground machine allowing everyone on their planet to instantly transform thoughts into flesh-and-blood reality. When astronauts from Earth arrive on the planet the civilization that made the machine has destroyed itself and been extinct for centuries. What the masterminds that built the thing hadn’t factored in is that a lot of the most powerful stuff going on in people’s heads should really just stay between their ears. “Monsters from the id,” the Earth scientist who discovers and activates the machine cries out before he’s ripped to pieces by a gargoyle that materializes from his own secret, crazy places. That’s kind of the way the Lower East Side felt to me sometimes. The neighborhood itself was a mechanism that allowed people to act on and realize impulses that anywhere else they’d keep in check.
A guy’s girlfriend fucks his two best friends (or says she did) and the guy grabs a baseball bat and beats both his friends’ heads in on the sidewalk. Between rounds of Bud tallboys and bathtub speed in an abandoned Puerto Rican social club, a group of cowboy artists transforms the vacant lot next door into a “sculpture garden” train wreck of metal, paint, and stone work reaching three stories into the sky. A couple on a city-run methadone maintenance program go into business for themselves by holding their daily prescribed and dispensed dose of liquid methadone in their cheeks until they get around the corner from the clinic on Avenue B and spit it into strangers’ mouths in exchange for cash they then take and go score real smack on Third Street. Outer borough rock-and-rollers blow off church, shul, or cartoons to march around a dance floor throwing punches, taking intentional headers off the stage, and pass each other back and forth like a manic version of the Jets and Sharks carrying Tony away at the end of West Side Story to the sound of jackhammering punk bands at weekend hardcore “matinees.” For a pretty wide variety of natives and transplants, Lower East Side life seemed to be about taking what was inside and making it happen on the outside no matter what the consequence or cause.
“The criminal, the mentally ill, the socially rejected, and those who have given up the attempt to cope with life,” is how one academic described the so-called urban jungle.
“Single men, pathological families, people in hiding from themselves or society, and individuals who provide the most disreputable of illegal-but-demanded services to the rest of the community.” Sounds familiar. Every person has the capacity to unravel and every neighborhood harbors misfits alongside the well adjusted. Saint or psycho, the trials of life can light anyone’s fuse. Something about the Lower East Side just shortened some people’s wicks.
For more than a century the neighborhood had been the end of the line in Manhattan. Like Canarsie, a lot of the Lower East Side was once swamp and marshland. Until it was drained and filled, Manhattan’s southeastern edge going south from Fourteenth Street leached into a fast-moving tidal channel that narrowed enough between the Brooklyn and Manhattan shorelines to earn the designation the East River. Most of the neighborhood had no subway service. The double L barely glanced off the Lower East Side’s northern border, the IRT and BMT lines skirted its Western edge at Astor Place and Broadway, and the F, J, and M trains snaked underneath it en route to Brooklyn and Queens with barely a handful of stops between them serving the streets above.
Generations of people arrived in the neighborhood hauling a generous allotment of cultural and psychological baggage that they would unpack on the neighborhood’s streets and inside tenements, factory buildings, and storefronts. For a while in the early twentieth century, the area around Tompkins Square Park had the largest German-American population in the U.S. But almost overnight the Germans were burned out of the Lower East Side melting pot when a ferry boat called the General Slocum caught fire while hosting a church-sponsored field trip in the summer of 1904. The parents of a generation of Lower East Side German-American kids watched helplessly from the shore as their community’s future burned to death and drowned in the East River. All that remains of Little Germany is an old church building on Seventh Street, a few architectural hints along Avenue B, and a monument to the Slocum’s thousand-plus mostly underage dead within the spielplatz the kids had once played in—Tompkins Square Park.
Ukrainian and Polish families that came in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were still there when I began working in the neighborhood. If they owned buildings they rented apartments and storefronts that could’ve been had for peanuts just a few years before to NYU kids for exponentially increasing monthly ransoms. There was some kind of Eastern European lunch counter on almost every block. Stanley’s on Avenue A, Christine’s on First Avenue, and Kiev on Second Avenue are all gone, but you can still get kasha varnishkes (a mix of steamed buckwheat and bow-tie noodles that is as savory and filling as spaghetti and red sauce) with your morning eggs instead of home fries at Veselka on Ninth Street. East Tenth Street still hosts a genuine Russian bath almost directly across the street from Lucky Luciano’s old family apartment, complete with steam rooms, a rock-lined “Russian room” sauna, and a changing area equipped with cots to sleep off a ritual beating from a masseur and any vodka consumed before or during a visit.
The Eastern European Jews that once filled the apartments and stores below Houston had mostly moved on by the time I arrived, but synagogues and schvitzes remained along with Bernstein’s Kosher Chinese Food on Essex Street, Katz’s Deli (not Kosher and a dining mecca for three states’ worth of local law enforcement the way doughnut shops were in L.A.) on Ludlow, and the B&H Dairy Lunch farther uptown near St. Mark’s Place.
The corner of First Avenue and Tenth Street retained traces of the even littler Little Italy that nurtured Charlie Lucky. John’s Restaurant where Joe the Boss’s hit squad settled a score and shot a couple locals in the bargain was (and is) still there same as DeRobertis pastry shop. Lanza’s Restaurant down the block from DeRobertis on First Avenue was reportedly a social club for made guys, and until it was finally opened under entirely new management for real in the nineties, tourists and new arrivals were firmly but politely directed back out to the sidewalk when they wandered into Lanza’s in search of a meal. Across the avenue Rosemarie’s Pizza was so unself-consciously old school that in August the management posted a sign saying they were closed for a week’s vacation, and a mix of employees and regular customers would hang out in front of the storefront in folding chairs until the week was up.
The sidewalks of the Lower East Side have been decorated with gallons of mob rivalry blood. The neighborhood also spawned Thomas Rocco Barbella, better known as Rocky Graziano, one of the greatest boxers who ever lived. Not to be outdone, the Lower East Side’s Jewish community produced Barney Ross, a guy who held fight titles in three different weight classes, singlehandedly fought off two dozen Japanese soldiers at Guadalcanal, and beat heroin addiction when he got home from the war.
They used to say that California must have been on a slant away from the rest of the country because all the nuts rolled there. But Alphaville had been East Coast visionary central for more than a hundred years. Nikola Tesla, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Allen Ginsberg, Charlie Parker, Emma Goldman, and Alexander Trosky all passed through or lived there at one point or another in their lives. The neighborhood offered a soapbox or a hideout. The genuinely creative, the genuinely clueless, and the genuinely nuts came from everywhere to reinvent themselves in a place that bore no resemblance to wherever it was that they came from.
The Hells Angels motorcycle club bought into the block on East Third Street between Second and First Avenue in the late sixties. New recruits earned the bottom rocker on their colors by standing guard over their brothers’ machines all night in any weather across the street from a mural immortalizing Angel badass “Big Lenny” Giordano throwing a punch like Popeye the Sailor and the wisdom, “When in Doubt, Knock It Out.” A hippie surge in the sixties brought a more delicate pseudonym for the area around Tompkins Square Park—“the East Village.” Sterling Morrison from the Velvet Underground, a group that gestated in a Ludlow Street loft, remarked years later that the best thing about San Francisco’s Summer of Love in 1967, was that the hype surrounding it lured most of the parasitic hippie creep element of Lower East Side counterculture out to the West Coast for a season.
The neighborhood was like some dry-docked coral reef constantly growing over the wreckage of immigrant armadas or individual adventurers who had run aground there, settled in, then either been wiped out like the Germans or picked up stakes and sailed on to fairer shores in the outer boroughs and suburbs. Every block was built on layers representing generations, stratas of society, traditions, beliefs, ambitions, delusions, compulsions, desires, and everything else.
Each Lower East Side block was a crazy quilt of buildings and storefronts rented, owned, operated, and frequented by different members of an almost absurdly diverse community. Art galleries held openings alongside synagogues honoring the sabbath. Puerto Rican cuchifritos (maybe the single most thorough exploration of deep-frying ever conducted) places shared blocks with vegan restaurants. Polish bars served college kids on dates alongside old-timers who’d been drinking since breakfast. Both ended up shooting pool and singing along to the same Johnny Cash songs by closing time. A block south of a Turkish-run newsstand serving the best egg creams and iced coffee on the planet, and around the corner from an old-time Italian funeral parlor, a Korean-owned dry cleaner on Avenue A turned a side business renting VHS tapes into a chain of video stores that became world famous.
The sheer volume and variety of humanity encouraged a kind of myopia rather than connection. It was entirely possible for people in the Lower East Side to go their entire lives totally unaware of someone living the same number of years on the other side of a six-inch-thick wall of wood, drywall, and plaster. Unless you found some kind of key that opened the doors separating neighbor from unaware neighbor, it was hard to see the connections that bound people in the neighborhood together.
During the mid–late eighties, the unavoidable fact was that heroin connected nearly everyone in Alphaville to someone else, whether they saw it or not. Smack was like an X-ray flashing through every apartment, every business, every life in that teeming patchwork neighborhood. It rippled out from the Avenue D projects like a shockwave. Junkies and non-junkies ran a gauntlet of lowlife rip-off artists that began at the foot of the buildings. Loose gangs of neighborhood kids were only too happy to risk juvenile detention for the pleasure of cracking open a head and taking drug money or milk money for a kid’s breakfast. Vomit, steaming in the summer and frozen solid in the winter, decorated sidewalks, park benches, and stoops whenever a new shipment of dope was strong enough to cause even seasoned addicts to empty their stomachs after snorting or booting it up.
The door to any apartment with anything of value in it had to have at least two deadbolts on it. Every window was barred. There was a locksmith on almost every block. Some residents put axle grease on their windowsills and littered them with broken glass so that skinny, single-minded, and totally desperate junkies would think twice about Spider-manning onto an air conditioner or scaling an air shaft to their window. Lower East Side bar and restaurant bathrooms were guarded like bank tills. Proprietors installed buzzers on toilet doors as a kind of velvet rope system to keep junkies from inadvertently graffiti-ing a stall with their blood while shooting up or with their puke afterward. If a junkie managed to get into a men’s room, sharp-eyed bartenders would snap off the appropriate breaker and plunge the addict into darkness. One bar on Second Street and Avenue A installed blue lightbulbs in its rest rooms. A glowing harvest moon reflected in the toilet bowl water when you pissed and if you tried to shoot up your blue veins were nearly indistinguishable from the rest of your arm in the murky light.
“This is Ed Koch, your mayor. You know the Sanitation Department cannot sweep this street if you don’t move your illegally parked car. Please get it outta here!”
When Ed Koch shook my hand at the NYPD commencement ceremony in Madison Square Garden in 1983, I was surprised, as people often were, by how tall he was. I wasn’t surprised at what a smooth operator he was. At the time Koch was heading for his third term and was famous for asking crowds “How’m I doing?” The taped message about moving your car blasting from a select group of street sweepers dubbed the “Ed Koch talking brooms” was more the mayor’s real style. Koch had the politician’s gift for one-way communication down to a science. In any public dialogue Koch paid close attention to people agreeing with him and closer attention to the sound of his own voice dismissing anybody that didn’t. Either way he came away from any encounter truthfully claiming to have fulfilled his mayoral duty by dialoguing with the voters. No matter how controversial or problematic the exchange, Koch was always “doing” just fine.
Homesteaders and activists on the Lower East Side hated Koch for being the de facto auctioneer at a decade-long selling out of a neighborhood that nobody had given a shit about for years. But you can’t blame Koch for wanting to see the city get back up on its feet financially by putting new price tags on old buildings. Anyone assuming the mayor’s office at the time would’ve done the same thing Koch did. They just might not have looked so happy about it. The seventies had been a fiscal disaster for the city and a political disaster for the politicians who oversaw it. Among the souvenirs of economic hardship on hand when Koch took office were hundreds of derelict residential buildings and empty lots all over the Lower East Side left in the city’s care when they were abandoned, foreclosed on, or seized for unpaid taxes.
Real estate, like narcotics, is a great opportunity for middle men. In the late seventies housing speculators gambled that it was worth risking the relatively cheap purchase price of city-administered properties in the Lower East Side (particularly around Tompkins Square Park) in the hopes that they would become more valuable. They guessed right and a lot got rich. The city was only too happy to offload buildings and lots for cheap so that they could become tax-revenue generating, neighborhood-transforming, commercially viable apartments, storefronts, co-ops, and condos. Agencies created years before to help small-time real estate owners and buyers now mobilized to remove legal and financial roadblocks for big-time speculators and the developers that followed.
Most of the neighborhood’s residential tenants were protected by rent control and rent stabilization laws that had been on the books for decades. Old-time businesses didn’t have the law on their side and new owners and old landlords alike began exterminating old stores and restaurants by hitting commercial tenants with absurdly high rent increases when leases came up. Mom-and-pop shops were shuttered overnight as new and often short-lived galleries, boutiques, and bars took their places.
The Lower East Side’s separate, undiscovered vibe began to evaporate. By the late eighties the hippie dream of a fringe community utopia was already impossible. When it comes to real estate dollars, you really can’t fight City Hall. Not in New York. Manhattan had only so many square miles and apartments, and in the eighties, a lot of financially set new arrivals were willing and eager to trade some safety and yuppie amenities for the thrill of buying into a place that was pretty much the capital of cool.
The writing was literally on the wall—“Not for Sale,” “Speculators Go Away,” “Rent Is Torture”—but the reality had been looming since the mid-eighties. When developers finished erecting the Zeckendorf Towers at 1 Irving Place in 1986, the immediate fallout from this luxury housing high-rise complex just beyond the northwestern limits of the Lower East Side was that it forced some West Village residents to buy watches. The Zeckendorf’s pyramid shaped top floors cut off an entire neighborhood’s view of the massive two-story ConEd clock tower. But the real shadow from the three-tower complex reached east and south across Tompkins Square Park, to a building called the Christodora House on Avenue B.
For more than half a century the Christodora House was the only non-project high-rise on the Lower East Side. It went up in the late twenties as part of the same American settlement house movement that earned Lillian Wald a housing project named in her honor. The idea was for volunteers to mix and mingle and work with recent immigrants and the poor in the Christodora’s meeting rooms, classrooms, music studios, dormitories, and medical facilities. Rental properties in the top floors of the building were supposed to pay for the upkeep and supplies of the charity work and public facilities downstairs. It didn’t work. After World War II, the building was vacated, condemned, and purchased by the city.
The Christodora lay vacant and, outside of various legal and illegal underground activities, unused for twenty years until city cops from the Ninth Precinct raided the lower floors, cleared out the people they found in there and welded the Christodora’s doors shut in 1969. After five bidless years, the city sold the building at auction in 1975 for about one and a half million dollars less than they’d paid in 1948. The speculator that bought the Christodora flipped it (without doing any work anywhere on it) in 1985 for about twenty times what he had paid for it.
Even though it was a complete wreck on the inside, the Christodora was still a high-rise on the outside, and therefore a strong anchor with which to stabilize new development in the area. The Zeckendorf Towers had already driven the last nail in the coffin of a mini-tenderloin area of SROs, porno theaters, seventy-five-cent mug bars, a pool hall, and a boxing gym around Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue that had been a sort of scaled down Forty-second Street for years. Scenes with the child prostitute character and her pimp in Taxi Driver were shot just a few blocks from where the Zeckendorf went up ten years later. Once the Christodora was renovated and reopened, it would help sanitize Avenue B the same way the Zeckendorf started the clock on the area surrounding it. Despite what some of the big mouths protesting gentrification in Tompkins Square Park may have said, it wasn’t a nefarious conspiracy. It was a simple fact of the free market. “Private reinvestment improved housing conditions, stemmed deterioration, and strengthened neighborhood commercial areas,” an eighties city-funded study concluded. More development money converting cheap local real estate into expensive local real estate would smooth the rougher curbside edges of the Lower East Side.
In response to charges that he was selling out longtime low- and middle-income residents, Ed Koch, whose own mansion on the Upper East Side was a job perk paid for by the taxpayers, simply offered, “If people can’t afford to live in a neighborhood, they shouldn’t be there.” Those that didn’t have the skyrocketing price of local fair market rent or a mortgage would be, in the words of one Lower East Side would-be Donald Trump, “pushed east to the river and given life preservers.”
The frustration for developers looking to send old guard immigrants and bohos swimming to Brooklyn was a series of high-rise obstacles along Avenue D—the end of the neighborhood alphabet and the last residential avenue before your feet got wet. Protestors, activists, and homesteaders may have been a pain in the city’s ass, but sanitizing and upgrading the Lower East Side was severely handicapped by the Avenue D projects and the drug sales going on inside of them, not by shouting slogans and staging the occasional riot in Tompkins Square Park.
Soon after New Year’s 1984, Ed Koch and the NYPD reassigned a couple hundred uniform and plainclothes city cops to the Lower East Side in a heavily publicized program called Operation Pressure Point. Citing “complaints from the community” the department instructed Pressure Point cops from the Ninth and Seventh precincts to arrest drug dealers and users. By the summer of 1986 there were more than twenty thousand arrests logged by Pressure Point cops. But only five hundred of those ever went to jail. Pressure Point was toothless. Uniform city cops were denied that neighborhood power to transform impulse into reality when it came to dope arrests. And just like everyone else, they were scared shitless of going into the projects. High-visibility, low-yield PR moves like Pressure Point were mostly a thorn in the side of decent law-abiding people that lived on the D and the visiting junkies and hell-raisers with little genuine connection to the area. Under Pressure Point, drug sales barely slowed but if you double-parked or drank a beer out of a bag on the street, look out.
I read once about a boomtown in Alaska that was accidentally built over a polar bear migratory breeding ground. Along with a nearly endless winter, the people that lived there had to contend with bears coming in their windows, raiding their kitchens, eating their pets, attacking them on the street, you name it. Their hometown was also the two-ton marauding mammal capital of the world. Census surveys in the eighties showed that the Wald and Riis houses on Avenue D were more densely populated per square foot than the most overcrowded cities in Asia. The estimated twenty-five thousand residents of the nearly fifty project buildings throughout the Lower East Side were mostly hardworking, low-income families of Puerto Rican descent. As if life wasn’t already hard enough for the people who lived in the Wald and Riis houses, they weren’t just trying to live while sitting on top of each other, they were going about making a life in the center of Smacktown, USA.
In our first year on patrol in Alphaville, Gio and I saw mothers and fathers fighting through hallways crowded with junkies like they were in a zombie movie. We watched kids on their way to school kicking used hypodermic needles in front of them like cans. Mothers breast-fed infants on park benches a few feet from nodding dopers somehow still standing though nearly comatose and bent sharply over at the waist. They waited on city-run food lines on the same block as rows of junkies lining up to buy smack before lunch. They paid for milk with food stamps in the same bodegas where junkies sold their food stamps to pay for a fix. Arrogant and violent young kids earned a million dollars a year moving heroin while hardworking fathers grew old making barely enough to keep their families fed and healthy.
Along with rising rents, high crime, and high expectations, new arrivals and old-timers alike all faced a potential complication in their lives. Scores of people came to the Lower East Side on the pretext of running away from a life that didn’t suit them to a life lived on their own terms, only to wind up strung out, fucked up, and on their way to an early grave. If the Lower East Side of the eighties had a motto, it might have been “Come for the Neighborhood, Stay for the Drugs.”
For me the crazy snow globe of the Lower East Side wasn’t based around Tompkins Square Park, the Christodora House, Cooper Union to the west, St. Mark’s Place, or any of the other parts of the neighborhood that were buzz words or hangouts then and are sought after real estate or tourist destinations now. My Lower East Side was the ground zero for a heroin epidemic that gripped the neighborhood—the Avenue D projects and the smack flowing out of them. When I officially began working in PSA 4, the housing projects of the Lower East Side, Gio and I were assigned to Sector D, an area that included several different parts of the neighborhood and that was big enough that we patrolled it in a squad car. The roughest part of Sector David was a strip of city-run residential real estate along Avenue D—the same area that had pissed me off so much during that drive to the academy a few years before. As far as cops were concerned Alphabet City’s street dealers only worried about two things: the first was buy-and-bust operations staged by the Manhattan South Narcotics Division. The second was the Housing PD. I found out later that Manhattan South Narcotics didn’t actually like sending undercover officers into the Lower East Side projects. Their guys often were robbed of their buy money on the way in just like the visiting junkies. And housing? Well, I was itching to test the waters on that one. Gio and I were looking for action, and we soon realized that if we hung out around the Wald and Riis houses on Avenue D, we’d find it.