Houston Street

This post is being written on the day that CBGB's officially lost its lease, appropriately enough. That club used to be the symbol of a certain era of the Bowery/Houston area. It was around the corner from my dad's apartment, and he was their emergency plumber. My first visit to CBGB's wasn't to see a show but instead to help my dad snake the toilet. Hilly Crystal, the club owner, was just another bushy-bearded, beer-bellied Lower East Side oddball, except that he actually made something happen and kept it going for years. My dad's world was chockablock with bellied, burly, bearded scruffy men, including himself. They were like a strange ethnic group down there. But I digress, this post is about Houstoon Street...

I lived on the corner of Houston Street and Second Avenue as a little kid and then again during high school, and college summers (Pop stayed after Mom and I split, came back to live with him later, hence drama, screw-ups, and a novel-in-progress). Anyway, the Houston street I knew was the end of the world. Run-down tenements, squatter buildings, abandoned buildings, junkies, winos, artists, wierdos, immigrants, fags, rejects... And lots of empty space.

Houston Street was widened years ago (I should find the date) by knocking down the first building or so on both the north and south side of the street. That's what gave Houston Street it's strange border of narrow, trapezoidal lots from the FDR to Sixth Avenue. Ever notice all the empty lots along Houston street that became community gardens (Liz Christie Garden at Bowery), parking lots, fruit stands (on Broadway), car washes (also at Broadway, now Addias world headquarters!?!?), stalls for selling used urban stuff (Just off Bowery)? Or all the exposed, windowless sides of buildings along Houston Street? Those walls are now either being coverd by odd shaped buildings on the little lots, ginormous buildings landing on the old tenement blocks like Venusian spaceships, or used for advertising.

Back in the day (well, MY day anyway) they were used for art: wierdly lovely abstract art (the iron girder nipples in violet and blue on the corner of Broadway that are being taken down right now to be replaced by 14" wide co-op apartments or another Bacardi ad) and what few of my newer-arrival New York friends remember, the social realist fight-the-power murals, a la Diego Rivera, that once festooned all of the lower east side. I have a photo here that I took from my bedroom window when I was 15 in 1985, showing the mural I'd grown up with being white-washed. The mural depicted a troop of five story tall united poor people (a Puerto Rican, a black woman with an afro, an old white lady, and an androgenous asian... person... marching through a burned-out Bosch-like image of the neighborhood with fat landlords with bags of gold lighting insurance fires, rats, junkies, evil white cops, etc. They're marching through the neighborhood like Che-meets-Galactus (ask any guy in his 30's who Galactus was, see Fantastic Four) carrying a rainbow flag (pre-queer-symbol, but queens and dykes welcomme naturally) and transforming the neighnorhood with the magic rainbow into a place of gardens and cooperation. Anyway, they whitewashed the mural in the Reagan years, replaced it with a huge add for the company who owned the building it was on. They sold old architectural ornaments for a fortune to that newly-minted creature, the "yuppie". The jerk who ran that outfit got a little karma when, in the 90's, he knocked holes in the side wall of the building to put in a cafe and make illegal private use of the sad little "park" the city put in on that trapezoidal lot beside the building. The building promptly collapsed, sans casualties.

I've posted a Flemish-style Houston Street still life of Thunderbird bottles from that old era. The old Bowery winos were a distinct breed of ruined men. They were generally harmless, absorbed in their own sorrows and the difficulties of making the rounds of flop houses and Bowery missions and liquor stores while having no employment and being conscious as few hours per day as possible. They might mumble at a little kid passing by, but lacked the coordination and energy and focus to really mess with you. The heroin junkies were a clearly demarkated species: when high they could stand in one spot for an hour gradually sinking towards the pavement millimeter by millimeter, but somehow righting themselves at the last moment, standing, taking a single step, and then slowly closing their eyelids, drooping their heads, and starting all over again. But the junkies were dangerous when thy weren't high, when they got desperate and agitated. But still, they preferred thieving and sneaking to violence and confrontation. It was the crackheads of the 80's who were like the arrival of Gengis Khan. Crazed, paranoid, quick to rage and violence, incapable of imaginning or caring about the consequences of any action, fearless and shameless. They took over the corner of Second Avenue and First Street in the early 80's, and they'd gather in huge mobs of twenty or thirty, waiting for new batches to arrive, then smoking the rock right on the spot. Unlike the winos and junkies, they were unafraid of the roughneck bikers and mechanics and carpenters and stoner-kung-fu-masters of our corner. There were a few melees on the block between the two factions, with blood and broken ribs on both sides. But compared to the crackheads, the folks of my corner (the tenement and the squat) were propertied bourgoisie. They had windows that could be broken, cars that could be torched, and had the odd liability of caring if they were maimed or died. So my dad and his pals could not get rid of the crackheads from the block completely. A sort of peace was reached with the crackheads staying mostly on the First Street corner and the Houston Street corner folks staying on their end. My dad and his pals were all armed, or at least owned guns, but in a moment of clarity it was realized that the crackheads could get guns,too, and you could never beat ghost-people like that, people with nothing to lose.

The last Houston Street photo I'm posting is a picture I took of a beautiful sky along Houston Street. One side effect of the crenellated empty lots along Houston Street was that it was a huge expance of open sky carved across Manhattan. It was just one more aspect of the unrealness of living in that neighborhood. No one else I knew from elsewhere ever went there in the 70's and early 80's, it was wierdly open, as if the city had just dissolved at the edges. "Here be monsters", terra incognito. You'd come out of the mouse-maze of Manhattan street where the sky is an afterthought, a vague rectangular strip somewhere abovee your head (blue or grey or freaky-orange at night from city lights on low clouds) and suddenly- wham!- you come out on Houston Street and the sky erupts huge above you. I remember Houston Street as an abandoned, impossible prairie, with big sky vistas all out of proportion. The sky was just one more thing, I suppose, that went feral and ran loose and spilled out into strange shapes on Houston Street.