In 1981 I lived in Manhattan at the corner of 11th and Avenue C, at 649 E. 11th Street, on the top floor of a walk-up. The building apparently pre-dated the invention of the elevator. I had a corner room with a good view of the World Trade Center over the burned-out building across the street. The building had a spray-painted black plexiglass door with an peephole area that had been scratched clean with a razor blade. The dealers kept a doorman there, another guy on the street next to a barrel of burning wood scraps or trash, and another guy at the corner as a lookout. A couple of flights up the stairs they would be dealing, mostly junk, and sometimes the dealers let the customers shoot up there, candle, spoon, the whole works.
Why was I there? I was bored of the midwestern small university town and shocked by the murder of John Lennon and election of actor Ronnie Reagan. New-York based punk rock musicians and leftist political philosophies may have influenced my choice to be there. Cost-wise, there was a sharp devaluation from 1st Ave. to Avenue A and then down to C that made it extremely affordable to venture farther east, about a 75 or 80% discount over 2 or 3 blocks, if you wanted to live in Manhattan rather than Queens or Brooklyn.
The neighborhood was mostly Spanish-speaking Puerto-Ricans, poor native New Yorkers, and small numbers of artists, musicians, and punks. I shared the living room with my friend, Pete. I separated my room with a California Republic flag I had found outside a suburban San Diego police station, and slept under an American flag from the same source. Sorry, officers. Youthful indiscretion. Statute of limitations is expired, isn't it?
We furnished the place with stuff off the streets: a sofa with a broken leg, artificial christmas tree, plaster madonna with broken-off head, a chest of drawers. Yes, we carried this stuff up 8 flights of stairs. I turned 18 while I was there. When we got sick of some furniture, like the chest of drawers, we would wait for the street below to get really quiet late at night, and then hurl it out the window.
We would sometimes be asked to show our "tracks" before being let in, and have to tell the doorman that we lived there. There was never any violence, as I remember. There was crime; when the dealers were not there we usually got broken into. Occasionally someone in the neighborhood would try to hold us up with a knife.
I never ventured far from Manhattan in the year I was there. The farthest I went was probably Jones beach and inside the crown of the Statue of Liberty. I was an avid urban hiker already then, walked all over the city, through the Bowery and Chinatown down to Wall Street and Battery Park, through midtown and to Central Park. From 11th to Central Park is really too far, though.
Within a year, it was clear that I wasn't going anywhere, and didn't have much more to learn from this place. I thought NYC would always push me down, too many rich and too many poor. The clincher came when the building caught fire, twice. The first time we discovered it in the apartment under ours. The second time alot of the doors were broken in with axes, windows were broken as people got onto the fire escapes, and some of the slate steps collapsed. Some of the steps were then holes, which you could step over, but some of the landings also collapsed, which made going up or down 8 flights pretty weird, as you had to hold onto the railing and swing your body 180 degrees over a huge drop. Then I think they cut off the water, so you had to visit friends just to bathe, and most of the residents went on a rent strike and were demanding that repairs be made. I didn't stick around to see how it all turned out. I stayed at my girlfriend's until I could go back to university, where I was still an honors student from the 4.0 GPA I somehow got in my first semester. I got this new idea that maybe getting a loan to go to university really was better than working for minimum wage and living in a slum. (I tend to learn by doing. I got to feel it in my gut.) Within less than a year, I had moved on to Los Angeles, but that is another story.
The reason for this story? I have never been back to New York since I left in 1981. I have wanted to see a picture of that neighborhood for a long time, if I can't go there. I decided to google up 649 East 11th Street for the first time in… maybe ever, and googled 647 instead. Why did I do that? Somehow "647" has a stronger trace in the universal mind matrix, I guess. I then discovered that there is now a Japanese sake bar called Kasadela on the site next to where I lived. Kasadera means Umbrella Temple, and it is a temple-town on the Tokaido near Nagoya. I also learned that the musical Rent is supposed to take place at 11th and B, and that Dustin Hoffman, Jane Curtin, and the Black Liberation Army have a history on Eleventh Street. (Not all together as part of the same incident, though. They all lived there.) I found some decent pictures of the restaurant interior and exterior here. Although they don't have sushi, they do have grilled eel over rice, Unagi-don on the menu! I want that and plenty of sake to wash it down. Unfortunately, I am 11 (or 13) time zones away. If I am in the neighborhood, I will stop in.
"The Alphabet" had a pejorative sound in those days. We called it the Lower East Side and sometimes Loisada(?). "Alphabet City" seems to have decent connotations now (but what do I know). It is a major mental hurdle to imagine the neighborhood has changed that much. We were the pioneers, I guess. The few, the proud, the idiots.
MORIAM: K
