Note: This post ran in a different form on March 6, 2009.
Pop quiz! Guess which of these Greenwich Village townhouses exploded exactly 40 years ago today…
a.) The one that looks different than all the others; or b.) One of the others
Answer: a! The building with the funky-angled protruding living room.
Yes, that’s the one. A few members of the Weathermen (l/k/a the Weather Underground) apparently mishandled some nails and dynamite and…yeah, kablooie. According to ever-reliable Wikipedia, it took nine days of body part collection to determine that three people had died in the blast. Two others survived and escaped arrest, with one remaining on the lam for more than a decade before getting pinched for pulling an armored car heist with Tupac’s stepdad. I am not making this up.
A slightly more thorough reflection from Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn here.
(Note: Every so often, we run short of rational ideas and dip into DCQ’s archives. The bulk of this post, intended to remind our East Coast followers that the specter of the eternal winter is so much peacenik propaganda, originally ran on June 20, 2009.)
Puerto Rican flags and bandanas were flying off the shelves in Los Sures and Spanish Harlem and on D-Block over the last few weeks. On recent weekend days, you couldn’t round the block without catching Big Pun blaring from a passing SUV. The PR trinket hawkers crowded out the Halal cart guys and the Mexican mango stands, pushing them off the corners with sprawling setups dripping red, white and blue. Then, finally, Sunday came: The one day of the year when browns outnumbered whites on 5th Ave. With the JAPs and WASPs retreating to their Hamptons cottages, the Upper East Side belonged to the Boriqueños.
Def Jam’s street soldiers came out:
As did the hooptie crews:
And the merengue fellas, with the requisite porcine drummer man:
Then there was this guy; photos don’t do it justice, but as you’ll pick up, the owner’s clearly a fan of vintage Pacino:
Backside detail: so excessive, it just might be genius. Or a ludicrous waste of money — jury’s still out:
Chicken trike man rocked a picture of his chicken trike ON his chicken trike! A proud fan of fowl:
Jewish Hipster or Hip Jewster? Hewish Jipster? (Did we manage to offend TWO long-persecuted ethnic groups with the latter? Awesome.):
Note: The documentary Los Sures, released in 1984 by WNET and Terra Productions with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is not available for online viewing or outside of limited view-only locations in New York City, including New York University’s Avery Fisher Center. Thus, all photos are physical screenshots, and quality is accordingly poor.
A quarter-century ago, several years after New York City’s flirtation with bankruptcy and societal collapse but well before Giuliani and broken windows, Abner Louima and the jailhouse broomstick, the Hipster Grifter and Sunday brunch on Bedford, south Williamsburg was a ghetto. Forget the abandoned factories and blown-out industrial blocks that begat the schizophrenic skyline of Williamsburg’s modern-day waterfront. Long before developers lampooned city zoning regulations in drowning the northern reaches of the neighborhood in condo towers — many now paralyzed as steel skeletons, rusting in the subprime hangover — the tenements of “Los Sures” served as the heaving, pulsing epicenter of the area’s residential core.
Labeled “the poorest section of New York City” by Diego Echeverria in his 1984 documentary Los Sures, south Williamsburg became the first mainland destination for many Puerto Ricans during the 1960s and 1970s. The film, available for public viewing upon request at NYU’s Avery Fisher Center, profiles five residents of Los Sures — five people whose places in life, while highly divergent in fact and form, are similar in that each arrived there through desperation born of abject poverty. There’s Tito, for one: With a mother, wife and two young children depending on him for financial support, Tito spends his waking hours smoking pot and masterminding myriad petty criminal endeavors. Stoic and centered beyond his 20 years, he appears committed to a life of hustling. “I used to work,” he states. “I was proud…but like I say, eh, if you can (get) faster money out in the street, I’ll stay in the street and make a faster buck, as long as I don’t get locked up, you know, and be a sucker.”
With a friend in tow, Tito takes the filmmakers along as he dives into one of the cornerstones of his considerable portfolio — chopping a stolen car on the fly. Future self-styled repo men of the world, take note (and remember to account for inflation): “We drive (the recently-jacked car) over here in the garage, take everything out right there, and (be) careful, having guys looking out left and right,” Tito explains, describing the process in the matter-of-fact tone of an insurance salesman. “Then we’ll get (to haggling) on the prices: Here, gimme 50 (dollars) for that. Gimme 200 for four brand-new tires. Gimme 15 for the battery. The radio go for 30, with speakers. The interior go for 175. Depends — if it got t-tops, 200 dollars. You want the roof? We’ll cut it off, give us 100 and it’s yours. Cars bring you money, man. It’s a lot of people out there with cars. It’s a lotta cars in the world. Yep.”
Tito (above, at left) and a friend chopping a stolen car, and at home with his wife and children (below).
Among Tito’s 20,000-odd, largely-Latino neighbors is Evelyn, who shares Tito’s embrace of self-sufficiency, if not his interpretation of morality. Vaguely described as an employee for a local women’s nonprofit, Evelyn effectively serves as a one-woman, mobile triage center, coordinating logistics for local families in need (helping one family find temporary shelter, for example, after a fire races through their run-down apartment building). The only subject with any apparent grasp of the city’s municipal structure and bureaucratic shortcomings — as well as the only one, in fact, with a reliable job — Evelyn admonishes the city for its perceived indifference toward the neighborhood’s plight: “You stay with your family, you’re safe. You stay with the system, you’re fucked. There’s no two ways about it.” At the same time, though, she harshly criticizes her own community for failing to police itself as the crack epidemic reaches Los Sures and alters the character of entire buildings and blocks.
“You have to say excuse me to the junkies so you can walk out of your own door,” Evelyn complains, adding that the community’s inaction equates to acceptance in the eyes of the impressionable. “All the little ones are seeing (that this) is easy money…it’s change, and it’s sad. Because it was a joy once. There was a sadness, but there was a joy. There’s no joy anymore. There’s only a lot of pain.”
Not everyone interviewed in Los Sures shares Evelyn’s absolute sense of despair: Marta, a single mother to five children from three different men, espouses the virtues of living in a close-knit community, a place where she’s spent years with virtually every soul in a five-block radius. “I know this neighborhood. I know the people. I know I could walk around; I know I could ask. I know that, to an extent, I’m safe here. I could say I’m among friends, y’know? I don’t find the need to leave Williamsburg to move to another area so that I can solve my problems. I’m gonna deal with my problems here.” She soon admits, however, that she’s got no choice in the matter — conceding that, in effect, her earlier bravado merely masks the fact that she feels trapped in Los Sures: “When you live in an area like this all your life, and this is all you know, how do you get out of it?”
In employing a spectrum of perspectives to bring the full extent of the area’s deprivation into focus, Echeverria also spends time with Cuso, a 43-year-old general contractor who struggles at times to break even on jobs amid fierce bidding wars. Installing a floor’s worth of windows in a tenement fronting Sternberg Park (just across the street from present-day Dunce Cap headquarters), Cuso calls Los Sures “a neighborhood of struggle. We’ve been struggling since we were kids. If it ain’t one struggle, it’s another struggle. You’re always fighting. You gotta fight.”
For Ana Maria, who reared seven children in Puerto Rico before bringing the whole clutch to south Williamsburg, her battle was with one of her sons’ attraction to gangs. Dance competitions among neighborhood b-boy crews became more intense, eventually leading to physical confrontation, retaliatory violence and, ultimately, the calcification of these groups as rival street gangs.
“People would call me saying, ‘Ana, they are going to shoot your son,” says Ana Maria in her native Spanish. “And I would drag him away from the sticks and the guns. All this I fought alone.”
As for Tito, the small-time street hustler, he arguably lost his fight, winding up in cuffs and prison blues as the film’s credits roll. With his brother already gone — shot and killed at the corner of South 2nd and Havemeyer streets years earlier — Tito says he’s resigned to the fact that, however unlikely in a neighborhood full of lifelong acquaintances, he is alone.
“Nobody is my friend no more,” he says. “I just hang out with a couple of guys…and that’s it. I can’t call nobody my friend no more…it’s hard, bro. And it gets harder every day.”
The corner of South 2nd and Havemeyer streets, 1984 (above); Tito in the kitchen with his family (below).
Cuso, (above, at left) and one of his workers in Sternberg Park after finishing a job near the present-day headquarters of Dunce Cap Quarterly.
Tito in his new confines (above); looking south through the neighborhood toward Broadway and the elevated J/M/Z subway line (below).
We braved Olympic-sized slush puddles Sunday night to drop by the East Village’s Mars Bar, known around town as an anachronistic ode to “authentic New York.” In bar-speak, this translates to “dim lights, cheap drinks, and Trainspotting-worthy toilets” (it apparently also means “desirable place to stage awkward celebrity photo shoots”).
The occasion: Mars Bar was getting a makeover, courtesy of a dozen-plus local graffiti artists. The show’s curator, Grimace, gave a nod to the establishment’s history as a hub for street art, mentioning Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lee Quiñones and Keith Haring — arguably the three most influential names behind graffiti’s acceptance by mainstream gallery culture — as one-time patrons. Pointing out that he and his collaborators had protected a swath of the bar’s pre-existing wall — a colorful mish-mash of abstract geometrics hovering above a guitar-playing skeleton — Grimace stressed a desire to “bridge the gap between the old and the new” in reinventing the bar as “a living, breathing, drinking art piece”:
The artists overhauled about half of the bar on Sunday, whitewashing and painting directly on some walls and installing hung pieces on others while adding complementary flourishes to the bathrooms and the underside of the weathered, wooden bar itself. Other surfaces — notably the ceiling — will receive facelifts sometime in the future, according to Grimace.
We caught up with a couple other street art vets, New York natives both: Like Grimace, who spins regularly at 3rd Ward’s massive “Danger” bacchanals in Bushwick, ShazOne and Milk are renaissance men of sorts. In addition to their involvement in street art, both now focus, to varying degrees, on music, with Milk professing to having “retired” entirely from graf writing. They also share a measure of dismay over the perceived degradation of graffiti etiquette in New York, with ShazOne the more outspoken of the two. Here, he describes the graffiti community’s self-imposed justice system — and we’re inclined to trust his explanation, given the assumption that his residence “in the mountains for a couple years” doesn’t mean he was opening for Don Rickles in the Borscht Belt:
Milk employed a different, yet related, euphemism, explaining that “in the early 1990s, I kinda terrorized the L train, the M train, and…doing that type of work kind of led me to a 10-year vacation.” He also forwarded a theory that sound entirely plausible to anyone who’s familiar with the recidivism rate of American ex-convicts…or the origin of the MS-13 street gang…or the move Blow: that New York City abolished its practice of sentencing artists convicted of vandalism to clean graffiti-adorned walls because such programs promoted networking among artists, who would bond over the cleaning and plan future ‘bombing’ sessions — with “future” typically being “right after we’re done cleaning this wall”:
If you’ve ever strolled the streets of San Fran, Manhattan or any number of other global metropoli, you’ve seen the BNE guy’s work. It’s pretty basic: Put “BNE” in all-caps Helvetica Neue Condensed, black on white. Multiply times 100,000 or so. Travel around the world, affix to stop signs, parking meters, streetlight poles, etc. Wait for people to get curious.
We started seeing the BNE stickers around SF in 2006 or thereabouts; the perpetrator would get slap-silly on entire blocks of meters in the Tendernob. Someone working for Gavin Newsom noticed it soon thereafter, and the mayor caught a few headlines — and, more significantly, contributed to the BNE guy’s murky legend — by putting a $2,500 bounty on his head. Nobody managed to collect, stickers kept going up, and the artist’s identity remained an enigma.
Then, news broke earlier this month that the guy behind BNE was setting up for a show in Hell’s Kitchen. The Paper of Record scored an unprecedented interview with the alleged artist and managed to reveal next to nothing about him. We took matters into our own filthy hands. NYC ad agency Mother, underwriting the show at its new warehouse on 11th Ave. and West 44th, tried to play up the show’s import by making it an exclusive “who do you know” deal, complete with a tight guest list we managed to weasel onto. For all the frills — dance floor, DJ, pretty people, free booze galore — the show felt uninspired: The artist’s trademark, predictably, dominated the landscape in varying forms, the most evocative of which was a 15-foot-tall block-graf rendering running the length of the north wall. Most of the other pieces commented on the alleged artist’s announced desire to rival the visibility of multinational brands. (He told the Times that “I don’t see other graffiti writers as my competition anymore. Now I’m going up against the Tommy Hilfigers, Starbucks, Pepsi. You have these billion-dollar companies, and I’ve got to look at their logos every day. Why can’t I put mine up?”)
We’re a day late on this, but the LA Times piece on Norteño-turned-faux accountant Richard Rodriguez has us mulling and pondering: a.) How long till the cop gets sent up the river? And, more importantly; b.) Is an upper lip tat necessarily detrimental to the credibility of a court testimony? Mightn’t it bring in sympathy points in some cases? An example: Say you’re on trial for a petty crime in Australian ranch country — shearing sheep out of season or disparaging Chopper Read, I dunno. The jury is composed entirely of poor ranching folk whose cattle compete with kangaroos for a shrinking stock of grassland. Your upper lip reads “kangaroos are great…for dinner” in Olde English. Helpful or harmful? I say helpful. Chopper would probably agree.
The moral of the story is that sometimes growing a moustache to cover up a tattoo is not always a smart legal maneuver, though in the case of Rodriguez it would seem to be a good move because without it he basically looks like your standard-issue Dodgers bleacher fan slash Latino gangbanger. And no jury in the world likes both of those things.
For our sadistic brethren, graphic video of some fat (and hopefully soon-to-be-indicted) policeman steel-booting Rodriguez here.
…we have fire hydrants and streetball. When the temp breaks 80, the people of Los Sures break hydrant caps.
Then grandma breaks out the oil-drum barbecue, and it’s officially a summertime Saturday afternoon.
The only question is whether or not the firefighters will be able to get the thing back together. In this case, the answer was a resounding ‘no’; two weeks later and it’s still gushing Catskills clear onto brown pavement.
Meanwhile, next to the BQE, a team from Rodney Park is eternally playing some other team from Rodney Park. Or so say their jerseys. I don’t even know if Rodney Park is a place or a man (or maybe the requirement for joining the team is you are a Rodney Park?!), but these guys can run. The teams seem to play one of only two styles: Aggressive, flashy and mistake-riddled with lots of sensational dunks or aggressive, flashy and fundamental with no dunks whatsoever. Either way, the Caucasian baller here is regarded as rare a sight as the post-Giuliani Manhattan street whore or the red panda courtship ritual.
Walking south from 86th on 5th Ave, something seemed odd: Bootyshaker Basin — appropriately located in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art — was missing its bootyshakers. Cops blanketed the museum’s steps; no trademark freaking to be seen. Moving south, it became clear that the tenor of the day was, perhaps, a bit less flirtatious than that of years past:
Not a happy woman…
and then an innocent sociopolitical debate turned nasty; out of frame, some young guy cold-clocked another grrrl and everyone went “aaaaahhhhhh” and started pushing each other. It was great fun…
…until the cops came and ruined it for everyone…
A peaceful procession resumes:
DEES EES NO CAHNIVAL! HOO LET YA EEN??
Creeeeeepy:
All in all, the standard hot vibe, a disappointing freakage level, mediocre pics, and many men (and women) with whom you would not want to engage in argument. 51 weeks till next year…7.5 platanos out of 10.
Puerto Rican flags and bandanas were flying off the shelves in Los Sures and Spanish Harlem and on D-Block over the last few weeks. On recent weekend days, you couldn’t round the block without catching Big Pun blaring from a passing SUV. The PR trinket hawkers crowded out the Halal cart guys and the Mexican mango stands, pushing them off the corners with sprawling setups dripping red, white and blue. Then, finally, Sunday came: The one day of the year when browns outnumbered whites on 5th Ave. With the JAPs and WASPs retreating to their Hamptons cottages, the Upper East Side belonged to the Boriqueños.
Def Jam’s street soldiers came out:
As did the hooptie crews:
And the merengue fellas, with the requisite porcine drummer man:
Then there was this guy; photos don’t do it justice, but as you’ll pick up, the owner’s clearly a fan of vintage Pacino:
Backside detail: so excessive, it just might be genius. Or a ludicrous waste of money — jury’s still out:
Chicken trike man rocked a picture of his chicken trike ON his chicken trike! A proud soul:
Jewish Hipster or Hip Jewster? Hewish Jipster? (Did we manage to offend TWO long-persecuted ethnic groups with the latter? Awesome.):
We were robbed. That we knew immediately. Musty clothes covered every inch of linoleum floor, from the cinderblock walls to the kicked-in back door. Two worn, ransacked backpacks lay somewhere underneath. The passports! Still in their place, alongside the credit cards and insurance cash under the plastic-sheathed mattress. Amid the tumult of the floor, an iPod stood out in its fluorescence, headphones disconnected earlier and stashed separately. They’d left this behind. They didn’t know what it was.
The cameras! The cameras. Gone. They got the motherfucking cameras. The ones with the photos of the beaches and the waterfalls and the jungles and the strutting street kids and the islands and the funeral pyre and the dirty fish markets and Waterloo and Maracas Bay and San Juan de las Galdonas. The cameras packed in our bags an hour before as we’d left our rented, windowless apartment to drink one last Carib with friends and close the book on Port-of-Spain and Carnival Tuesday. To bring closure to three days of round-the-clock costumed, painted, sweaty revelry and three weeks of haggling and tromping our way through Trinidad and northeastern Venezuela. Upon reaching Tragarete Road, we dove into a pulsing current of celebration, each participant a member of a “band” clothed in the stereotypical vision of cultures real and imagined — ”Egyptians” in full King Tut headgear, “jungle warriors” with leaves covering only the most forbidden of body parts, “Americans” channeling John Wayne.
The coordinated costumed pranced alongside flatbed semis alternately carrying full bars and stacks of speakers blasting the designated soca songs of the year (and there were about eight of those, played with according frequency). But this was day three — and we were out of Puncheon spitfire rum, with a plane to Tobago leaving in three hours. Our gang was easy to find — they were usually hanging in the steel-pan yard on the corner, shirtless and stinking from too many consecutive days of music and beer and just trying to “maintain” through the weeks of nonstop practice leading up to the festival proper. We said goodbye to Nigel and Kurt and Tommy and the kind dreadlocked guy Lennox whose canines were chiseled down to vampire fangs and walked back to the unkempt, ground-level unit to collect our packed bags en route to the airport. Only they were no longer packed.
Suspects abounded: Bryan, our drug-dealing landlord with stitches sealing a two-inch mystery gash above his Adam’s apple. Anthony, the skinny dark-skinned man who charmed us weeks earlier with his sordid story of growing up in The States for 35 years before being deported in the ‘80s for smoking a joint in San Fran’s Washington Square Park, who had led us to Bryan when we were in desperate need of shelter? The group of standoffish teenage boys loitering outside Bryan’s apartment when we left for the parade earlier? Nigel, the band leader and our entree to true Trini culture, our unofficial Tragarete Road tour guide? Could he have!? Someone who knew we wouldn’t have time to call the cops over for a report. Someone poor; that eliminated nobody. Someone who knew our schedule — someone who knew us. Someone we’d never find.
Detroit photographer Kevin Bauman has 100 Abandoned Houses (via Volts, Amps and Ohms). We have six. But we swear we shot these before his site blew up earlier this fine spring. Check the trees if you don’t believe us. Ha. Moted.
