Summer in the city: Yesterday was the Siren Festival at Coney Island, and though there were a few bands I would have like to have seen, it was too damn hot to join the indie-themed masses gathered on the blacktop drinking warm beer and complaining about how damn hot it was. So a couple of friends and I decided to show our local stripes and hop the free Ikea ferry (awesome) to Red Hook (awesome), where we unhesitatingly bypassed the superstore and headed to the ballfields. To play ball, you ask? Hell no. For a Latin feast, natch.

Yesterday was opening day of the Red Hook Ballfield Food Vendors summer season, and it was phenomenal. Heaven is the innumerable vendors hawking ethnic variations of the pork-beans-cornmeal trifecta. There were Ecuadoreans selling pickled cabbage enchiladas, Salvadoreans papusas and plantains, Mexicans tacos and huaraches, and Colombians seeking revenge by sending their gringo customers away with plates loaded with enough steak and sausage to ensure an early death. There was corn on a stick and smoothies and horchata and fried sweet bean and plaintain donuts. There was Ballantine's in a brown paper bag sipped through a straw. And though there were times when, due to the deliberate pace of our Latin friends getting in line seemed akin to stepping into a Beckett novel, by and large everybody who had trekked to the Brooklyn hinterlands understood that their patience would be handsomely rewarded.

Word to the wise: you don't go to Red Hook just to pick up a taco or two and be on your way. This is a full day's worth of waiting and eating, and strategy is required if you're going to maximize your time. I would suggest beginning at the southernmost vendor, which yesterday was occupied by the Colombians, and ordering something to munch on while you get in line for the next vendor. Repeating this tactic 5 or 6 times will take 3 or 4 hours, but will result in a comprehensive tour of Central and South American street cuisine. If you need to there is plenty of shade in which to lay down and take a nap; alternatively, you could pop into the Ikea and pay penitence for your gluttony by walking the either delightfully confusing or maddeningly deceptive aisles which are themselves reminiscent of Managua.

Oh, and if you're keeping track: This is why I'm awesome.

What with the weather being nice - if hot - and the fact that I occasionally have somebody to walk with, I've taken to enjoying an evening constitutional as I make my way home from work. I take various routes, enjoying the sights and smells and sounds, and generally trying to lose myself in the sordid architecture of downtown. But even when I walk alone, I am not alone. Indeed, from the moment I leave work on 13th St, there are few moments when I am not being watched.

The NYPD operates 2,310 surveillance cameras on the streets of Manhattan alone. This is in addition to the approximately 2,000 cameras keeping watch in the subway system, and over 3,000 that supervise the goings-on in the city's housing projects. The project to install surveillance cameras throughout the city began in earnest in 2006, ostensibly as a response to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Ironically, September 7th, 2001 was An International Day of Action Against Video Surveillance.

There are 12 community districts in Manhattan. Walking home, I pass through districts 1, 2, and 3. Combined these districts boast 652 surveillance cameras of either the stationary, rotational, or globe variety. Additionally, there are innumerable cameras monitoring the exteriors of private businesses and residences. Just the other day, I counted 4 cameras directed on the sidewalk outside the Hell's Angels headquarters on E. 3rd. St. Invariably, there's a camera scanning the portico beyond the entrance to every apartment building. The doormen always know who you are before you walk in.

Leaving work, I'm picked up by the rotational camera on the north side of 13th St between University and Broadway. The cameras between Liberty and Maiden on William, between William and Nassau on Maiden, and right outside my building record my arriving home. In the elevator I am watched. As I do my laundry I am watched. Sometimes I dog-sit for some former clients, and help myself to a cocktail from the bar. I am never sure that I am not being watched.

As a child I struggled with bouts of insomnia. Unable to sleep, I would feel myself utterly alone in the world. To comfort myself I would conjure the image of the 24-hour Safeway just down the street. 24-hours: I knew there was always a cashier working the late shift, and as long as there was I wasn't alone. The refrain from a song I can't remember suggested that the city is the easiest place to be lonely. Surrounded by people, anonymity is default. I don't know, maybe it's narcissism, but the idea that maybe I'm being watched, that I have a witness...well, maybe it makes things a bit less trivial. That my actions are endowed with some degree of gravity by virtue of their being recorded...I don't know, guess I find the idea of voyeurism comforting.

As is true for most stories I tell, this one begins in a bar. Namely, that neighborhood bar we all love, and in which I spend entirely too much time, the Redhead. According to the certificate of occupancy, the Redhead occupies the ground floor of a 4-story Old Law Tenement at 349 E 13th St. Old Law Tenements were constructed in great numbers between 1879 and 1901 to house the invading European hordes moving to New York's East Side, and are remarkable for providing each apartment with a window.

1921 - across the street from what is now the Redhead, at 354 E 13th St, 5 year old Guiseppe Varota lives with his parents in a cramped apartment. Rumor had gotten around the close-knit Italian community that Guiseppe's father, Salvatore, had received a settlement of $10,000 in a lawsuit resulting from an automobile accident. On May 21, little Guiseppe was replaced by a note demanding $2,500 or "you will never see your boy again, dead or alive, for he will be drowned and the rest of you will be killed and the house burned."

The note bore the mark of the Black Hand: skulls, daggers, and a black hand. An early incarnation of what would become known as Cosa Nostra, the Black Hand, La Mano Nera, was a loosely organized network of recent Italian immigrants, borne from out of, and preying upon, the misery and fear of the immigrant community. The brutality of their methods - they were especially fond of dynamite bombs - was shocking even to the native New York community, which had cut its teeth on the riots and gang wars of the 19th century.

Salvatore Varota never received a settlement, and though he was able to negotiate the ransom down to a still substantial $500, he would never see his son again. Guiseppe's body was found on June 11th in a small box that had washed up on the shore of the Hudson. He was killed because he knew too much: his captor, Antonio Marino, was a neighbor, indeed, from right across the street - 349 E 13th St.

That the block that now houses the Redhead was once notorious as a violent and desperate part of town; was once the scene of one of the most shocking crimes in this city's history; was once, according to the New York Times, "the rendezvous of Black Hand bands," may seem unlikely. But consider: Antonio Marino's death sentence was overturned because he had been savagely beaten by the police. Indeed, the beatings left another one of his crew, John Melchionne, with brain damage so severe he spent his remaining days at Matteawan State Institution for the Criminally Insane. That the Redhead was once the hangout of desperate men whose actions resulted in brain damage? Now this I get.

In the midst of recent archival meanderings, I was surprised to find that the building housing University Place Gourmet Deli was once used by such leftist parties as the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Turns out, the area surrounding 13th St. and University Place was once the epicenter of New York radical politics. Emma Goldman (not Goldburg) lived at 210 13th St. from 1903 to 1913; it also served as the headquarters of her Mother Earth magazine. And Union Square set the scene for everything from Goldman's arrest in 1893 for encouraging the unemployed to steal bread, to protests against Sacco and Vanzetti's execution in 1927.

Lesser known was the New Workers School, which opened in 1923 (just after the opening of The New School) and occupied a building on University Place, at a site now featuring a Jamba Juice. The New Workers School set out to offer a "systematic proletarian education that should help the workers meet the political and industrial emergencies that face them in the struggle with the ruling classes." It offered classes in Marxism, History, Evolution and Public Speaking. New classes that were added for its second term included The History of the Three Internationals, The Syndicalist Movement in Europe, and Imperialism Since 1860 in the United States.


When muralist Diego Rivera's commissioned piece for the Rockefeller Center was rejected, he offered to reproduce it, without charge, for anybody who would give him wall space. Thus began his residency at the New Workers School. A reporter for Time went to see the murals:

The route was obscure: past a cut rate drugstore, a toy shop and a haberdashery to a grimy doorway labeled: NEW WORKERS SCHOOL; up a narrow steep staircase straight to the top floor; through the bare offices of New York's Communist Opposition headquarters, to an oblong lecture room. There from door to door ran a set of 21 heavy, richly-colored fresco panels, a present to Communism by a man generally acknowledged to be the world's greatest muralist—Diego Maria Concepcion Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodriguez de Valpuesta.

The completed work was known as Portrait of America, and prominently features Lenin, surrounded by such figures as Thoreau and Thomas Paine.


More than a name and a politics, The New Workers School and The New School for Social Research both shared an attraction to Mexican muralists. While The New Workers School was able to provide a space for the increasingly marginalized Diego Rivera (he had recently been banished from the Communist Party for his ties to Trotsky), the first pieces commissioned by the newly opened New School for Social Research were a series of large murals by Mexican artist Jose Clemente Orozco, who along with Rivera, was a leading figure in the Mexican Mural Renaissance.


The New School frescoes, five altogether, are know as A Call for Revolution and Universal Brotherhood,and were painted between November, 1931 and January, 1932. If anybody knows where I can see these, please let me know.

I walk past the boarded-up building occupying the south-east corner of 5th Ave and 13th St dozens of times a week, always paying close attention to the iterations of street art and advertisements adorning the north wall and the plywood blocking the front windows from view. The building was graced with some work by Judith Supine for a bit in 2007, and I was particularly fond of a piece that used the back pages of the Village Voice as background for erotic renderings of a recognizable resident of 13th St.

The space has languished, unoccupied and decaying, for as long as I've walked the block. In its last incarnation, the building was known as Cafeteria 61. Sometime in early April, 2006, Cafeteria 61 suddenly locked its doors; handwritten signs posted in the windows read 'Closed. Store for lease.' Cafeteria 61 had been abandoned in obvious haste; from the sidewalk, passersby could peer through the windows and see shelves brimming with merchandise - even the salad bar had been left fully stocked.

On the night of April 18th, 2006, firefighters responding to the abandoned deli arrived to find 'heavy fire conditions'. The blaze, which severely charred the entrance of the building but left the interior intact, resulted in minor injuries for two firefighters. Then, Sixth Battalion Chief Edward Bergamini suggested the fire was suspicious, and that the cause would be under investigation. It is widely believed by residents and business owners on 13th Street that the blaze was intentionally set by the retreating owners.

That the building would come to such an ignominious end betrays the heights to which it had soared, not as Cafeteria 61, but as the Lone Star Cafe, a raucous, Texas-style country music nightclub. The Lone Star opened in 1976 as a non-ironic, straightforward country and western joint in the middle of downtown. It became so popular, however, that it was soon booking such acts as John Lee Hooker, Sly Stone, Buddy Guy and Willie Nelson. Roy Orbison regularly played, and it was not unusual to bump into Springsteen and Van Zandt at the bar. A patron fondly recalls his experience at the Lone Star in the 80's:

The Thursday before Live Aid I was there with my friends from England who had never been to the USA before. Dinner at the Hard Rock and then down to the Lone Star. That night a blues guy called " Lonnie Mac" from Chicago was playing. We went upstairs and saw that the tables had reserved signs on them. First came Paul Simon to sit down with Penny Marshall. Then Mike Jagger comes in behind us with Keith Richard. My friend turned to go to the bar and banged into Bob Dylan. I told the guys no work tomorrow, we are staying here and at 3 in the morning Dylan and Jagger got up on stage to Jam. A night never to forget.

But what most remember about this building was not what happened inside, but what appeared on the roof one night in 1978: Iggy, the 40 foot iguana. Made of wire mesh and polyurethane foam, the iguana, an inanimate cartoonish figure of Jurassic Park proportions with an open, spiky-toothed mouth, spiny quills along its back and a great, curling tail, was a downtown icon until skyrocketing rents forced the club to close in 1989. Kinky Friedman, Texas icon and frequent performer at the Lone Star with his band the Shalom Retirement Village People, recalled Iggy being a propos of both the club and the times: 'People made love inside the iguana. Drug deals went down all around it.'

Without a doubt, the purgatory in which the building currently exists will come to an end. Likely, the building will be razed, almost certainly for luxury condos. Perhaps, just perhaps, we can hope for an homage. A 40 foot iguana on the roof deck of your luxury condo? I think I hear selling-point.

So you all know where I'm coming from here, right? Funny thing, though. Fred Savage was apparently a bit of a dick. Enough of a dick, that is, to get himself knocked out by an acquaintance of mine on a a singles cruise in Mexico. It doesn't change the fact that much I think I know about love comes from watching the hesitations between Winnie and Kevin.

Ever noticed how Union Square seems to be de facto divided into distinct regions? The south of the park feels different than the north, while the east has a completely different vibe than the west. I've always felt that the east side of the park is a bit untamed. It seems to be more regularly frequented by malefactors than the west. Same for the north end of the park, where in the afternoon kids from nearby Washington Irving High School gather, and where the occasional melee erupts. The west side of the park, however, with its fountain, artist stalls, greenmarket, dog run, and playground seems, I don't know, cleaner, more controlled. The south end of the park, with the steps and the pavilion, is, of course, the place to be, to see and be seen, and on an day such as today, there are scores of people milling about. All these elements taken together suggest that the most desired place to find an open seat is on a bench in the south-west corner. This evening, when I went to grab a seat and do some reading, I found myself relegated to the north-west sector, a kind of liminal space, straddling the self-awareness and preening of the south-west and the thuggery of the north-east.

It was all an evening in Union Square should be. There was a Cuban man, or probably Puerto Rican, who serenaded the passersby in Spanish with background music from a handheld boombox. There was a gentleman in a 'No Nukes' t-shirt sitting across from me who leaned over to the woman on his right, an obvious stranger, and asked, 'What's toffee?' And there was the young woman who sat down next to me with a sigh. Attractive from the look of her legs - long, tan and smooth, with a tattoo on her foot - I don't look up from my book to look at her face. Aloofness is the only game I got.

Commotion, inevitably, came, came twofold, when a Union Square Partnership employee reaches over the singing Latino to empty a trashcan, and in the process spills discarded food containers all over the man and his stereo. Swearing, in Spanish and French, ensued, while directly in front of me, two men are arguing, one accusing the other of drinking beer in the park, in front of the kids, without an I.D. 'I didn't know, I thought it was an energy drink,' claims the one. 'This is a crime, I'm talking jail-time,' replies the other. Unsurprisingly to everybody, this other soon revealed himself to be drunk (though smart enough to be boozing out of a McDonald's cup), as evidenced when he began to ape the melody of the Puerto Rican, or Cuban, and do an imitation rumba. There were wry smiles on the faces of all, knowing smirks, as if all had come to the square to see just this, and expected nothing less.

I also saw a man walking his dog with his left hand, and his daughter, perhaps 4, whom he had trained to hold onto a leash, with his right.

Some of you may have noticed the now near-completed luxury condos on the NE corner of Elizabeth and Spring St. I know I have pointed them out to whomever happened to be with me as we walked by, commenting on the fact that this neighborhood was not too long ago a no-go zone. Originally a horse stable in the late 19th century (it has ramps between floors instead of stairs), 11 Spring Street is a beautifully crafted stone building. But until it changed owners in early 2007 (reportedly for just under $15 million), 11 Spring was more often mentioned as “the candle building,” known for its uniformly tied white window drapes and the eponymous candles in each of its 60 windows. But even more notable than the mysterious candles, drapes, and the beautifully crafted stone was the bottom floor of the building that had long been a venue for muralists, graffiti artists, and renegade tromp l’oie-ists from around the globe. Indeed, 11 Spring Street was once one of the most famous locations in the world to see and post street art. Here's how it looked:





Notice the white window drapes and the candles:



Here's how it will look when the renovations are complete:



Nobody ever saw anybody go inside to light the candles, or come out after having done so.

I do the legwork, you enjoy the results: City of Memory