La Bamba

Back in February I did a post about Slugger Ann's, a long-lost bar owned by a fascinating woman. In the comments, a number of readers mentioned La Bamba, the bar that Slugger Ann's became after Slugger passed away in 1980.

Recently, a rare image of La Bamba surfaced at the Facebook group "Manhattan Before 1990." The poster, Ruben Iglesias, credits the photo--and the street drawing--to David Wojnarowicz in 1982.



In Cynthia Carr's biography of Wojnarowicz, Fire in the Belly, she recalls how the artist would spray-paint "friendly cows" on the intersection of E. 12th St. and 2nd Ave., so photographer Peter Hujar could see them from his apartment window above the Village East Cinema. (I wonder if Hujar might have taken the photo, clearly shot from the cinema.)

Wojnarowicz wrote about this television-dreaming cow in a short piece called "For Sophie," in which he talks about cruising Stuyvesant Park, and then walking down the avenue to: "the telly cow head seven feet tall and some boy outside La Bamba screaming at me to grow up and get some crayons...and don't fuck up the street...I walked at him like I was gonna spray-paint a cow on his forehead and he split."

In the comments on the Slugger Ann post, reader Poep Sa Frank Jude wrote:

"Yeah, it was La Bamba, a drag-queen and punk spot where I worked for about two years or so. VERY colorful. The stories I could tell! Even wrote a song about the place, begins:

Paris and Laverne, were sitting at the bar
when Donna walked in, she called Paris a whore.
It was 4 AM, closing time for a fight.
I should have known 'cause it happened most every night.
There was no time to think; I jumped across the bar;
Put myself between 'em, took a left hook to my jaw.
My head was reeling; my ass, it hit the floor.
Just a lesson they taught me, one of many more.

These women were men, and I was just a boy..."


Read more about the history of that corner bar here

NYC 1973 - 1974

Recently, I came across the photography of Mike Frey, a group of shots all taken in New York City between September 1973 and June 1974, his freshman year in the NYU film program.

They show a city half-collapsed on itself, filled with dilapidated diners, cluttered fruit stands, and dusty Chinese restaurants, their cracked windows fixed with masking tape.



Everything in the photos looks dirty. I like the city looking dirty. It's hard to say why, exactly, but I do.

Trouble is, some moron is always coming around to say you can't like the dirty old city without also being a fan of rape and murder, which strikes me as an especially moronic thing to say. You can like the look of a time and place without celebrating its worst aspects.



Look at those garbage cans on St. Mark's Place, so quintessentially garbage can-like. They're not made of plastic, but metal and rust. They look like tired workmen, vaguely heroic as they perform a thankless job in the inevitable grip of entropy.



You don't see garbage cans like that anymore--and you don't see the word "transients" much either, except on very old signs that have yet to be ripped down. It's a good word. Transient: 1(a): "passing especially quickly into and out of existence," (b) "passing through or by a place with only a brief stay or sojourn," and 2: "affecting something or producing results beyond itself."

Look at this Staten Island boy. He styled his hair and put on those insanely tall shoes for a trip into the city. He wants them to be as shiny as they can be. He's got things on his mind beyond Staten Island. Did he ever find what he was looking for?



And there's the old High Line, the final stretch where it curves around Hudson Yards. It's being fussed over as we speak, glossed and readied for its reopening later this month. But back then, when Mike Frey was walking around with his camera, it was an old, imperfect thing, flanked by other old, imperfect things.



I liked it that way. I think of the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi (loneliness, withered), a pleasure in the beauty of decay:

"If an object or expression can bring about, within us, a sense of serene melancholy and a spiritual longing, then that object could be said to be wabi-sabi." "Wabi and sabi both suggest sentiments of desolation and solitude." (Wiki)

We don't get much of that anymore, either.

View the rest of Mike Frey's photo collection on Flickr.

Bird Garden

From my piece in today's Metro NY:

On a Saturday morning at the Hua Mei Bird Garden in Sara D. Roosevelt Park, where the Lower East Side rubs up against Chinatown, the trees are full of birdcages. Half shrouded in white cloths, they look like Halloween ghosts, bouncing a little in the branches. Up close, you find that each one is carved from bamboo and contains a single songbird...



...It’s the end of summer. The air has shifted. Already, the leaves of the London Plane trees are brown and falling. One drops into my lap, like a living thing, and I think of a line from a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti:

“Outside the leaves were falling
and they cried
Too soon! too soon!”

Please read the whole essay here.

Shakespeare & Co.

This is the final hour for Shakespeare & Co. Book Sellers on Broadway. Literally. They close one hour from now, at 6:30, forever.



Everything is 50% off. The store is filled with just-returned NYU students, walking around in a daze, muttering "This sucks." No one told them.

A sign in the window reads, "It is with heavy hearts we leave 716 Broadway." The rent was too damn high, of course, in a city explicitly for "hipsters and tourists."



Half the store has already been dismantled. It's painful to see a bookstore with its shelves ripped out.

Tables and shelves are selling to whoever wants them. One woman bought the neon Shakespeare sign from the window for $500. What will she do with it? "I don't know," said the saleswoman. "Maybe open a bookstore? She might end up disappointed."



Previously:
Shakespeare & Co. Closing
...and Hipsters & Tourists

Battle of Brooklyn

For my piece in this week's Metro, a visit to the Battle of Brooklyn celebration.



On a beautifully temperate Sunday afternoon, I went to Green-Wood Cemetery to watch a group of Revolutionary War reenactors celebrate the Battle of Brooklyn. Dressed in their eighteenth-century best, they stuffed a cannon with balls of tinfoil and shot them towards the distant harbor. “Cover your ears,” warned a man in a tricorn hat before the boom and the ring of floating smoke. The monk parrots nesting in the nearby trees were not pleased.

Benjamin Franklin walked around with his kite, ostensibly waiting for lightning to strike, but the sky was stormless, a clear summer blue. Another man held up a leafy twig, explaining, “This is from a tree planted during the American Revolution. It grows in Woodside, Queens. I think it’s called a beech tree, but I’m really not sure.”

I walked to the top of Battle Hill to look at the statue of Minerva. In her helmet and armored breastplate, she waves down to the Statue of Liberty, who seems not to notice or care. They’re like a couple of estranged sisters, these two, one ignoring the other’s overture...

Please read the rest of the essay at Metro

If a Tree Falls...

A tree has fallen in Greenwich Village, thanks to vibrations from nearby construction. One resident has written and posted an obituary--and a bit of gentrification satire--on flyers around the neighborhood:



Locust Tree, a raggedy yet comforting fixture of Greenwich Village over the last several decades, died on Tuesday, August 12, keeling over in his home, a tree pit in front of a tenement building. He was believed to have been in his late forties.

Tree left his native southeast some time in the late 1960s, borne aloft upon the era’s winds of change. “I was a sissy little seed that didn’t fit in in my goddam pod, let alone Marietta, Georgia,” he was fond of telling local residents. A gleefully uninhibited presence, he found welcoming soil on West 11th Street, where he germinated, grew tall, and agreeably steadied tottering drag queens in the midnight hour, shaded infants on hot summer days, and tolerated being urinated upon by neighborhood dogs.

The Village was a welcoming place for a spindly, misfit plant of the pea family Fabaceae in those days. Yet it was rougher-edged, too, and the sapling Tree narrowly missed being obliterated by the 1970 explosion that leveled a townhouse on Tree’s block, the result of a botched bomb-building operation by members of the radical Weather Underground Organization. Still, Tree reveled in his proximity to such cauldrons of artistic ferment as the art-house Quad Cinema and the Mercer Arts Center, home to avant-garde theater productions and such proto-punk bands as the New York Dolls. Tree was regularly brushed up against by colorful passersby including Johnny Thunders, Patti Smith, Alan Vega, William S. Burroughs, Rip Torn, and Viveca Lindfors.

As the Village gentrified, Tree took deeper root as an emblem of a wilder, hairier, more libertine era. But in recent weeks, he was having trouble staying upright, his system weakened by the steady vibrations and unceasing clang of municipal and private “improvement” works on the street.

The future plans for the tree pit where Tree lived remain unclear, though one developer, Watervliet Partners LLC, has proposed “an innovative multi-tier shrubbery concept informed by the Village’s history and prestige.” Under this proposal, the new plant’s shade would be reserved largely for a dues-paying private membership, though a small section, closer to the curb, would be made available to the public.

Dive Bars

In Newsweek this week, Alexander Nazaryan discusses the death of the dive bar in his article "Yuppies Are Killing the Dive Bar."



"All across the land," he writes, "laments have been going up for dive bars in recent years, as beloved establishments pull their last pint, replaced by corporate outposts that are far more morbid than what they’ve replaced. This isn’t a trend; it’s an epidemic."

He lists a few of New York's recent losses, visits the Subway Inn, brings in Joseph Mitchell, and includes a couple quotes from me (“The new New Yorkers skeeve everything that reminds them of aging and death. They want a constantly re-lifted face-lift”).

Nazaryan also speculates on the reason for the dive bar's death:

"The reasons for the disappearance of dive bars can be found in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. No, seriously. The way we drink, where we drink, largely reflects how educated we are, how much money we have, whether we even have the leisure time for unhurried bibulous consumption. The death of the dive suggests that we don’t drink together anymore, as a single nation yearning for a quick post-work respite or Saturday-afternoon escape. The rich can pay several hundred dollars for a single coveted shot of Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve; the poor, meanwhile, drink Cobra out of paper bags and Miller Lite in busted lawn chairs. The dive bar used to be for those in the middle, those who had a little money and a little time, not to mention a little curiosity about the human race: the mid-level bank manager, the cop, the teacher, the hopeful writer, the waitress. They dove together into the sloppy democracy of cheap beer."

Check out the whole article here--it's a good read.