Walking Off the Lower East Side

I'm at Sugar Café at the corner of Allen St. and E. Houston St., a 24-hour cafe that's been open a little more than a year. A long narrow joint that best accommodates parties of one or two, the west wall consists of retractable glass doors that open up in season and the interior walls are painted bright white. The scrambled eggs, toast, and potatoes cost $3, and the coffee is strong enough.

I plan to walk through the Lower East Side this week, guiding my feet with only the vaguest of agendas. I want to pay attention to small things, the details, vignettes, and cameos that may help unveil this area to me. I'll know what I'm looking for when I find it.

Though I decided to eat breakfast at Sugar in advance, that's mostly the extent of pre-planning. Except for 27 Eldridge. I'm reading Richard Price's new novel Lush Life, enjoying the author's portrayal of the Lower East Side, and that specific address is critical to the plot. Don't worry, no spoilers ahead.

I've also walked into the heart of political controversy. City planners are currently revising the zoning plan for a vast swath of the East Village and the Lower East Side, 111 blocks in all, to curb the recent expansion of expensive high-rises in the area. Too many unwieldy buildings now loom over the historic tenements, and the creeping upward development threatens to literally overshadow the street life below. But preserving the character of the neighborhoods while still allowing for moderate growth, especially upwards, is a delicate task for the planners. At the public hearing just last night (NY1 News story), protesters claimed that the city's rezoning plan protects the wealthier areas at the expense of the poor.

Getting here from the Village: A good way to walk to the Lower East Side from Greenwich Village is to walk east on Bleecker to Bowery, and then east along E. 1st Street to where it merges with E. Houston. I've had a thing for E. 1st Street every since I wrote the post about Trotsky's little boy. It's impossible to write about the Lower East Side and not bring up issues of poverty, whether historic or current, just like it's impossible to write a New York novel without discussing social class.

Images: Dorothea Lange. Crowds around post office. Lower East Side, New York. June 1936. FSA/OWI Library of Congress. LC-USF34-009180-E DLC (b&w film nitrate neg.); and WOTBA, Sugar Cafe, Tuesday, May 13, 2008. 11 a.m.

The Classic New York of Mame Dennis: A Coda, on Bank Street

At the time I set out on the recent Mame walk (see related posts following), I was trying to decide between Mame Dennis and Lily Bart, the heroine of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, for the walk's theme. While exploring the places Auntie Mame worked following the stock market crash of 1929, I realized that both Mame and Lily share one thing in common, a crisis of social status. Mame's story of finding herself ill-equipped to fulfill the basic job requirements in the Depression echoes Bart's similar lack of preparedness at the turn of the century. But with her spirit of adventure, Mame knows how to play roles to survive and get along. Lily Bart, on the other hand, can not see her way out of the constrictions of social class and status. Doors opened for Lily, but she did not enter. Mame, as we know, opened all the new windows and doors.

In the late 1920s Patrick Dennis' aunt, Marion Tanner, the purported role model for the character, bought a handsome house on Bank Street in Greenwich Village and lived there until the 1960s. The "real" Mame did not inhabit Beekman Place, but the Village, an appropriate neighborhood for a woman with her taste in ideas and friends. According to several books and memoirs, among them, Richard Jordan's But Darling, I'm Your Auntie Mame and Eric Myers' Uncle Mame: The Life of Patrick Dennis, Marion Tanner was indeed an eccentric wealthy woman of keen intellect, but not quite the caricature that the nephew created.

Patrick Dennis lived his own colorful life, marrying and becoming a father of two children, all the while grappling with issues of bisexuality, and later launching a career as a butler, including a stint for McDonald's founder, Ray Kroc. According to one story, Patrick was once asked about the inspirational source of Mame, and he pointed to himself. At some point he and his aunt had a falling out, and the politics of the family grew complicated. Stricken with pancreatic cancer, Patrick died in 1976 at the age of 55.

While walking along Bank Street last week, I met a woman who knew Marion Tanner. She said Tanner was one of the most brilliant women she had ever known, but "with a giant screw loose." In the 1960s, Tanner turned her house at 72 Bank Street into several apartments for renters, but in time, she let artists, and later ill people, drug addicts, and other unfortunate souls stay there. She eventually lost the house through non-payment of taxes. "Mame" lived the remainder of her years at a retirement home on Hudson St. She died in 1985 at the age of 94.

The woman I met chastised me a bit for asking questions, saying that this was "an old story." But, sometimes the old stories are never told. In the end, what remains is the moral of the fictional story, and the one worth repeating -

"Live, live, live!"
"Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!"

Image: Bank Street, West Village, New York, New York. April 2008.

See related posts:
Classic New York: A Walk, and a Map
Classic New York: 59th and Fifth: A Slideshow
Classic New York: The Algonquin
Classic New York: Times Square
Classic New York: A Visit to Macy's, in April
Classic New York: Henri Bendel
Classic New York: The King Cole Bar at the St. Regis
The Classic New York of Mame Dennis
A Walk in Turtle Bay: Beekman Place, the U.N., Tudor City, and E. 42nd St.
The Liberation Theology of Mame Dennis
Grand Central Theatre, and A New Walk Begins

Coming next: The walk, and a map.

Classic New York: The Algonquin

From Times Square, making my way east along 44th Street, the crowds dispersed as I crossed 6th Avenue. It was a noticeable break between Frantic and Serene. The block along 44th, between 6th and 5th Avenues, regains the polished luster of Classic New York. Of course it does. It's the block, among other things, of the Algonquin Hotel, at 59 W. 44th.

Mame Dennis once worked as a personal shopper at the Algonquin, but, according to Patrick Dennis, the hotel didn't fare well enough in the poor days of 1931 to keep around a woman with expensive taste. He writes, "So she passed most of that spring chatting with old friends in the lounge."

The doorman opened the door for me, and I had to adjust my eyes to the dark surroundings. At around 5 o'clock yesterday afternoon, the lobby was in full swing, with couples and larger groups chatting around cocktails, giving the impression they had been there since breakfast. The first creature I noticed was Matilda, the Algonquin Cat, perched at the reception desk. Now 13, she could care less who walks through the front door. I asked directions to the Blue Bar, and the host escorted me through the lobby to an adjacent room. "Welcome to the Blue Bar," he said, and he said it like he meant it.

I took my place at the far end of the bar. I started up a conversation with the bartender, ordering a "Matilda," a lemony orange vodka concoction finished with a touch of good champagne. The drink is named, of course, for the Cat Who Could Care Less. Finding whatever I said Dorothy Parkerish, the couple next to me struck up a conversation, asked me where I was from ("Greenwich Village, by way of Texas," as part of a lengthier monologue), and said that I just missed a posse of Texans from San Antonio. I'm sorry I missed them, but the bar was clear enough at that point for me to look around at the Al Hirschfeld theater drawings, the subdued blue backlights along the ceiling, and what was on the three television sets.

The presence of TVs in the bar (which would have been impossible in the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis) - tuned yesterday, by the way, to the General Petraeus hearings, the Par 3 round at the Masters, and on the largest, Animal Planet, keep the Algonquin not only a comfortable and friendly place with a rich history but also a living entity in contemporary life. Don't you know there's a war on? How about that Tiger Woods? And, what about that tiger? Sitting at the bar in the Algonquin, I realized that Classic New York is still accessible to the living, not something long gone and in the past, and given political progress since the days of Mame in matters of civil rights and justice, more accessible to more people than at any time before. The matter now, I'm afraid, concerns how many people can afford these kinds of drinks in a contracting economy, an issue Mame faced in 1931.

The hotel and the bar, while beautifully restored, doesn't come across as a set piece, with its best days far behind, but a place where I would like to bring friends to have a drink and to write our own fresh dialogue for 21st-century New York.

Website for The Algonquin Hotel.

Image: by Walking Off the Big Apple. April 9, 2008.

See related posts:
Classic New York: A Walk, and a Map
The Classic New York of Mame Dennis: A Coda, on Bank Street
Classic New York: 59th and Fifth: A Slideshow
Classic New York: Times Square
Classic New York: A Visit to Macy's, in April
Classic New York: Henri Bendel
Classic New York: The King Cole Bar at the St. Regis
The Classic New York of Mame Dennis
A Walk in Turtle Bay: Beekman Place, the U.N., Tudor City, and E. 42nd St.
The Liberation Theology of Mame Dennis
Grand Central Theatre, and A New Walk Begins

The Tribeca of Duane: Duane Street and Duane Park

On my walks through Tribeca last week, I found that my head and feet propelled me toward Duane Park, whether I liked it or not. This particular triangular streetscape, with its little well-groomed island of a park in the center of the confluence of two streets, seems so pretty that there must be something amiss.

This section of Duane Street between Hudson and Greenwich is so sweet that when the weather warms up I want to bring back my set of portable watercolors to paint the scene. It's a quiet movie set of a place with a museum-like quality, reminding me that Tribeca recovered from its shell-shocked days after September 11 by becoming the home for the Tribeca Film Festival.

Not many people roam the streets. While visiting during the day, I've shared the street and park with a handful of people. A few fathers with children, nannies with babies in strollers, and a couple of twenty-somethings by themselves wandered about, most stepping into the welcoming Duane Street Patisserie for coffee and a treat.

The buildings that line the north and south sides of Duane Park represent various styles of architecture popular in the 19th century - neo-Renaissance, Romanesque Revival, Queen Anne, Federal, neo-grec, etc. Importantly, for the overall pleasant effect, these five or six-storied buildings conform to human scale. The exception of scale belongs to the former Western Union building at 60 Hudson St, a massive Art Deco monument that looms over the park like a mean nanny. It's a clean street and a neo-urbanist dream of mixed-use development, except for a mixture of social class.

Given Tribeca's status as one of the city's wealthiest zip codes and Duane Park well-kept by the lucky neighbors, I feel I've intruded just a bit by being here, cautiously stepping into someone else's yard. I'm paranoid. Nevertheless, I've come across so many references in the contemporary literature of New York about the city's decaying sense of place* that this idea of New York-as-Museum-of-Its-Former-Self has started to color my vision, too. Maybe that's why I want to go back to Duane Park with a set of watercolors.

*For more on this emerging theme, read Walter Kirn's excellent review of Richard Price's novel, Lush Life, in the New York Times Book section from Sunday, March 16. Price's novel evokes the changes on the Lower East Side.

Image: The Tribeca of Duane by Walking Off the Big Apple.

See related posts:
The Woolworth Building
Establishing Shots: The Tribeca Film Festival
Tribeca's Most Tripped-Out Vista
Tribeca Living: A Building for Chocolate, and One for the Wool Trade
In Search of the Lower West Side: Before Tribeca
Walking Off Tribeca and Remembering Mostly Lunch
Walking Off Tribeca: The Lay of the Land
Walking Off Tribeca: Starting at Square One

Walking Off the Wall Street Bears: A Subprimer

I am no financial genius, but the colonel and I sold our happy little bungalow in the American South a couple of years ago, a time of a local bubble, and we made a bit of money, albeit a pittance compared to New York real estate profits. * We also got rid of our cars. We were moving to Manhattan, after all, where bungalows do not exist, although I think they would make a charming addition to the landscape, and cars seemed way too much of an inconvenience.

Much of the worries on Wall Street these days stem from the crisis in subprime mortgages, risky loans to often credit-risky individuals to buy homes for themselves. However, these individuals found themselves overwhelmed financially with often high adjustable rate mortgages, and they faced foreclosure. Some of the lenders are also up a creek. All this is just sad. Manhattan, on the other hand, does not see much subprime action at all, because people buying condos and townhouses at 4 to 6 million and up are not financing these purchases through subprime mortgages. New Yorkers of means only deal in prime, like a yummy slice of prime rib roast.

Walking down Wall Street, I visualize the world I have seen outside the confines of Manhattan, one of a variety of homes - ranch houses, bungalows, Cape Coders, MacMansions, adobe houses, shotgun houses, and all the American vernacular, and all the people inside of them, figuring out how to manage their budgets. The elegant Federalist, Gothic Revival, Art Deco, and Beaux-Arts buildings in the Wall Street area, on the other hand, seem removed from this aforementioned crisis, like they're on an island.

WARNING: WOTBA's limited economic knowledge should not be used by real people engaged in financial speculation. I'm just going for the visuals on all this.

Image: Dorothea Lange. 1939. "Washington, western, Thurston County. Malone Company house in abandoned mill village now occupied by Work Projects Administration (WPA) worker." Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection.

* However, WOTBA obviously has way too much time on her hands and should get a JOB.

See the complete walk, Walking Off the Wall Street Bears.

Walking Off The Big Apple Contemplates Going On Strike

Maybe. The Writer's Guild of America is on strike, so late night TV talk shows are in reruns. The Broadway stagehands are on strike, so much of Broadway is dark. So we have much unrest among the creative classes these days in ole New York. So maybe the lone website workers like myself can just quit typing on the laptop, too. Unfortunately, I have no one to strike against or protest. I stay home wearing my fingerless gloves and developing carpal tunnel syndrome, and I have no Scrooge to blame.

"What are some of the ominous portents of a serious economic downtown in the future?," you may ask WOTBA. "And what does it have to do with The Daily Show being in reruns?"

I am glad you asked. Workers of the creative world are on strike because the distribution of wealth has once again been stacked in favor of the HAVES. The writers would like some of the money from DVD sales and the re-use of their material on websites. I don't have any DVDs, but I can attest that I have seen my own words used, and without any compensation, upon the Internet. That was back when I actually had jobs and made an income. I have become accustomed lately, to paraphrase Joni Mitchell, to write real good for free.

Today is a day of light trading on Wall Street, as it's the Veterans Day holiday. One of the underlying causes of the Great Depression in the 1930s, and its importance goes far beyond the stock market crash of 1929, was the unequal distribution of wealth. As an old friend once said to me, "I don't have anything against money. I just wish more people had some."

By the way, I read an article in today's NYT that the striking writers are still writing and publishing elsewhere, because writers need to write all the time. But what of the Broadway stagehands? Are they building stage sets in their living rooms?

The Bowery 2007: Preliminaries

From Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900):

No more weakly looking object ever strolled out into the spring sunshine than the once hale, lusty manager. All his corpulency had fled.

His face was thin and pale, his hands white, his body flabby. Clothes and all, he weighed but one hundred and thirty- five pounds. Some old garments had been given him--a cheap brown coat and misfit pair of trousers. Also some change and advice. He was told to apply to the charities.

Again he resorted to the Bowery lodging-house, brooding over where to look. From this it was but a step to beggary.

"What can a man do?" he said. "I can't starve."

See the complete walk here.

Image: Louis Sontag, The Bowery at Night, 1895

5 Miles, 4 Cupcakes, and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

The four finalists of the cupcake search: clockwise, from top left:
Dean & Deluca Flower Vanilla Cupcake (Prince & Broadway): $5.50
Whole Foods Market R.I.P. Chocolate Cupcake (E. Houston & Bowery): $4.99
Pinisi Red Velvet Cupcake with Strawberry (128 E. 4th. St.): $3.50
Sugar Sweet Sunshine Pumpkin Cupcake (126 Rivington St.): $1.50

"The cultural, if not moral, justification of capitalism has become hedonism, the idea of pleasure as a way of life. And in the liberal ethos that now prevails, the model for a cultural imago has become the modernist impulse, with its ideological rationale of the impulse quest as a mode of conduct. It is this which is the cultural contradiction of capitalism. It is this which has resulted in the double bind of modernity.

-Daniel Bell, Introduction, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 1976

Stay tuned for the winning cupcake and more discourse on social class.

A Note About Walking Into Intimidating Places

As a practicing flâneuse, I have no problem walking into establishments designed for the well-heeled. I like to wander into luxury hotels, upscale restaurants, and auction houses if only just to look around at the decor and then leave. Sometimes I will ask a few inquiring questions of staff, but I do not usually want to mingle that much with the clientele.

More often that not, I am treated with cordiality, sometimes bordering on friendliness, even when I'm wearing my beat-up sneakers and a torn pair of blue jeans.

I attribute my success to good posture, a husky voice in the alto range, and some well-rounded liberal arts knowledge, in that order. Posture is almost everything. While I often feel like I am the only woman on earth that does not practice the yoga arts, I admire all the trim, almost Gumby-like bodies of those that do. As a youngster I attended summer camp in Tennessee, an all-girls camp that divided us up between the Amazons and the Valkyries, where a counselor would wander among us and exclaim, "The posture bird is watching!" I like to imagine that I have shoved the neck of a Fender Stratocaster up my back.

The second is my husky voice. Garbo had a lovely low voice that allowed her to successfully make the transition from silent to talking motion pictures, and I think people take vocal types like Garbo, Lauren Bacall, and Judy Garland very seriously.

The third quality that helps me in New York is a foundation in the liberal arts and a curiosity about the world that borders on a personality disorder.

In summation, I walk into formidable places with my head erect and then ask, in a low voice, if I may look around because I admire the work of (fill-in-the-blank architect or designer).

See complete Garbo Walks.

Image: WOTBA likes to dress up on occasion like the late great Texas blues master, Stevie Ray Vaughan.

"The Pain Threshold," Or, Maintaining Dignity with Our Euro-spending Friends

Or, alternative post title: "Who's Wearing the Fingerless Gloves Now?"

New Yorkers know only too well that it's expensive to live here. According to the latest census numbers, large numbers of New Yorkers shell out a large percentage of their income for mortgage or rent. Other dollars go to the utility company, the cable company, mass transit, and to caffe lattes grandes. That leaves precious little for a movie and brunch.

With the dollar now so deflated in relationship to the euro, New Yorkers have to work hard to maintain dignity with their euro-rich friends visiting from overseas. Vacationing friends will disappear for a spree in SoHo and bring home a bounty of goods to show off. "And it's all so cheap," they say. Or, I'll go out for a nice dinner with visiting friends, and while I'm looking for the thing on the appetizer part of the menu that's under $12 dollars, the friends will say, "And it's all so cheap!"

The weak dollar means that Americans will think twice about visiting Europe and also limit purchases of European goods. At some point, European companies arrive at "the pain threshold," and there comes a knocking at the door. Many articles in the business pages, such as this one, indicate the threshold has already been breached. It could get worse, though, and someone's hand could get caught in the door after it's open and then slammed back shut.

U.S. officials don't mind, because a weak dollar eases the trade deficit. It's kinda pitiful, if you ask me.

More from NYC & Co:
"Total visitor spending from New York City tourism in 2006: $24.71 billion
Total wages generated by New York City tourism in 2006: $16 billion
Total NYC jobs supported by visitor spending in 2006: 368,179
Total taxes generated by visitor spending in 2006: $6.24 billion"

NY Puppy Sticker Shock: How much is that doggie in the window? ARF! ARF!

"Conspicuous consumption claims a relatively larger portion of the income of the urban than of the rural population, and the claim is also more imperative." - Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class

While strolling through the West Village today I came across cute puppies for sale in a window. I don't need any more dogs, but I went into the store anyway. The sign in the window read "Uptown dogs. Downtown prices." Oh so adorable, these little ones! Some puppies slept on top of one another, and others licked their bellies. I loved the puppy that pressed its nose on the glass cage and wanted to lick my face. "How much for the rat terrier?" I asked. Pulling out a chart, the clerk located the rat terrier on the list and said that with today's very special discount of $100 the terrier would cost $995.

Jaw dropping. Obviously, New Yorkers of means will want to spend as much as possible for their puppies. You've probably heard that the Queen of Mean, the late Leona Helmsley, left $12 million in her will for the care of her Maltese.

I, too, spend some money on the proper care of my dogs, including an annual summer haircut of $150 for the big dog. That's $25 more than my own cut at a fashionable Soho salon. I have also bought into the whole dog wellness food industry, purchasing cans with labels such as "Thanksgiving Dinner," "Senior Medley" or "Cowboy Stew." I also buy them sweet potato glucosamine snacks for their aging dog hips. But Walking Off the Big Apple's beloved pets came to her free, as they needed a loving home. If someone bought a puppy for $1095, I worry they might be disappointed if it didn't work and want to take it back.

1917: Trotsky's Flâneur Boy Wanders Downtown

Leon Trotsky lived with his family in New York for two months in 1917. In his autobiography, the revolutionary tells a charming anecdote about his younger son*:

When I telephoned my wife from the newspaper office that Petrograd was in the midst of revolution, the younger boy was in bed with diphtheria. He was nine years old, but he realized definitely – and had for a long time – that revolution meant an amnesty, a return to Russia and a thousand other blessings. He jumped to his feet and danced on the bed in honor of the revolution. It was a sign of his recovery.

We were anxious to leave by the first boat. I rushed from consulate to consulate for papers and visas. On the eve of our departure the doctor allowed the convalescent boy to go out for a walk. My wife let him go for half an hour, and began to pack. How many times she had gone through that same operation? But there was no sign of the boy. I was at the office. Three anxious hours; then came a telephone-call to my wife. First, an unfamiliar masculine voice, and then Seryozha’s voice:

“I am here.” “Here” meant a police station at the other end of New York. The boy had taken advantage of his first walk to settle a question that had been worrying him for a long time:

Was there really a First Street? (We lived on 164th Street, if I am not mistaken.) But he had lost his way, had begun to make inquiries, and was taken to the police station. Fortunately he remembered our telephone number.

(For the full account of Trotsky's two months in NY see Leon Trotsky. My Life. 1930. Chapter XX. New York )

Please see the follow-up post HERE.

*Trotsky's son, Sergei Sedov (1908-1937), an apolitical engineer, was arrested and shot during the Stalinist purges.

Style and Sustenance in NYC on $25 a Day

Walking Off the Big Apple is sometimes upset, along with her fellow citizens, over not having enough money to enjoy the city. New Yorkers pay so much in rents and mortgages now that we have little for anything else. Budget-minded tourists, I would imagine, also feel like there's not much left after one night in a hotel. Luxury travelers, on the other hand, can afford the $1,000 a night hotel rooms and probably don't care how much they spend during the day.

A zany older woman I know from Jackson, Mississippi once told me that she always drank champagne with her bowl of beans and rice. I'm with her on this sort of style and class mash-up. If you've got just $25 to spend on food and drink for a day in New York, I'd suggest the following:
• breakfast: get a small coffee and croissant at a coffee cart and take it to a park = $2.50
• lunch: order a panini at a small authentic Italian walk-up eatery = $6
• dinner: locate a hot dog stand (they're everywhere) and buy one for $2 and then sit in the park. If that's disgusting, then you can buy some bananas and have money left over.
• after dinner or before, find the unmarked Temple Bar on Lafayette and order a world class martini for $12, and leave $2.50 as a tip. If you don't drink, your money will go far in New York.

Walking Off Class Struggle in New York

My entire possessions consisted of five dollars and a small hand-bag. My sewing-machine, which was to help me to independence, I had checked as baggage. Ignorant of the distance from West Forty-second Street to the Bowery, where my aunt lived, and unaware of the enervating heat of a New York day in August, I started out on foot. How confusing and endless a large city seems to the new-comer, how cold and unfriendly!*
-Emma Goldman, Living My Life, Vol. One, Page 1

Walking Off the Big Apple is increasingly concerned about the appalling division of social classes in the city. Though an ever-present part of the city's life, documented over the ages in fiction and non-fiction, the current configuration of hedge fund managers on top and the working poor at the bottom bothers the moral conscience. Thusly, I am rummaging through the grad school shelves for wisdom on the topic - Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class, Karl Marx's articles for the New York Daily Tribune, Edith Wharton's novels, and everything by Emma Goldman - to share with you in the days ahead.

* Emma Goldman walked approximately 4 miles from the ferry landing near W. 42nd St. to the Bowery.

See full text of Living My Life at the Anarchy Archives

Marxists Internet Archive Library

See full text of Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class here.