Take A Walk On The Wild Side
By: Mark Coleman
Tags: Gentrification, Real Estate, 1980s, Autobiography, NYC

Take A Walk On The Wild Side

Lower East Side NYC circa 1981 photo by Brian Rose

Apartment hunting on the Lower East Side was fruitless but instructive, while a Greenwich Village listing sounded (and turned out to be) too good to be true

Right off the bat there was a strike against me, something the how-to books and job fairs hadn’t warned of — probably because it was so obvious. I had no address, no place to live, and the timer was ticking on my temporary lodging. Understandably, it’s damn near impossible to secure employment if you’re not a local, established in the community. And finding an apartment in New York City is damn near impossible even if you have managed to land a job. Why didn’t I think of this back in Ohio?

Landing an entry-level editorial spot at Railway Age (in a thunder clap of luck) was only half the battle. With just a few prepaid nights left at The Chemists Club, the pressure mounted. Any apartment in my price range — $200 a month max — seemed to reside in the unfamiliar-to-me East Village or distant Brooklyn. Armed with a roll of dimes, and The Village Voice classifieds, I commandeered a booth in the lobby (no phones in the rooms) and began dialing. Dozens of calls yielded three possible spots: two roommate shares and an outright lease.

At this point, I really started to get nervous.

*

“Did you have any trouble getting here?” My potential roommate was polite, apparently not bothered by my late arrival. I was secretly frazzled.

“Nah I just took the subway, and then walked straight down Flatbush Avenue like you said. Sorry I’m late but there was a train delay.”

I was inordinately proud of this excuse, figuring it showed my familiarity with the day-to-day hassles of the city. What happened was I boarded the D express line at 42nd Street as instructed — headed in the wrong direction. Thoroughly frustrated, I disembarked at 125th Street and sprinted over to the downtown side of the tracks. By the time I arrived in Brooklyn, I figured not much else could go wrong.

My ultimate destination turned out to be a compact, well-kept corner brownstone. Inside, the building was divided into two long, narrow apartments per floor. The young man who admitted me into 2B said the other occupant was out so he would show me around. “Adam” looked to be roughly around my age and size, 23 and six feet tall, but thinner and bonier than me, with alarmingly pale skin and frizzy black hair just covering his ears. Immediately he identified himself as an actor and it was easy to imagine the guy onstage as a mime, coated in arty clown makeup. Once he’d shown me the cubicle-sized bedroom for rent, empty save for a sort of thick blanket or lumpy pillow laid across a long wooden frame, we settled into the living room. The décor was decidedly off-campus chic: potted plants, lumber-and-concrete-block shelves containing record albums and paperback books, uncomfortable couch that originally belonged to somebody’s grandmother.

After I ran through my resume, strongly implying that I led an ascetic existence away from the typewriter, the interview took a puzzling turn. Adam kept asking about my “social life” in audible quotation marks, phrasing and re-phrasing his queries. The answer was simple: “I don’t have one yet.” Adam continued undeterred for a spell, clearly irritated by my clever reply. Eventually, he gave up and reclaimed his previous, placid demeanor. His parting promise, “I’ll call you after the vetting process is over, either way,” came across as an insincere formality.

I’m in the process of being vetted all right, I thought while descending the front steps fifteen minutes after ascending them, vetted right out the fucking front door. Muttering to myself on the sidewalk a few minutes later, I nearly collided with a lamppost. Adam sounded like somebody talking in code. Ah, OK. The guy wanted to know if I was gay. But what the hell, why not just come out and ask? Maybe there was something I missed in the Voice ad, a tip-off or password that flew straight over my head. Feeling flushed in the cold, I got pissed off at myself for misreading the situation.

Nearing the subway station, I came upon a crew of teenagers, loafing around a massive boom box on the sidewalk. The radio blasted a disco song and its saucy chorus followed me down the reeking stairway, a woman’s silky voice haunting and taunting.

Can you handle it

Can you handle it

Cause you ain’t had nothing like it

Once I was back underground, hurtling toward Manhattan on the spray-painted subway train, I felt surprisingly relieved rather than disappointed or worried. A row of eye-catching underground murals flashed past the dirty windows as we approached the Manhattan Bridge. Abruptly, a blast of deafening static issued forth from invisible speakers, followed by the conductor’s metallic alto in mid-announcement. “…lastop Brooklyn…neckstop Grand Street Manhattan…THIS IS THE UPTOWN BOOGIE DOWN D TRAIN TO THE BRONX.” I laughed and said, “I love this place.”

*

Nobody had sat me down and advised, Go East Young Man, while I continued my first apartment search. Frankly, I had no idea where I was going or what I was getting into, or I wouldn’t have gone. Not so soon, anyway. Negotiating the area around the alphabet avenues in Manhattan — A, B, C, D between 14th and Houston Streets — was no joke. I learned the hard way: all that time-honored guff I’d half-consciously bought into about living in a bohemian garrote suddenly stunk like bullshit. This was a ghetto.

I read East Village in the apartment for rent ad and assumed it signaled a geographical and spiritual connection to Greenwich Village, the famed bohemian quarter I’d visited as a tourist during college breaks. My grasp of the terrain was tenuous enough that I didn’t realize how far east The Village extended, way past the historic McSorely’s Ale House and the baroque subway station at Astor Place. Geographically, and spiritually, the East Village was another neighborhood if not another universe.

Naturally, as a cultured young person, I’d already made the pilgrimage to CBGB on the eastern periphery. I can’t remember who played that night; it was the tail end of a music-packed spring break vacation in 1980, my final year in college. Twelve months later, the environs surrounding CBGB had stayed the same. The grungy punk bar was a well-lit oasis on the Bowery amid sleazy hotels, storefront Jesus missions and restaurant supply stores where sturdy commercial stoves took up sidewalk space. Inside CBGB, the squalor was (sort of) contained. The Bowery bums of legend were still around, just not stumbling into the club too often.

Walking east of Bowery felt like wading into a deep-water drop off.

The listing for an apartment share in the East Village sounded promising, but I had no real idea where I was headed. Pitt Street, the youthful-sounding woman on the phone explained before I asked for directions, was the continuation of Avenue D south of Houston St. I felt relieved at this evidence of Pitt Street’s obscurity: apparently other people hadn’t heard of it either. “Eve” described both the apartment overall and the vacant bedroom in particular as small; she shared the larger bedroom with her husband. We arranged a meeting the next day. “Turn left on Houston Street when you get off the subway,” Eve said with a rehearsed chuckle, “and keep going till you hit Pitt.”

Feeling edgy, I also hedged my bets with a long shot at an actual lease, inquiring about a one-bedroom apartment for rent on 7th Street east of Avenue B. An unfamiliarly accented voice on the line gruffly scheduled a tour for the next afternoon, conveniently timed right after my Pitt Street interview at noon. “Yus’ buzz thee super,” he said before hanging up. Minutes later, I gathered he meant ring the superintendent’s doorbell.

Houston Street I knew as the east-west artery that bisected the Village and the downtown depths. To the south were Soho’s cast-iron corridors, the old country byways of Little Italy and Chinatown, and nearer the river, the Lower East Side proper, where narrow side streets stuffed with ancient tenements huddled beside institutional-looking housing project blocks.

My East Village initiation began as a stroll along the southern outskirts of Greenwich Village: an Italian neighborhood, with a huge Catholic church and many small restaurants, quaint old row houses alternating with newer mid-sized apartment buildings, clumps of medieval elderly people and shrieking kids crowding a concrete “park.” Despite the proximity of cross town traffic and its attendant exhaust fumes, olfactory evidence of pizza and bakeries in the vicinity was everywhere: more nauseating than appetizing, a sign of my general anxiety about the future. Heading due east, the dorms and lecture halls of New York University soon occupied the north side of my vision, almost campus-like. So far, so scenic.

Passing Broadway and that rarest of sights in Manhattan, a gas station, I was engulfed by a stunningly different vista to the east. Reaching Third Avenue a few minutes later felt like entering an alternate sphere, at least to my naïve imagination. I had crossed over into a dystopian landscape that could’ve been dreamed up by my recent literary discoveries Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard. Everything — buildings, sidewalk, street, cars and trucks, even my fellow pedestrians — looked older and neglected, if not flat-out damaged by the passage of time, and definitely dirtier than the rest of the city, if that was even possible. Layers of indecipherable graffiti and grime covered every exposed surface. Tumbleweeds of windblown trash bounced on the streets. An alarming number of parked cars appeared to be abandoned. Every third or fourth building sported broken windows and barricaded doors.

The distance between avenues appeared to decrease as the numbers on the street signs turned into letters; the buildings got smaller, narrower, more residential than business. Here the ubiquitous corner grocery stores or delis all displayed the same yellow awnings with red-lettered bilingual signs. Bodega. Crossing over to the south side of Houston, my path traced the perimeter of a two block-long park. Ten yards away, a cluster of lost souls shivered on a pair of benches, despite the unseasonable warmth. A trio of burly young men in unzipped parkas and baggy sweat pants stood facing the benches. My sixth sense said “drug deal going down” and sure enough, before I could avert my eyes, the biggest and baddest-looking guy turned and fixed me in his pitiless gaze: “WHAT THE FUCK YOU LOOKING AT…”

When I turned around two breathless blocks later, the coast was clear. Nobody had followed me, but the sidewalk teemed with people — for the first time I really understood that hoary old expression. Hot and moist from speed-walking, I slowed down as much as possible without stopping. Another concrete park loomed up on the next block, and I glimpsed a vast empty swimming pool, complete with lifeguard chairs, lying behind the rusted fence. As Eve predicted, the street sign above read Pitt Street so I hung a right turn. In the middle of the block sat my destination: a decrepit brick building, shuffled into a deck of near-identical structures, each one hastily painted in muddy shades of reddish brown. I’d telephoned Eve from a pay phone on Houston and she met me at the front door. She looked even younger than I’d imagined, too young to have a husband.

Short and pixie-like, with streaks of blonde in her bottle-black hair, Eve confidently padded up the warped staircase like a mountain-climbing guide. The incline made me feel light-headed. Or maybe that was my nerves. When we got to the apartment on the fifth floor there wasn’t a whole lot to see. The long narrow living room opened into the kitchen area where a greasy white refrigerator and stove shared space with a bathtub. I inspected the windowless bedroom for rent — more like a storeroom or closet — in a matter of seconds.

We sat in the living room for a few semi-excruciating minutes, I stared at undecorated walls and dusty, half-full shelves while Eve bluntly apprised me of the dangers of the neighborhood. But I’d decided against the place before she told me there’d been two break-ins just in the year they’d lived here. The drug scene, she said, shaking her head. My share of $400 a month would’ve been $150, cheap for New York. And for all that you paid a price in terms of personal safety, and maybe in self-respect too. I’m not ready to live like this, I righteously decided. Not quite yet, as it happened.

Down on the street, I easily retraced my steps on Houston for two blocks and then proceeded due north on Avenue B. Every corner was occupied by a bodega. Young men clustered in groups outside the stores, laughing and jostling each other. Glancing down the passing side streets, I saw children milling around the front stoops, and middle-aged men sitting on upended crates, drinking beer and playing dominoes in the 50-degree weather. I carefully avoided all eye contact and briskly made my way to East 7th Street. Rounding the corner on the home stretch, I was stopped in my path by one of the locals hanging out in front of the store. He looked to be my age or maybe younger despite an abundant, sculpted mustache. No time for salutations or small talk: he got right down to business.

“Works, works.”

“Uh what?”

“Works! Five, five bucks.”

Oh shit, I thought, he wants to sell me a syringe.

“Look no thanks man, I don’t do that stuff.”

“Then what THE FUCK you doing here…”

It wasn’t the way he said it that intimidated me as much as the accompanying look: cruel, cold, crazy. Walking down his block no longer seemed like a good idea — forget living on it — so I beat a retreat before our conversation went any further. As I continued up Avenue A, headed toward 8th Street and eventually the subway, a squad of beefy men in inky-black suits plowed past me on their way downtown. Now what? Stepping aside, I spotted a telegenic bald spot bobbing up and down amid these obvious bodyguards. It was Mayor Ed Koch, campaigning for re-election. Not yet an official constituent, I held my tongue as the incumbent passed. What I wanted to do was hurl his signature line back in his face. “How’m I doing?” It was a teachable moment. Every day in New York City, the upper echelons and lowlifes traversed — or collided on — the same sidewalks.

*

Frankly, the next apartment ad I answered sounded too good to be true: a studio (one-room) apartment near Washington Square Park, the heart of Greenwich Village, for $300 per month. Fiscally, the rent was a stretch. But I replied in a last-ditch effort, leaving my name and temporary number on a robotic answering machine, never expecting to hear back.

The address turned out to be the best thing about 78 Washington Place: smack dab in the middle of a picturesque block between the park and the commercial strip of lower Sixth Avenue. Arriving early, I conducted a quick surveillance mission before my appointment. The block contained a new NYU Law School dorm and some older three and four-story structures. Several had restaurants on the ground floor. One building in particular drew my attention because it looked out of place next to the other neatly rehabilitated town houses. The dirty-red brick recalled the color of dried blood and makeshift rag-curtains adorned most of the windows facing the street. This had to be it.

I stepped over a decorative iron fence and ascended the crumbling concrete steps to the front door. After several attempts, the buzzer didn’t summon anyone so I began to knock. Instinctively, I stepped back just as the door creaked open and I finally received an answer.

“Ah are you the guy looking for an apartment?”

Jeff the Super, as he’d identified himself on the phone, was a gangly middle-aged man, well over six feet despite stooping a bit. He wore a jailhouse pallor, like he never got out in the sun. His lank black hair was streaked with grey, his incongruous green eyes magnified by gigantic bug-eyed glasses: ocular relics of the previous decade that appeared to survive thanks to a tactical deployment of rubber bands. He immediately qualified as the strangest person I’d met in New York so far. Yet somehow his oddball manner wasn’t off-putting; to the contrary he was cheerful, friendly, projecting a loony infectious optimism right from the start.

Entering the front hallway we were met by the musty, stifling aroma of a long-neglected attic. Sloppily applied globs of bilious red paint didn’t hide the cracks in the walls. Bare light bulbs in half-broken fixtures provided what passed for illumination.The place gave me the willies. As I caught up with Jeff on the creaky staircase’s first landing, a squat, sour-faced man in what could have been a fancy headwaiter’s or bellhop’s uniform appeared from above, grunting something cryptic about toilet paper as he pushed past us.

“There are a couple things that Anita — she’s the landlord — forgot to put in the ad,” Jeff said as we resumed our ascent to the third floor. “The bathroom is in the hall and there’s no kitchen.”

At least he didn’t say a couple little things.

“But every room has a sink, and a hotplate.”

To cut a long story short I moved in two days later, and stayed for six months.