9 Bleecker Street, NYC

Every and then, I need to devote a posting to a single photo, because it is special to me and/or it is an orphan that I can find no other place for and/or it is a great image.  9 Bleeker is one of those pictures.  I grew up on the subways in the city in the 50's and 60's and no longer live there, but when I do go back, I don't recognize the place anymore and wonder what I am doing there.  But every now and then, my meanderings will bring me to a place like this that take me home, if only for a minute and reminds me of the lovely squalor of the city in which I once wallowed, of a time when so much of NYC looked like this.

Is it hard for me to imagine New York City

without Schrafft's, full of Hadassah Ladies

fresh from a Broadway show and deciding

between the french toast or bagel and lox to

fortify them for the Long Island Rail Road trip

back to the suburban tedium we called home?

Not really (he answered with no small sense of

sadness over the inexorable ravage of time).

No harder than it is to imagine life

without my mother, without whom

Schrafft's would never have existed

as an object of mystery and reverence to me

ever present at the corner of 5th Ave and 13th St

across from the Graduate Faculty of 

The New School for Social Research where

I spent two years working to cleanse my mind

of the bourgeois ideas my parents worked so hard

two instill in me.

Two years, and never once setting foot inside,

never once imagining that this holy shrine I passed daily

and the city I inhabited, and that inhabited me,

could cease to exist.

Pablo