As a younger man,
New York filled me with wonder
now, it tires me.
I wrote this haiku last December, or maybe the December before, sitting in a Crate and Barrel store or was it a Pier 1 next door to a Starbucks or something, who can remember, one shopping mall begins looking just like the next. We were in the vicinity of Rockefeller Center and I was waiting for Jackie to look around after we had gone to see the tree and made the obligatory visit to Dean and DeLuca. At the time I thought I was just getting old and cranky and NYC had just passed me by. It was just not my city anymore, bequeathed to a new generation. While this is true, of course, I have come to realize the I haven't changed that much, New York has, and as far as I'm concerned, not for the better. Sure, it is now clean and cute, safe and family friendly, ordered and organized, sanitized and purged of the unwashed and unwanted, but in return it has become less interesting and lacking in intrigue and the dangerous edge that makes a city a city. A city devoid of mystery, danger, decay, depravity, and the desperation that was once scrawled across the walls, the vagrantly ideocryncratic characters that give a city life and inspire poetry appears banished.
Its New York City man
you've got to scream here to survive
and poke yourself with needles
to make sure your alive,
its a plastic airbrushed heaven
that drives little girls insane
and fills their heads with strange ideas
on how to play the game.
or
I am a gutter rat...
My ambitions take me
no further than 42nd Street,
My nightmares take me
all the way to Harlem.
Every time I return to the city, I swear I will never return. The Disney people have reimagined 42nd St and Times Square to death, the Bowery and the Lower East Side have been gentrified beyond recognition, much of Greenwich Village has been torn down by NYU and replaced with large university buildings and what's left is shops selling posters and/or pizza. Not to worry though, Rocco's on Thompson Street and a few other hold outs from the 50's and 60's are still there, but are now islands of nostalgia, lacking in context. I could go on and on and on about the half mile of nameless, faceless buildings on the west side built by Donald Trump that are as bland, lacking in character, and crass as he is, but what's the point. They're there, I'm here, and he's on TV firing people, so you need to watch what you say and do, because there are cameras everywhere. I'm beginning to rant.
What I really wanted to report on was the disorientation I experienced on a recent amble through the SoHo area, and particularly the area around Prince and Elizabeth Streets where I had done an interesting little photo shoot in 2004. As I was walking around, I realized nothing looked the same and I was a stranger in my own town. And indeed, nothing was the same, and not always for the better, although not everyone would agree with me. After some inquiry, I was able to establish that I was in the right place, just at the wrong time.
This is a photograph of Brian taken in 9/04 on the corner of Prince and Elizabeth Streets. Brian, the self proclaimed "Prince of Elizabeth Street" was a passable artist and I think writer, with delusions of grandeur and a funny, playful manner who reminded me a lot of myself when I was young. He was lying in the sun on this discarded couch on Prince when I asked him if I could take his picture. He said "sure, for a dollar" which I gave him gladly, saying that it was a bargain. Afterward, he took me to a cafe down the block where some of his paintings were hanging. They were ok, so we sat, I bought him a coffee, and we talked for a while.
When I was there last week, the building behind Brian just didn't look the same. And indeed it wasn't. When I went into the shop on the corner to enquire, they told me that the prior building, the one with all those nice words drifting up out of Brian's head, had been demolished a few years ago and this new one, which did look pretty darn authentically old and nice, had replaced it. I was impressed, and no longer disoriented. Walking down Elizabeth Street, where the next three black and white photos had been shot, I was surprised to see that they were all taken on the wall of one building marked 11 Spring Street, although the entrance seemed to be on Elizabeth, where I was standing watching people coming and going. I was a little confused about that too. The black and whites were taken in 9/04, the color ones of the same locations were taken last week.
So that was 11 Spring Street then and now. This window where the last photo was taken was bricked up at the time. There's some good things happening here. 11 Spring Street looked great. I wouldn't mind living there myself. I guess its not all bad after all, and I can no longer say...
New York City is a tough town,
if you don't believe me
next time you are in Manhattan
I can show you this little alley
three or four blocks east of Carnegie Hall
where you can still see
remnants of Van Cliburn's smile
smeared across the brickwork.
Pablo, the gutter rat
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