January 3, 2015 |
A tsunami of new construction is raging through New York City, luxury abodes rising like mushrooms, owners and domiciles alike shiny and vacuous as Jeff Koons’ sculpture. But there are still pockets and flecks of old New York flair and flavour. West Houston Street, for example, retains its R Crumb Zap Comix vibe, the gnarly old guard enhanced by squadrons of stunning young women, steaming hot clusters of flaming youth. I spent a few summer days down there, observing the pedestrian traffic flow, the citizens cruising by, tall and short and frail and able, a delightful mix of tortoise-paced tourists, money launderers, Old Methadonians and Village purists, gold-plated Eurosnots looking for hot spots.
My inamorata Huminska designs small batches of elegant dresses for an elite crowd of curvaceous gals. She had a brick-and-mortar jewel box of a store in Nolita for several years, but recently moved her business online. A friend of ours, an authentic old-school hipster who owns a couple of properties in Greenwich Village, had an attractive storefront that was temporarily empty. He suggested we might animate the space with a pop-up dress shop. We quickly ripped out the banquettes and minimal kitchen of what had briefly been a lunch counter selling only lobster rolls at $23 a pop. It’s a New York thing, or was. It didn’t last because the owner’s pipeline to the trade had already been hacked by several other lobster rollers who had cornered the freshest crustaceans in Maine. We washed down the bisque-pink walls, tacked up gold shantung drapes for the dressing room, brought in armfuls of Casa Blanca lilies to erase a faint submarine odour, put mannequins in the picture window, dresses on the racks, and opened the doors.
Sporting my customised security outfit – white Sulka shirt, navy shorts and matching socks, mace, blackjack, sap gloves and pepper spray – I sat on the bench out front while the retail action hummed along. The weather was sublime, few can recall a summer so transcendent, absent that sticky heat that descends like wet cotton around the 1st of July and transforms the town into a reeking sauna, in which the sweat-soaked citizens are compelled to change their outfits three times a day, until the temp begins to descend in September.
How pleasant to sit on my doorstop-size copy of Wally Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, and analyse the multitudes hurrying by. I love the way women dress in summer, in slivers and shards, an undershirt worn as a dress, a lacy bra, a panama hat tipped back, everything expertly draped to conceal and reveal; easy to imagine these creatures as Apollo’s daughters hurrying to perform some ecdysiastical solstice ritual on LaGuardia Place. This season’s most favoured outfit seems to be short shorts (lace trim optional) worn with high heels, a lethal combination for lotharios young and old. The male gaze becomes a 1,000-yard stare.
This voluptuous display of skin includes a lot of visible tattoos, too many full sleeves in fact, on kids who ought to know better. Worse yet, the random inscriptions that some seem to apply like patches on a jacket, perhaps not thinking far enough ahead – these inky emblems have a terrible permanence that does not improve with age [Looks at upper arm.]. Still, there is much outstanding ink – indeed, “Who is this, what thing of sea or land / that comes this way sailing, with all her bravery on / and tackle trim?”, her entire belly a full-scale Inferno, tongues of multicoloured flame surrounding some mischievous sprite coiled around her birth button. Her boyfriend clocked me reading his Delilah’s inscriptions and paused at the bench with a conspiratorial smirk.
“Still likin’ it huh?”
I replied in the affirmative, since I wasn’t ogling, just admiring, hence flattered rather than busted. We exchanged banalities, he noticed my fragmentary English accent, asked me where I was from, and I pointed south. “Six blocks down that way, har har.” They moved on and I resumed my observations. Then the fiery-belly girl strolled back to the bench, asking again where I’m from, and more pointedly, “And are you a married man?” That’s when my bullshit detector began to beep – no longer some elegant old city slicker sunning himself as the sun crossed Houston, rather a mark to be conned, tempted and then divested of his wallet. I noticed the boyfriend standing 50 yards up the street, this amateur pimp sending the girl back to work the mark. Jeeze, I’ve been in the city this long and could still be mistaken for a yoyo looking a blow job? Annoyed, I gave Delilah a slow brush, not the stiff yard brush but not a feather duster either; she knew I knew and she wandered off, leaving the disgruntled codger to wave ironically to young Sport waiting a block away.
As if to add another dark shadow to the bright afternoon the next figure I discern in the passing throng is the former hubby of an old friend. Christ, that guy is still walking? I don’t care to see if he’s talking, the amount of alcohol he has imbibed over the past few decades must surely have pickled him by now. I keep my head down, let auld acquaintance be forgot with this schlemiel. I’m disinclined to suffer a blast of his turgid misanthropy today. My happy disposition toward my fellow man was rapidly declining into Swiftian mode, so in order to steer clear of further malice and character assassination, I went to buy a coffee at a neighbourhood hot spot, the curiously named Fair Folks & a Goat. The genial owner, Anthony Mazzei, has plans to build a caffeine-based empire that will eventually eclipse Starbucks, and in the meantime offers a great deal, $25 a month for an unlimited supply of beverages. I signed up for that, and not just because I got the lowdown on Starbucks in Naomi Klein’s No Logo, a terrifying book.
Boldface alert: the artist Francesco Clemente in a nicely rumpled linen suit and espadrilles, pushing his grandchild along in a stroller – I don’t know him but I feel like I know him so I call out praise for his show that I haven’t yet seen that just opened at the Rubin Museum – he smiles like a Caravaggio priest and moves on. Here’s Russell Simmons escorting a gorgeous girl a foot taller than himself; she looks like she stepped off the cover of a Roxy Music album – I haven’t read Page Six lately so don’t know her name. They climb into a black Escalade purring at the curb and drive off into the day.
Across the street is SoHo, where I first set down in this miraculous town 100 years ago. It was an empty quarter at the time. Artists had just begun living in the industrial loft spaces that abounded south of Houston. What visionary could possibly have imagined that one day these empty storefronts would become “flagships” renting for $30,000 a month, that industrial lofts would sell for several million dollars each? Real-estate remorse, that painful affliction for which there is no cure. Except perhaps the contemplation of divine bodies passing by. Here are two West Indian lovelies heading west, doubtless to Melvin’s Juice Box or Miss Lily’s, two establishments down the block that both serve excellent Jamaican food. Who hires these beauties, is it my old friend Serge Becker, entrepreneur par excellence or is it Melvin Major to whom they are drawn like filings to a magnet? This handsome lad from Hilton Head, SC, dispenses fresh coconut juice and codfish fritters that even the Yogatinis cannot pass up, slender as they appear in their spandex uniforms, rolled-up mats damp with fragrant sweat, just done practising the pretzel spiral, a stance that triggers rabid barking from 1,000 downward-facing dog men. I admire that pretzel logic, too, but with the cool eye of a flaneur, not the sticky veneer of a voyeur.
A water truck from the Parks Department hoses down the raised midsection of the street, a flowery bed between the racing streams of traffic. Sunlight kisses the roses and the streets gleam clean for 15 minutes before the grit and grime begins to begin again. A New Yorker I know painted his truck in the exact same colours as the Parks Department, added an almost identical logo and proceeded to park anywhere he wanted in this overregulated town, meter maids unable to discern the tiny difference – and that’s how smart folks negotiate New York.
Houston Street itself is a noisy, dangerous thoroughfare converted by the late, unlamented builder Robert Moses into a four-lane highway, the beginning of his plan for the destruction of pedestrian New York. Moses cared only for cars. He intended to put an expressway through SoHo and out to the Southern bridges, bypassing lower Manhattan, and eradicating entire neighbourhoods in the process. The empty lofts and the tenements now worth millions to landlords who would have sold them for a song or burned them for the insurance, were saved by concerned citizens, led by an amazing woman named Jane Jacobs, a lifelong Villager who understood how cities and citizens could actually coexist in relative harmony. Now in an ironic slingshot of history those landlords’ pockets bulge with unearned money, and New York rolls on, indifferent to everything but change.
By Max Blagg
