A wrenching play, a crazy comedy

Today, our last, was a Broadway day. Well, for us, it was slightly off Broadway, a block over in Hell’s Kitchen.  We went to a glorious Leonard Nimoy play, the tale of Vincent Van Gogh, in one of the theatres there that has been converted from a church. The theatre was called, appropriately, Starry Night Theatre of St Clement's. The play was simple and eloquent, titled: Vincent.

One actor played the part of Vincent’s brother, Theo. He also played the  rare and harrowing bits of Vincent that he needed to get Nimoy’s tale across.  The set was divided into two areas: Theo’s Paris apartment on the right with lush soft furniture and polished floorboards, and Vincent’s studio on the left with its sparse chewed paintbrushes, letters to Theo on a desk, an old easel, coat and wonderful broad old sunhat, and unpolished floorboards. 

Sunflowers and starry nights exploded, when queued, across the big screen behind so that the entire set almost became a painting. Yellow. Orange. Blue. With a soft lyrical French violin playing solo to accompany it.  The use of the multi media really added enormous depth and flexibility to Vincent's tale.  Offering something in the background further illustrating what the performance was about. The theatre was small, the acting intimate, the performance heart-wrenching.  I doubt their will ever be a day that Vincent’s tale does not tear at my heart.  Bec and I both cried.  We loved it all.   

From there it was just a street across to Times Square, where the great screens of digital advertising have taken over the entire square.  It is wall to wall bright flashing lights.  Chaotic on the brain. As we approached, the crowds (as they had the day we went to the World Trade Centre) exploded exponentially within just half a block. I had to hang on to the others so as not to be pulled from them as the jostling became so pressurised.  Where do they all come from?  We have seen them only in a couple of places, and at MOMA early in the piece, but nowhere else. Tourists can really be swallowed up by New York.  And that is a relief. Luckily, most of the time they were not where we were.  And we like it like that.

Times Square was crazy with wide-eyed tourists.  And sharpsters making a killing. One fellow was pulling in a packet with his racket.  He held up a bit of cardboard advertising that he needed 'crowd-funding' to make a trip  to Dharamshala. And folk in the crowd actually helped fund him!  He is not even pretending to be homeless, but he is doing the same thing, begging. Stashing away a fortune. All with a very big grin on his face.   

A group of middle aged Latino girls had a good 'con' going too. They stood beneath a big Disney screen, dressed up as Disney characters as if they were official, as if they were advertising the new Disney movie. They weren’t.  They were  pan-handling.  In costumes they had put together themselves.  They would line up, surround a loose tourist and insist on a photograph. Then, when that was taken by one of their ‘gang’, they quickly surrounded the hapless victim pressing signs notated, 'Tips Please!' in front of their faces, until money was forthcoming. Or, follow them half a block, insistent, if someone tried to reneg.   I felt sorry for those being scammed.  The gang had one person who collected all the money.  She had a handbag strapped around her body quite literally swollen with money bills.  That huge sum had been extracted from people just today.  And they likely do this every day. Ay-yay.

Another fellow, a Storm trooper, had great wads of tips in fat bankrolls tucked into his socks.  Both sides. When you can get such easy money from such silly tourists in such a short while why would you ever bother doing a 9 - 5 job?

Even the digital screens enticed the spenders. One offered 'fame' whereby you can have your image thrown up on to the big screen over the entire external wall of this building for a full fifteen seconds. Time enough to photograph yourself up there, if you so wish. And most do. For a price. Just come inside the store and find out how!

A young bible basher was reading a bible aloud when he was not cursing sinners, while his subdued partner held aloft a speaker, to amplify his mission.  She probably wished he had a 9 to 5 job, as not a soul was interested in listening to him.  I would not advise a radio job, though, or a church minister.  HIs  approach is not all that successful.  There were six guys and one girl off to a wedding.  And a strolling' naked cowboy, with no socks to hide his stash. Luckily, most people were smiling.  Though the armed police were out in droves, as they are every night, they told us.  Looking forward, not doubt, to another crazy evening in Times Square.

This was the last of New York for us, this trip. We have to fly home tomorrow. We have barely scratched the surface of Manhattan, which we have concentrated on, let alone the rest of the city this trip. We really need months to do it justice. We don't have months.  But we would love to.  Sometime.  

Vincent

The Stage, the Setting, the Actor

Crowd funding a trip to Dharamshala

Panhandling

Great wad of tips tucked in his socks

Cursing sinners, praising saints

A retro wedding

Naked Cowboy

New York guarded

Fame for Sale

Grunge, squats and rubble

Peter Stuyvesant once owned the land that our hotel is on, and this morning, when we left it, and took the bus south ten blocks, the land there, still was part of his bouwerij, his farm. In fact his body lies in a vault at St Mark’s-in-the-Bowery, just a street away, so Peter Stuyvesant came to Manhattan to stay. He could never have guessed, though, that multi-story buildings would cover all areas of his farmland, let alone the entire island he came here to govern.  

Today we are exploring the East Village. Greenwich Village is west at our backs, and Lower Manhattan and Battery Park are to the south of us. This little corner of the world was given away, sold off by Stuyvesant’s descendants as the push for more land to the north became necessary.  

Here, settled some of the Irish overflow from Hell’s Kitchen, as is evidenced by their church of St Bridgid’s. And, here, too, many German immigrants moved. Nearly 50,000 over time. In fact so many Germans came to this area that for a time it was called Kleindeutchland,  Little Germany. They formed the largest group of Germans outside Germany, and their influence on many of the buildings, still standing, is evident: little touches of the baroque: angels and philosophers adorning.  

A disaster struck the German community, though. One gorgeous Sunday morning much of the congregation of St Mark’s Evangelical Church headed off on the General Slocum steamship for a day's picnic on a beach over the other side of the East River. They did not come back. The steamship caught fire not long after embarkation, and some 1200 of the congregation died in the disaster, decimating the German population, who tended, after that, to not want to stay here.  Many moved further north to settle.  

Development meant reclamation. The city workers clawed back as much land as they could from the water's edge, throwing rubble into the East River in order to build a foundation strong enough for greenspace, and for the Franklin Delaware Roosevelt parkway, which carries traffic north and south to this day.  The bricks and rocks beneath it came from the rubble cleared out of London after World War 11.   Much of it was first used as ballast in ships coming across to America. Then was dumped here as much needed landfill. I hope the park and road builders included notes in time capsules for future archaeologists, otherwise future excavations might prove fairly confusing. 

The neighbourhood grew in response to worker’s housing needs, with low set walk ups and elevator buildings set along the streets. Over time it became noted for affordable rent and cheap eats, so started attracting a counter culture.  First came the beats, then the hippies, then the punks. Then the skinheads.   

Yoko Ono regularly held performances in one of the theatres along the main drag here in St Mark’s Place.   Andy Warhol also introduced the Velvet Underground, and Abbie Hoffman started the Yippee movement.  The things we remember from way back. The Hare Krishna movement started in North America around a tree in the park which was used as a chanting circle.   

Artists, musicians and the alternative set of thinkers and talkers occupied many interesting little cafes.  Street art came to decorate the bare brick walls. Much of it, quite stunning. One artist, Jim Power, a homeless man, who has been living on the streets here since 1985, has over time, decorated many surfaces, but especially the base of the local lampposts, with his own Gaudi-like china mosaics, creating a little history of the ‘burb.  He is called “Mosaic Man”.

The riots this lamp post records in 1988, were not the first, nor will they be the last in the community.   But they were indicative of the times.  The whole neighbourhood had decayed with little or no funds being injected into the community from city hall.  Rents had become prohibitive, cheap housing non-existent.   The central square of greenery, Tomkins Park, had become thick with drug pushers and skinheads and the homeless, who monopolised most of the park as their abode. The city, wanting some control, imposed a curfew of 1am, trying to clean it all up. Riots broke out, exploded, with full blown attacks on Christodora house, a sixteen story high-rise, symbolic of a sense of security, a homeplace, that many of these angry street rioters did not have.  

The whole area has a bit of a reputation for anarchy.  Rents barely covered the maintenance, so many of the high rises mysteriously burned down, leaving great gaps where the building once stood in the street.  The city took over these spaces.

Then the community negotiated for their use with the city, building community gardens in many of them: alternative ones with a grungy interesting look. Many are decorated with pink plastic flamingoes, pop-can whirlygigs, and chipped frisbees cut into flowers.  Recycling what is on the streets as garden art.  

We chatted to some of the locals who told us that community folk get a little funding from the city if they follow some agreed rules, like regular maintenance of the community garden spaces, and keeping them accessible on fine weekends for the public to use.  Many locals are growing fresh herbs and flowers on these dusty city lots that once had been torched.  Some ninety such garden plots in this tiny community are said to exist. 

One of the gardens has become a kind of Men’s Shed and Domino’s Club for a happy group of Puerto Ricans who have, in recent times, moved into several of the streets of the village, we were told. The women were sunning themselves in their space at the back of the garden when we were visiting.  The men had their shed out the front, facing the street, so they could chat to passers-by.  Or protect.

Some of the burned out buildings have been taken over by squatters.  Many have spent decades in their squats and have become very politically active, employing lawyers, to ensure that now, after all this time,  their right to stay is not taken away from them.  Some have repaired hulks of buildings and turned them from burned out ruins into functioning homes again. Some have entered agreements with the city whereby they now are able to own their squats.   

The homeless are here, still, today. They occupy a big corner of the park, their plastic bags and possessions laid out in the sun, airing, on this gorgeous sunny day. Many of them are sitting, just chatting to each other: friends.  Some are playing cards. They stick together, closely.

I had a pencilled note on this walk in my research folder, reminding myself to leave this walk to the end,  as I was not sure how interested we would really be in it, but it has turned out to be one of our favourite walks in all of New York city.  One of our favourite suburbs.   

The sun was out. The locals were relaxed and smiling. The restaurants interesting in ways that we haven’t found elsewhere in New York—eggplant souffle we found on a menu, not burgers. How about that! The coffee, too, was tangy and memorable the way we like it, not anaemic and flavourless the way most others are served. So, all things were right with our world while we walked.   Plus, the entire suburb reminded us of one of our favourite suburbs back home, West End, in Brisbane. They are quite similar.   Unusual.  Cheerful.  Slightly anarchic.  Long may it live in peace. We will remember it well.

St Brigid's now opened again

German influence on the building

A German library and dispensary, still beautiful today

Built using London's World War 2 rubble as infill 

Yippee movement started in this basement by Abbie Hoffman

Hare Krishna movement in NYC started around this tree

A homeless man's homage to Gaudi

Christodora House

Alternative community garden

La Plaza Cultural -- one of the Community Gardens

Street art overlooking La Plaza Cultural gardens

Men's shed for the locals

This one called 'See Skwat', with 'Victory Museum' done in  mosaic. It bears a sign: "This land is ours See Co-op Sqat Not For Sale".

Plastic bags are possessions, street benches are beds

Everything is slightly anarchic

With its little touches of shabby elegance

West Side Art

A dale of flowers, a neighbourhood of nightmares

The Dutch settlers called this area, ‘Bloemendaal’, dale of flowers. Their early farms that sprouted here must once have been pretty. But, then, the potato famine hit in Ireland, and boatloads of dirt poor and starving Irish men and women arrived on the shores of Manhattan where they were stopped short at every turn by signs meant just for them. Like the Jews, no one wanted the Irish to live near them or to work with them.

They tried everything. They were the first to line up for hard labour work on the new docks being built along the Hudson, then the railways, and the slaughterhouses built close to the water, close to the shipping. They offered themselves at hourly rates on less money than freed blacks were paid: a pittance, making new enemies in the process. They would resort to anything to earn a dime. And finally crime became the only means for many of them to survive.

They congregated along the docks where hovel tenements were hastily thrown up as cheap housing for dock workers, where flowers once grew. They formed gangs for protection. The area they lived in became known as Hell’s Kitchen. And was as desperate as Dante’s Inferno. It was the dirtiest, meanest, wildest neighbourhood in town. And, for over a hundred years, the Irish street gangs, ran many of the rackets from there.

We tracked down the Landmark Hotel. It is one of the oldest in the 'hood, and has stood on this spot overlooking the Hudson since 1868. This was a well known Irish hangout and the ghost of a young Irish girl who died upstairs is said to haunt the tavern still. As does the apparition of a Confederate soldier who was shot at the bar, yet who managed to stumble up the stairs until he fell dead into an empty bathtub at the top. Still on the second floor.

The bar was carved from one long piece of a beautiful mahogany tree, and like the tiles and the pressed ceiling are original. Little bits of Irish history adorn the wood panels. An Sciobairin, or Dear Old Skibbereen, is an old Irish folk song where a father tells his son the tale of his history, of the terrible potato famine, of having to flee the country after the Irish Rebellion, of trying to find a safer life. The plaque landed in Hell’s Kitchen.

During prohibition the Landmark was closed, it is said, for all of thirty minutes. For as long as it took to roll the barrels of whisky up the stairs, out of sight. George Raft, the actor, regularly drank at the speakeasy that quickly sprang up inside the tavern, bending all the laws, as usual. It was that sort of neighbourhood.

The Irish weren’t the only group hanging out in the hood. Puerto Ricans bought in as cheap labour lived here, too, and muscled their way through life the way the Irish learned to do. Further along from the Landmark Tavern, in a street once lined with grimy buildings and smelling like offal on days when the wind blew from the direction of the slaughterhouses, is the May Matthews playground. Still here today. It has a sign slashed across its wall graffiti: ‘We the people demand control of our communities’. Even today.

Here, on a mean drizzly night, late in August in 1959, a dozen or so members of different gangs, the Vampires, the Heart Kings, the Crowns, piled into a cab which dropped them at the gates of this playground, a known hangout for ‘white kids’. They were seeking to avenge a beating suffered by one of their friends. They had daggers, belts buckles, umbrellas. They came ready to fight. It started with words, but ended in death, when a young caped attacker started swinging his knife. Within minutes two youths lay dead in the playground and another was seriously injured. Seven were charged one of whom was the caped youth, who reportedly said: “I don’t care if I burn; my mother can watch.” Life was so cheap. Life was so hard. Life had come to this.

It is all like a scene out of the movie, West Side Story, and in truth, this is the neighbourhood, and these were the lawless street gangs, who inspired that musical. Much of the tale based on fact from these streets. And, that very night, just as the Capeman murders were happening, further up that street and around the corner and across the road, West Side Story was playing to an audience of theatre goers at the Majestic Theatre.

The street in front of the playground was once called Hooker’s Row. Strumpets, desperate for a coin, would hang off fire exit ladders, lean out windows and doors, or strut their stuff along the street, offering their wares to any passerby game enough to happen upon this desperate part of town. And where there were prostitutes, there were churches. To save the beaten souls. Many, still around today, though most seem to have been converted into off-Broadway theatres, restaurants or apartments.

Even the Actor’s Studio where Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro trained in method acting was once a church, over in the street behind. It operates still, run by Ellen Burstyn, Al Pacino and Harvey Keitel. Many actors lived in this neighbourhood; for like the Irish, it was all they could afford while studying their craft. And Broadway, a place of dreams, is just metres away.

As is the now trim brick-fronted site where Billy Haas’s Chophouse used to be, where Judge Joseph Force Crater took his young girlfriend out on the town one night for a chicken dinner and a twosome. Some believe he had links with some of the corrupt heavies at Tammany Hall. And that someone there had links with the underworld. Crater ate lobster as his appetiser, and after paying his bill the couple left. Judge Crater was never seen again, and became known in popular tales and comedy routines of the day as 'the missingest man in New York'.  The Iobster and chicken may have been his last supper.

The site of the Market Diner was next on our route. We were there for its final moments. A great front end loader was crunching up the remnants of windows, doors and walls what had once been the headquarters for the Westies, one of the violent Irish gangs of recent times: the 1960s to the 1980s, before a big crack-down and clean up thereafter.

We called in at what used to be the Westies’ headquarters, the 596 Club. It is all spruced up now, and is called Mr Biggs Bar and Grill. Here, though, the Westies leader, Jimmy Coonan along with members of his gang murdered a loan shark, Ruby Stein. It was not a neat job. Stein’s torso was later pulled out of the East River. His finger, it was said, was cut off and saved by Jimmy so he could use it to fingerprint a gun he used in another murder so that Stein would get the blame. Those were the days.

Fingers were a signature sign-off for this gang. Tales are told by older residents in the hood that at times the 596 club had a glass jar behind the bar that held many such severed fingers. One rumour has it that once even a severed head was rolled along the bar top as if playing shuffleboard. 

Today, though, the Westies have gone. The area is being cleaned up. Like much of Manhattan places of low rent and desperate living are quickly being done away with. The gentrification goes on. Here, now, are bijou restaurants topping Trip Advisor lists as the best places to eat in all of Manhattan. Here, too, Broadway goers happily have a night out before, or after, their theatre show.

Here, are off-Broadway theatres, many old churches who have found an easier way to survive, with rave reviews. And, here there still are some naughty gentlemen’s clubs, this one called Private Eye, just a hop, step and jump from where Cindi Lauper’s Grammy winner, Kinky Boots, is playing. A little bit risqué. A little bit renovated. A little bit of fun these days. Folk, though, still tend to call it, Hell’s Kitchen.

Early sign in Manhattan shops

Some of the original Hell's Kitchen tenements

Ghosts of the Landmark Cavern

A beautiful mahogany tree became the bar 

Bits of Irish history adorn the panels

During prohibition the rules were bent and broken

Once a deadly gangland 

West Side Story played out in the streets and in this theatre

Hooker's row 

Actor's Studio 

Used to be the headquarters of the Irish gang, the Westies

Here the Westies brutally murdered a loanshark

Judge Crater's last supper was taken here

Gentrification goes on

Many buildings have found ways to survive

Private Eye is a gentleman's club

Kinky Boots in Hell's Kitchen