Tag Archives: EastVillage

American Dream

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A post on Bay Ridge Blog reminded me of an incident I haven’t thought of in many years. Any romance street explosives might once have held left me on the afternoon of a hot, sunny 4th of July.

In 1980, within nine months of moving to New York, I had my own apartment, a fifth floor walkup in a tenement building in the East Village. The rent was cheap.

Across the street was – still is, for all I know – the NYC headquarters of the Hell’s Angels. My apartment faced the street. Every 4th of July, they closed off the street and had their block party. Fireworks and firecrackers were always part of the activities. After the first few years, the novelty wore off, then transformed into endurance trauma.

Over the years, the scale and scope escalated. More fireworks, more elaborate displays, larger booms. My least favorite was some kind of single-shot explosive. It was launched from a canister on the street, rose several stories, then exploded. It rose to just below roof height, right outside my windows. Even on a bright, sunny day, you could see the flash of light through the dirty plastic roll-up shades. Then you felt – not heard – the percussive shock wave pass through your body. Then you noticed your ears were ringing.

One year, I think in the late 80s, my neighbor across the hall invited me to look after his apartment and his cat while he escaped for the 4th. This was a vacation for me as well: he lived in the back of the building, away from the explosions. And he had air-conditioning and cable television, both inconceivable luxuries to me at the time.

I was up on the roof for a while, looking down at the street, watching the people and their barbeques. People were talking, laughing, playing their radios. This year the Angels were loading up metal trash cans with boxes of god knows what, M80s? Then they set fire to them. The first few would go off, sounding like nothing more than loud firecrackers. Then more would catch, firing closer together, then they were firing all at once in a roar magnified by the metal in the can, smoke and flames rising out and up, then dying down, slowly, then silent. The devil’s Jiffy-Pop.

When I’d had enough, I went back downstairs, into the A/C. I could still hear explosions, but they were muffled, distant. I watched TV.

I felt the shock wave pass from the front of the building to the back. Through me, through every piece of furniture in the room, through the building itself. I felt the pressure wave pass through and around me. There was no other sound.

I ran to the roof, to the front of the building, and looked down. On the street, where the trash can had been, was a metal ring. It was smoking. It took me a moment to realize it was from the bottom of the can. The bottom of the can, the rest of the can, was gone. The asphalt of the street beneath where the can had been was on fire.

The scores of explosives, which had crescendoed and subsided like sulfurous popcorn throughout the day, this time had exploded all at once. The trash can was instantly converted into shrapnel slicing into the crowds at street-level. The people on the street were shocked and dazed. People shut off their radios. At first the street was silent. Then strained voices, crying, and screams. From five floors above, I saw blood.

A young man had been hanging out with friends, with family. He was staying with relatives who’d journeyed here before him. Maybe he’d come here to stay, maybe he was thinking of it. He’d only been in this country a month. I didn’t know him. I didn’t even know he existed until a piece of trash can propelled halfway down the block found him. It sliced his jugular. He was dead in minutes.

As I said, I haven’t thought of this in a long time, maybe 20 years. All these images, these sensations, are vivid in me right now. Before I read the post from Bay Ridge, I was going to go to sleep. It will take me a while to get back to that place now.

Grief & Gardening #7: The Garden of Memory

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Yesterday afternoon I was in the East Village. I took a chance and went to visit the first garden I worked on in New York City. I haven’t seen it in nearly 15 years.

It’s not visible from the street. It’s behind a tenant-owned building on 1st Avenue. You’d never know it was there, like so many hidden garden treasures in the city.

The last time I had seen it was sometime shortly after I moved to Brooklyn in 1992. I went back twice. The first time, I saw that, despite neglect, the garden was holding its own. Some things had spread surprisingly well. The hardy Begonia grandis had escaped the bed and spread into the dry-stacked brick retaining walls and halfway across the brick path. By my second visit, someone had “weeded” the garden, removing all of the Begonia, not knowing what they had.

It was a little disheartening. My move to Brooklyn had been disruptive. I was not so much moving toward something as running away from and leaving behind – abandoning – much of my life. I had hoped the garden would continue without me. It seemed as if it might not.

When I went to visit it yesterday, my expectations were low. It could have been worse. I noticed the big changes first, then some details.

20 years ago, we planted a paperbark maple, Acer griseum, as the centerpiece of the garden. It was an outrageous purchase: $300 for a 6-foot tree. I was astonished that it was still there. It’s now huge, probably 20′ high and as wide, nearly filling the width of the backyard. I noticed some dead branches, but otherwise it seems healthy and vigorous. With a judicious pruning, it has decades ahead of it.

The holly which had graced the corner of the yard was overgrown, leaning out from both walls, racing the maple for the light. The two large Ailanthus which had shaded half the backyard were gone. Much of the garden was a rampant carpet of green, mostly Virginia creeper.

Closer inspection of the green told me not all was lost. I recognized the leaves of plants I had planted all those years ago. Epimedium, Cyrtomium, lotsa Hosta. There’s now a carpet of variegated Solomon’s seal. Toad lily. Climbing Hydrangea. I even saw the distinct blue-green scalloped leaves of bloodroot, growing yards from where I had planted it.

And, I was happy to see, the Begonia is still happily seeding itself around. It had not been extirpated after all.

So the garden is still there. In desperate need of weeding and shredding, but largely intact. My visions of what the garden could become, expressed through the selection and placement of plants, have drifted and blurred.

I lived in the East Village for 12 years before moving to Brooklyn. It was where I landed in New York City. Through this garden, the breakup of lovers was transmuted into friendship. New lovers courted in its embrace. I celebrated my 30th birthday there. Many of the others who helped build this garden, men who were my neighbors, died long ago. That garden holds them in my memory.

NYC Garden #1, The East Village, the 1980s: The Shade Garden

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A portrait of me taken in the East Village during the 1980sThe East Village was the site of my first garden in New York City. My second lover in New York lived in a tenant-owned brownstone on First Avenue. When we were breaking up, he proposed a project for the two of us to work on together: turning the backyard behind the building into a garden. The space was dominated by two mature Ailanthus trees which, along with the buildings to the south, shaded the yard almost completely. On the ground grew nothing but liverworts and Ailanthus seedlings. In and on the ground were the remains of a back building which had been torn down a few years before.

I planned a simple asymmetrical loop of a path around the backyard. I identified a dozen different beds, based on their light exposure and site along the path. We started a compost bin. We weeded, and shredded and composted the remains. We sifted the soil to remove the building debris from the dirt. The soil level dropped by a foot in some places. We set aside the usable brick and stone. These became the paths and retaining walls of the new garden. We amended the dirt as best we could with organic fertilizers and bales of peat moss. (These days, I use coir, produced from the husks of coconuts during processing, instead of peat. Peat is not a renewable resource, and its harvesting destroys wetlands.)

We planted bulbs in the fall. I labelled everything. Friends remarked that it looked like a plant cemetery. In spring the first bulbs came up. We were ecstatic.

The garden continued to be developed and enhanced over the next few years by us, building residents, and other neighbors. One of the residents, a carpenter, built a deck over the broken concrete patio. One afternoon we had a load of topsoil delivered. Since there was no access to the backyard from the street, the truck dumped it all in a pile on the sidewalk. Neighbors pitched in and, with shovels, buckets, and a wheelbarrow, moved the soil through the building to a new pile in the garden. We learned about shade gardening. Wildflowers, ferns and hostas created a shady, green, cool oasis – a sanctuary from the noise and heat and, to be honest, stench of the street.

It took five years for the garden to feel completed. I continued to care for the garden until I moved to Brooklyn in the early 1990s. All my records and photographs of the garden over those years didn’t make it with me.