Out and About in the East Village

In this weekly feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.

Today is part 2 of our interview with Phillip Giambri, picking up in the mid 1970s. Read part 1 here.



By James Maher

Name: Phillip Giambri
Occupation: Storyteller, Submariner, Actor, Theatre Sound Tech, OTB Announcer, Computer Systems / Network Administrator.
Location: St. Marks between 1st and 2nd Avenues.
Time: 1:00pm on Monday June 17th

Around then I needed a steadier job. How long was I going to go without a responsible pair of shoes? The actor’s union used to give you a free pair of shoes every year if you were unemployed and in the union — and I never missed a year.

So I got a job working for the city at the OTB [Off Track Betting] as an announcer for 15 years. I had benefits. It was in the Paramount Theatre in the middle of Times Square. It was still kind of in the theater so that was a good compromise.

The plus side of that was there was a bar right across the street on 43rd Street called Gough’s Chop House and The New York Times was right in the back of our building, so all of the writers and the photographers and the press room from the Times hung out in this old Irish bar in Times Square. I started hanging out there because I wanted to meet the writers from the Times. I thought they were really interesting. I hung out there off and on for 17 years.

I got my first computer job because of New York Times writers. My wife’s boss bought one of the first portable computers that weighed 55 pounds. It was a Panasonic and it came in a suitcase and I borrowed it and instantly got addicted. A couple months later he said, ‘Hey where’s my computer?,’ So I got this guy that I worked with at OTB and he built a PC for me for $2,000 dollars. I wasn’t sleeping at night, I was taking stuff apart and putting it back together.

At the time at OTB, the computer department switched from mainframes to PCs, and nobody there knew anything about PCs, so they said, ‘Go talk to Phil.’ So my friend who became the head of that side of the business asked me to come work for him as a network administrator. I was willing to take a pay cut to apply for the job and, of course, HR said, ‘You have no experience with computers, how can we hire you as a department head?’ And I said, ‘I’ve been written up in The New York Times numerous times as a computer guru’, and they said, ‘Yeah, sure.’

I pulled out these newspaper articles and they said, ‘Well, how do we know that you’re the Phil that he’s talking about.’ So I said, ‘Okay, wait a minute’, and I go downstairs and over to the Times to my friend Larry Shannon who wrote those articles. He was the first computer writer for the Times and he would always write, ‘My friend Phil the computer guru said we should do this.’ He kept quoting me. So he wrote a letterhead paper from the Times saying that I was indeed the Phil from the computer articles and they gave me the job. Thanks to Gough’s Chop House I got my first computer job. After two years of that, Giuliani came in and things got real bad over there, so I moved to the Hospital for Special Surgery as a network manager and worked there for 17 years.

From there, I decided to retire, get tattoos, and start telling stories. The other thing that I loved about this neighborhood was hanging out at the bars most of my life and swapping stories. I’ve closed so many great bars in this neighborhood that nobody even remembers or knows about. My favorite bar of all time was called Broadway Charlie’s on Broadway near 12th Street.

One of the other reasons that I moved to New York was because I wanted to be a beatnik, but I was about 10 years too late when I got here. I was going around in the West Village to all the places where the beatniks had written. I followed Kerouac and Ginsberg, and I was going around to all the places that they hung out. They were long gone, but I found this bar called Broadway Charlie’s where all the guys who didn’t become famous and weren’t dead hung out. They were all there.

It was an incredible place and every Friday and Saturday night they would have live music and all of the musicians who played in the Village would go and jam after they got off work. From midnight to 4 you would have great music and weirdo local bohos, old folks, and leftover hippies. It was a really strange, fun crowd. This was around ‘77 to maybe ‘81.

In the ‘50s, poetry was really big in the West Village. The beatniks brought it in and then it moved over as far as St. Marks Church in-the-Bowery, which still has the same poetry service that they’ve had for 25 years.

They had Corso and Ginsburg and all those guys leftover from the ‘50s still reading then. When the hippies came in the poetry kind of disappeared. It was all rock and roll, Fillmore East, Electric Circus. Coffee houses didn’t do poetry anymore.

And then all of a sudden in the last 10 years it started, slow at first, but in the last five years it’s felt like the ‘50s all over again. Every bar with a back room is fostering some kind of poetry. It’s amazing. These kids, they act like professional performers and they’ve never been on stage before. They’re reading things that they’ve written on their phone. They’re damn good. It’s a very exciting time right now. The East Village is alive with this stuff.

The thing I’m proudest of is the work we did with the block association. That was the thing we were most successful with that meant the most to everybody around here. Our lives improved dramatically. But then as soon as we did that the Gap came in and all of a sudden everybody else wanted to come in here. That’s the way it works.

James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.

-----

Read Part 1 from Phillip Giambri here.