The East Village — 'this place is still the best home for a lot of people'

[Photo by Gregoire Alessandrini]

By Jennifer Blowdryer

Of course the very bloodiest single-minded crimes in Manhattan are real-estate battles.

There was that locksmith of a landlord who allegedly made an entire likable middle-age couple go missing. More locally we have Danny Rakowitz, the so-called Tompkins Square Park Cannibal, and his temporary flatmate Monica, who thought she’d get his apartment and ended up in the stew instead. I always felt that the apartment was the key factor in that murder — anybody who was acquainted with Danny should have known better than to cohabit with him for even a moment.

Marla Hanson got her face slashed by landlord-hired goons and got famous the wrong way, enabling her to hook up with a tabloid-hungry author Jay McInerny for a minute. Gary Indiana’s great book, "Depraved Indifference," is a lightning-rod masterpiece about the mother and son who did away with a needy woman who, to be fair to their aspirational level, did in fact own an entire townhouse.

Most real-estate crimes here in the East Village are of the pettiest Dickensian kind – somebody’s got themselves an apartment, all the way indoors, in a building with or without a lobby, or even just a room in an apartment. Their quarters are often piled high with animal hair, collectibles, and palpable loneliness. Once an anchor tenant gives up or loses a domicile, they got nowhere, really, to go. Ever. Because as much as every jackass likes to mention that the East Village has changed, like they just noticed it, the way straight men don’t notice they’re older til they hit the wrong side of 50, this place is still the best home for a lot of people.

I suppose that on the yuppie/crazy/Puerto Rican/Dominican range of remaining East Village tenants, I’d have to be realtor-perceived as one of the crazies. You’ve got to stick with your own kind, even if it takes a microcosm of rezoning, so I sometimes put other crazies up in my small flat. Barflies, charmers, the well-spoken and unmatriculable, they need to be here, even if it means they're on the floor by my bed, under a table, or, worst-case scenario, sucking up my expensive cable TV watching endless episodes of "Wicked Tuna."

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My favorite guests of necessity were originally here in the 1980s, the 1990s, or the aughts, bein’ beautiful, working on the buildings, spackling, plumbing, and being difficult, going to Mars Bar every damn day, gossiping thoroughly about each other in a Yenta way that is more informational than dunning. Because to have a habit, a craft that’s useless in a technocracy, to slide into permanent befuddlement due to the alcohol-poisoned blood that washes over ones brain every 2 minutes or so, to inhabit a permanent state of virulent misinformation due to that cross bred and sprayed substance which weed’s become. Worse yet, future tenants are likely to suffer from the after shocks of some Dick Cheney version of a military invasion. Bad things just happen to a guy who thinks too much and plans too little.

When brutal things happen to a woman she gets a lot less social slack – the world can collectively shun a crone shuddering on a ledge, no longer mom, booty call, or interested listener, unable and unwilling to hear how the world done a man wrong for even a millisecond.

Homelessness is so rampant but dunning that toting around a very large bag on city streets is a social death knell. The art of the bag stash is an artful slight of hand you'd better master if you're in the position of no position. If you’re trying to get a footing in somebody’s apartment then you’d better not be too obvious – put your stenchy belongs under the couch, just behind a chair, in a corner of a closet you hope the host doesn’t use much. One so understands.

I mean hell, I’m not much of a joiner, and groups of, say, 7 folk or more tend to turn on me in a subtle display of hive mind that I often suspect would translate into a public square beat down in another century or town. If it wasn’t NYC and the last great vestige of street life it retains, I’d be a stray cat, a low-down talent snob, an impossible to please slow to anger woman with snarly hair who picks friends like illogical magnets, an artist that needs to be broken.

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[Photo by Gregoire Alessandrini]

In the East Village I fit right in. I can walk to Ray's, talk to Kim and the ad-hoc salon he hosts behind the counter, get myself a peanut butter ice cream and some Belgian fries. If the sun is out even a little bit I could walk across the street to Tompkins Park, swing by Crusty Row and say hello to G-Sus or the late LES Jewels, or the Circle part of the Park to find Eak, after craning my neck to see if Jay is in the chess area to the right side, dominating at a chess table, sober but happy to be only a few feet from the boisterous day imbibers at the 7th Street entrance.

If there’s a conga beat that’s going on more toward Avenue B there are definitely congo players and maybe some of that hard to master off-beat Latin singing, so I walk down more toward the Avenue B side of the benches and stay close by the music, listening, smiling hard. Every few months my endless pursuit of artistic hobbies means a flyer generating visit to Santos at The Source on 9th Street. He’s a good man with a narrow multi-purpose print shop who crinkles his eyes kindly when I’m there on one of my bad days, stammering out my request for a DVD copy, hunched forward and vague but terribly busy with a million projects no Grant shall ever shine on. Santos makes people happy.

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I spent so many nights in a nearby building with the best cuddler ever that one operator came to call me “The Landlord’s Girlfriend,” a sort of fiendish tag muttered from clenched teeth. I sort of was, especially with my responsibility of pointing out the boiler room. Often there’d be a call that required me to get out of his bed way too early for an East Villager, cram on my shoes, and totter down to the basement to show an indifferent city worker where the boiler was. The employee always had a pleasant world weary shrug of an attitude. They'd look at the boiler, check the clipboard, and we'd all keep moving on with our day.

I had to point out the boiler because somebody with a beef called the Housing Department about rats or noise or God knows what, and the city worker with the clipboard was just a guy with a job, and he had to check something off on a form. This was the easiest out for he and I. It wasn’t like they thought there wouldn’t be a boiler room there if they caught us unawares. It was that the accumulated animosity resulted in a promiscuous use of snitching and cross snitching to 311, 911, and any other have-to-respond social services that exist. It was a stunning and extended use of city bureaucracy and we all had to play our parts, just about every other day, there was no way to stop any of it once it got rolling, Common Sense is such a myth.

Construction and history wise it’s an alright building, and it had itself a nice little courtyard that the couple on the first floor ably ran as their own, which tends to happen with ground-floor courtyards. The East Village version of the real-estate death battle writ small was sometimes more interactive than calls to the Housing Department. Like when the special-needs guy from the second floor clocked the courtyard tenant who’d invited him in for a celebratory glass of birthday scotch. Don’t get too friendly with your neighbors, was the lesson.

On another floor an ex-con moved in with the 90-year-old mother of his dead former cellie and knocked her around. He was fond of trying to engage GOLES (Good Old Lower East Side), an exhausted tenant’s rights non-profit, when his tyranny of one became threatened.

Another standing tenant was a not-too-bright nutter who grew up in the building, drew a knife on his trapped walker-bound father. You could hear the son’s security guard shoes tromping around or spot him booking down the steps, spewing the angry monologues of the self trapped, eyes flashing, face puffed up to a bright and scary red.

The low-down sociopathology of Elder Abuse is pretty common in rent-controlled apartments here and maybe everywhere. Pity the very old, the crippled, and frozen agoraphobic hoarder, because once a predator gets past their dented doors that’s all she wrote. Elder Abuse is both a true evil and banal, a crime perpetrated by the illiterate whose goal to just, you know, stay inside is a tenacious mini genocide of a living soul. Most crime, after all, is just poor people doing heinous shit to each other, no millions involved. Homicide cops don’t think much of us, the uncunning poor.

The other day, as I walked down my hallway steps, a woman, too thin, too hard, too much at work, said “Do you like silver?” and I stopped dead in my tracks. “Yes. Yes I do.” I replied, the only answer, because without leaving my own building I had just met the most classic of peddlers and she is after all alive, and deserves to be here as much as the plants, the bankers, the children, the loafers, and the artists.

The female riff raff of the LES are those plants that are just too green, the ones who sprout through the concrete on a so-called esplanade just off the Con Ed plant on the FDR. These unweeds and the peddling riff raff are suspicious activity, which is the safest way to be around here. It’s fun. In turn we, the effervescent place saving plants, refuse to be suspicious of you, you, and you. That’s how you miss the good stuff. Come on over, you Albanian Supers, you wheezing pugs, you silk screening waitresses with no ability to fulfill an order of any kind. We've all got our nerve!

Jennifer Blowdryer is an East Village resident who's been here since 1985 and was conceived in a dumpy tenement off the Bowery, right on Bleecker. She is the lead singer of Jennifer Blowdryer Punk Soul.