The other day I traveled south of 34th street for the first time since March to walk the Lower East Side of Manhattan, an area that has held on to a sense of history that can be hard to find elsewhere in the city. The blocks that straddle the lower part of the Bowery, way south where it originates at Park Row, all the way up to East Houston street, is a treasure trove of old buildings that hark back to a time when many new immigrants would start their American life there.
I have been reading “Elizabeth Street” by Laurie Fabiano, a novel published in 2006 by an Italian American from Hoboken who tells us the story of her family coming from Calabria around 1900. She writes about why they came, where they came from, how they lived and why they moved away from Little Italy. The book is written in a very attractive, simple style, with some sections set in Scilla, across the straits from Messina.Other sections draw from the author’s youth in the ’60s and ’70s when she was trying to persuade the older generation to share the family history with her. It is a great read and I wish all of us could write a story as captivating as hers about the immediate history of our family.
So down I went to Elizabeth Street, part of a group of streets that was constructed from 1755 onward, running north from the old city. These streets give away their age by the fact that they all bear names of English noblemen, Essex, Norfolk, Forsyth and, of course, their Queen the original Elizabeth. They predate the Revolution, the New York Grid and Gentrification by several decades and they were home to the poorest of the poor, until finally in the last century the affluent moved in looking for a bit of history.
The beginning of Elizabeth street, south of Canal Street is a particularly vibrant corner of China Town, proving that, unlike Little Italy, China Town is still very much an ethnic neighborhood, with many grocery stores and herb shops, none of which are overly commercialized or modernized. Post Covid (for the time being), the street is packed with people on a Friday morning going about their daily shopping routine and the vast majority of them are Chinese. Most importantly, because social distancing is not even an option, everyone wears masks which makes it feel even more like you are in Asia instead of in America.
Much of the first block of Elizabeth street is taken over by the 5th precinct station of the NYPD. As soon as you approach the corner of Bayard you can tell that there is a police station nearby, because there are cop cars everywhere, some of them with agents on duty in them, usually staring at their cell phones inside their cars rather than out and about engaging with the people they are supposed to protect. Once you turn in to Elizabeth street proper, the street is like a parking lot, because, same as on other blocks close to other precinct stations, the police allow themselves free parking all around their place of work – which these days appears to be mostly indoors.
The Fifth Precinct Station itself is celebrating its 175th birthday this year and while I am sure that they enjoy good relationships with the local business people, you don’t see any of the cops walking the street. The tendency of the NYPD to lock themselves into their own work space that started after 9/11 has now become a way of life for them, not only here but on 151st in Harlem and on 21st in Gramercy to mention just a couple of places where I have seen it for myself.
In Laurie Fabiano’s book, she writes about an Italian cop called Petrosino who died taking on the Mano Nera. She also tells the story of how her grandmother was kidnapped as a little girl by Il Lupo and his gang of Italian gangsters for ransom. The relationship between the police and the community, then as now, was always spurious, with the ethnic make-up of the force lagging way behind the most recent changes in the population. Right now there seems to be a full disconnect, enhanced by cops sitting in their cars or inside the bastions that their offices have become,with their masks on their chins and glued to their cell phones rather than engaging with real people.
After three blocks of China Town, at Grand street, Elizabeth street used to run into Little Italy, but now it has become something completely different. Suddenly there are leafy trees on both sides of the streets, the old tenements are renovated and there is a plethora of trendy restaurants that are trying to make a quick buck from outdoor dining before it gets too cold. Without bothering to apply for outdoor licenses, many restaurants, here and everywhere else in the city, have built plywood pens that hold anywhere between 5 to 15 tables where people can be served by waiters in masks, mostly during the early evening. Most of these structures are a sorry sight, especially in this area that used to be playground for the affluent but still hip people from the financial, cultural and tech elites. You can’t blame the restaurateurs for creating their terraces from the cheapest material because they know it will all be gone again soon. But it does create a kind of vicious circle, where you have to ask yourself if you really want to pay for a $ 30 entree inside a box that would barely be good enough for a chicken coop in the country.
Retails finds itself in a similar quandary. Many shops are open but their patrons are gone and with them the dream of finding that fantastic pair of Dries van Noten pants in a boutique that is so exclusive it does not even have signage on the window. On the northern stretch of Elizabeth, there are at least three shops that exclusively sell scents and fragrances, with names like Le Labe, the Scent Bar and Olfactory and a shop called Bradelis that only sell brassieres of all kinds. All this at a time when many women celebrate not having to wear a bra when working from home and many people go for days without putting on even deodorant because they don’t need to leave their home.
The house where the family of Laurie Fabiano lived in the 1900s is still there and doesn’t look like a tenement at all. That may be because of the hyper-fancy shop for botanical home remedies that occupies the ground floor. They now sell their elixirs and essential oils from behind a plastic table blocking the door. Maybe it is the clean and nicely pointed brickwork that makes the ornamental molds look classy, even if they were cheap cement decorations intended to make some tenements look less dreadful than they really were. The inside of the apartments has probably been renovated to accommodate the lifestyle and reflect the good taste of the wealthy people who live there now. But unlike the Chinese people living just a few blocks south of here, their way of life may not be coming back any time soon.
Up to Houston and then two quick left turns around the corners onto Mott street brings me to Old Saint Patrick Cathedral and its complex of adjacent buildings. If it was up to me, as a tour guide, I would much rather bring my guests here than to the big monster up on Fifth Avenue. Architecturally, it is simple with its stone facade and its brown plaster work back, and there is little that is remarkable about the church. But in the city that always changes, it is heartening to be in a place that hasn’t changed significantly in 150 years and has benefited from a mild form of neglect, leaving everything just as it was.
There is a gorgeous red stone Victorian house on Mott that used to be the Children’s Aid Society and has a stair-step gable straight out of the 19th century fantasy of old Dutch New York. There are the buildings of the first mission of the Sister of Charity of St Vincent de Paul, now turned into fancy residences. There are the homes for the clergy across from the main entrance, a beautiful chapel adjacent to the former cathedral and more modern St Patrick Youth Center which judging by its early modern style was built long after the Cardinal moved up to Fifth Avenue.
I would have loved to walk around the graveyard or sit in one of the pews to look around at the art work and soak in 150 years of devotion, of joy and of sorrow and feel connected with all of those who came before, the Irish, the Italians, the Jews and the Chinese who made this area the gateway to the American life. But like the cops, the Church’s people are hunkered down in their own bastions and only come out when they really have to, not offering their “public” spaces to a public that so badly needs to see and smell and reconnect with their city. It would take so little to open up the churches, or at least pay a couple of people to supervise access to the cemetery, so people can be tourists in their own city for an hour or two.
Around the corner on Prince is one of New York’s finest independent bookstores McNally Jackson. I was happy to see that they were open and appeared to be doing pretty well, judging by the number of people in the store. I browsed through the reduced priced items outside but though there were some books I may need one day, there wasn’t anything that really grabbed me. I walked in the store and they were playing Kate Bush’s “Hounds of Love”, one of my all-time favorite records. It is an odd choice for a book store but it showed a typical NY effort to let us know how cool they were. So I said, what the heck, they are trying to tell me it’s OK to indulge myself and buy a brand new book at full price. And there was “Red Pill”, fresh off the press, and the boy at the information counter said, “You can only pay on the other side now. But good choice, l really like Hari Kunzru’s work.” And for a moment there, it seemed like everything was as it had always been in New York.
the meta-tourist 