Getting to know the neighborhood, years later

This past weekend I met Lillian for dim sum. She had invited a friend, and that friend, in turn, had invited another. The four of us congregated in Chinatown and found a table in the back corner of Dim Sum Go Go.

Lillian's friend was a little late; when he arrived, he introduced himself as S—. We ticked our orders on the menu sheets provided and talkd about this and that. S— had a long history in the area. Lillian asked him what he did and he told us that he had made his money partying. He and a friend had set up a SoHo space in the late70s/early 80s and began throwing rent parties there. As it was illegal to run a club in a private space, they set up an art gallery in the front and made the parties invite only. The parties became exclusive. He told us they were the first "club" to actually use a velvet rope to regulate entry. They hired cutting edge DJ's and he told us that they were the first club to really spin house music. He told us they had started a lot of things and told us to google his partner's name. They've done documentaries, he told us.

As the years wore on, his friend became less reliable, and the business became harder to sustain. S— was getting older as well, and so he sold his half of the business and bought a house in Montauk. He invested in other things, and he told us that his party days had set him up well for the rest of his life. He asked me where I lived and when I told him he asked me when I had moved in. He asked me if I remembered the fireworks displays they used to set off in the raquetball court by my house, but I said I had missed those by a few years.

S— had lived in the area for a while and he told me of the Italian kids who would sell fireworks on Canal street to the commuters heading back to New Jersey. They would store the fireworks in the basements of all the shops that lined Thompson Street. On the fourth of July, they would take the left-over stock and dump it into trash barrels in the raquetball court and light them on fire. S— said you could feel the compression of the air in your chest when they went off. He told me it'd knock the breath out of you.

He told me the kids were crazy. The police would drive by on patrol and they'd toss firecrackers into the car windows. He then stopped himself. "I'm exaggerating," he said. "But they would toss firecrackers under cars as they passed." He said the police would drive by to make sure things were ok; they never tried to stop the festivities.

One year, he said things went too far. They threw fireworks under a car and the driver stopped. S— was standing on the corner away from the action and people started running away; he heard them screaming about a gun. The driver was waving one around as the kids scattered.

He told me one year they shot fireworks off the roofs of the buildings; the leftover paper was knee deep in the streets. He said that was the year the littered paper caught fire, which brought the festivities to a halt. He said they moved the ad hoc fireworks displays to a park near Mulberry Street, but it was never quite the same after that. The neighborhood began to lose character.

As we were leaving, he asked me if I had ever noticed an older Italian man sit in front of the barber shop around the corner from my house. He told me I should introduce myself. "Tell 'em S— said hi," he told me. "He'll tell you stories." I promised him I would.
Posted by eku at April 1, 2009 3:01 PM