Clack. Clack. Clackity-clack. Clack-Clack. The sound broadcast through an open door on Broome Street on a Tuesday night, the noise and the fluorescent light pouring onto the otherwise quiet street. Mahjong is the game at the Happy Lucky Social Club, which is not the actual name of the place but probably no further away in meaning than the English translation on the sign above the door.
When I poke my head into the linoleum tiled storefront, the men—all Asians, anywhere from 19 to 45 years old, with thick white tiles stacked in front of them on card tables—turn and stare at me. They scowl. And a slender guy (who looks to be in charge) carves briskly around their folding chairs, silently moving right towards me, so fast that I immediately unpoke my head from the room and continue down the street to have dinner. As I walk away, I turn, and he continues to glower at me from the doorway, still saying nothing.
If they weren’t gambling, they were the most intensely unsocial Mahjong players I’ve ever seen. Perhaps they were operating on the assumption that due to barriers of culture or language, they would be ignored by anyone who could tell the difference between a casual game and one where there is a pot at stake. Or perhaps they just didn’t care.
Barrio Chino, just down the block, means Chinese District in Spanish. There’s no sign that says this, just a paper menu taped in a window. I walk in and a hostess in a polka dot dress—a sexier pattern of a look that has probably been in circulation in this neighborhood since the early 20th century—seats us, with a warning that if business picks up we may have to move to a smaller table.
The restaurant space looks for a second like it had been totally vacant and abandoned as recently as this morning. A total fake job. The restaurant’s décor is a carefully constructed ruse to make me feel as if I’m eating and drinking in a forbidden and, possibly illegal, den. The stained paper menus, the cocktail list written on beer-case cardboard, the beat-up tables and chairs—everything is designed to feel authentic, no less so than a suburban Applebee’s replete with photos of the high school football team.
But rather than evoking small-town nostalgia, this shabby décor has been designed to simulate the warren of craphole storefronts that ran up and down this street and neighborhood and city not that long ago. Except now they meet city health and fire codes, and the food is damn good.
This is Broome Street—or a few small blocks of it—starting near Allen, crossing Orchard and Ludlow before running into oblivion in the guise of several street side parking lots, before dead ending into housing projects and a park.
The Chinese, Latinos, Jews, Hipsters and others who cram themselves into the tenement buildings lining the streets here are part of the paradox of the neighborhood, surviving where zoning and indifference conspire to turn back the high-rises currently sprouting all over the rest of the Lower East Side. BLUE Condominium, at Norfolk, just north of this little stretch, is that big blue glass building that erupts from the low-slung edifices surrounding it. The parking lots where Broome fades out could be the site of tomorrow’s high rises. The city is currently studying rezoning the area to limit heights, but the towers that snuck in sprout like mushrooms in a neighborhood where no one ever thought developers would want to build one high rise, let alone four.
Down the road from Barrio Chino is Bo Bo Poultry Market, closed for the night. They truck in every single bird they sell from their own free-range farms in upstate New York, having beaten advocates of the slow-food, natural, organic, hormone-free, and so on and so forth movement to the punch by a solid decade. Without a Chinese Frank Purdue or an advertising budget, you probably don’t know about Bo Bo. You probably don’t know that anyone can walk in and buy a freshly killed bird in the middle of Manhattan, better tasting than anything in your supermarket’s refrigerated aisle. But you can. And even if you don’t, they supply dozens of restaurants around the city with chickens bred and grown to satiate the Chinese American palate.
Back at Barrio Chino, just across Broome from my window seat, Jin, a sushi bar, throws its door open to the warm spring night. An NYPD cruiser pulls up. The couple next to me at Barrio starts talking about a friend of theirs who used to patrol the area. I only catch fragments of the conversation. He was a cop a decade ago, dealing with entirely different troubles than whatever the two officers heading into the sedate and swank restaurant were encountering.
“Alan was on the beat down here,” says the man to the woman seated across from him. “He said that dealing with the crazy shit down here is what drove him to the shooting.”
The woman nods as she wolfs down another bite of beans saying, “I sent him a birthday card.”
“You did?” the man asks, not waiting for a response. “To his jail cell? You know he could get life in prison?”
The cruiser, having left while this conversation went on, pulls back around. “I guess it’s sushi night at the precinct,” the man says, while they continue to discuss their erstwhile friend and his troubles. The sheet of paper in the Asian officer’s hands wasn’t a summons. It was a takeout menu. His partner, carrying two bags, hops back in the car and they roll off with the whoosh of Detroit steel, to eat dinner.
In front of BabyCakes NYC, a gluten-free bakery across from Barrio Chino, an unmarked white delivery truck—the kind that seems always just about to run over stragglers in intersections—parks on the sidewalk. A film crew gets out and starts to uncoil wrist-thick cables and set out huge floodlights. No scout cars around, no permits that I can see, but surely they have some permission; the gear is much too sophisticated for a fly-by-night shoot. A young, skinny man wraps himself around a metal piece of apparatus waiting for instructions, and turns to look into the windows at a case full of carrot cupcakes and vegan brownies.
When Guss’ Pickles is open, they keep their big red barrels just around the corner on Orchard but, at this hour, they’re behind the steel-grated door, under the big, garish awning. Last July a pickle festival ran right down Orchard, anchored by Guss’, and at the other end by their archrivals, The Pickle Guys, of Essex Street. I tried pickles from both vendors, and am ashamed to say I didn’t taste a difference, though I liked Guss’ hots (or spicy pickles) quite a lot.
Taking it to the Streets
If New York has a Jane Jacobs anymore, she probably lives in Brooklyn. But maybe, maybe she might live in the Lower East Side somewhere: nose rings, body tats and polka dot dresses. She observes the “sidewalk dance,” as Jacobs put it, playing out on her block of Broome, while she gets her coffee at 88 Orchard on the way to the subway. It’s not as pretty a dance as it used to be, but then again, maybe we want to remember the dance as being pretty, when it’s always been a little dirty and gritty.
Broome Street, this side of it, shares more with Jacobs’ decidedly more picturesque Hudson Street than meets the eye. It was to be the site of the eastern half of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, Robert Moses’ final boondoggle, which brought Jacobs’ to fame as the face of the street-level protests against a Manhattan entombed by his elevated highways.
On her way home at the end of the day, neo-Jane goes to Lolita, a pioneer on the block when it opened back in 2001. It’s not too far from the Chinese Senior Center, where more than 60 of the elderly regularly sit in folding chairs watching with rapt attention at a satellite broadcast, comporting themselves as if they were seated in pews at church.
Broome, having dodged the wrecking ball, is the center, if not exactly the geographical, then the gravitational, of the Lower Lower East Side. Cultures are slapped together and rents are almost as insane as they are north of Delancey. There’s less traffic, humanity and chaos than exists one block south on Grand, and so there is room enough for a neighborhood to grow. It’s here you get a feel for what the Lower East Side became to the people who actually inhabit it.
Bernice Abbott, in her legendary photographic chronicles of New York City in the 1930s, took a picture that showed the grit of Broome Street. But she was on the west-side of town, near the Holland Tunnel. The east, where immigrants settled in, with one ethnicity ceaselessly being replaced by the next, for generations, remained and remains a forgotten part of New York, even for a photographer whose job was to chronicle the city for the federal government.
The housing projects where Broome Street peters out were built in the 1950s as part of a slum eradication program. The Lower Manhattan Expressway would’ve curved around them like a two-headed snake to meet the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges. Broome, before those projects were built, was the main drag through a warren of tiny streets and tiny blocks, few of which exist today—except for an odd alley here, a patch converted to a park with a sandbox and a jungle gym, there.
History Has a Price
Back at Barrio Chino, the crowd is starting to thicken. We are too far into dinner to have to give up our large table, but people are waiting and a concession to modernity, the credit card machine, allows our hostess to quickly turn us over before the evening rush. My margarita buys an extra five or so minutes in which to linger and eventually sign the bill.
In some ways the anchor of this area is the Tenement Museum, which has supported the businesses that have opened here and restored several tenements to show tourists who dare leave Midtown or the Financial District what life inside the apartments of New Yorkers was like at different points in history. But even then, especially then, in two tiny rooms, New Yorkers lived outside of their apartments, on the streets that, like Broome, held all the goods and services they needed to live.
In a rare candid moment for a TV star, Chris Noth told New York magazine that, “What makes me really sick is how New York now looks like a bad imitation of ‘Sex and the City.’ Meatpacking is a good example of just how fucked up it is. You can’t have a city that’s interesting where the only people living in it are rich.”
The mall-ification of New York is nothing new; in a way, New York needed it to survive to avoid the fate—easily dismissible—of so many other great American cities—St. Louis, Seattle, Buffalo, Detroit—that died during the ’70s to ’90s and now boast either featureless or decrepit downtowns devoid of humanity. They were all engines of the American economy, but New York could never be grouped with them, we say.
And why it still can’t be, perhaps, is that New York has always had people of enough greed or vision or power to sustain, through their self-interest, the infrastructure and identity of the city. When that self-interest became too misaligned from common needs, those titans, like Moses fell. And patches of streets—like Broome, between the Bowery and the projects—still survive, despite their best efforts.
I take a last sip of the fresh lime margarita. I walk out weaving through chairs and tables and, then, weaving through the camera crew on the sidewalk. There are a lot of empty storefronts here.
