Kurt Cobain once famously noted the way in which fashion designers, seeking to emulate the trendy grunge couture of Seattle, Wash., adorned their models in flannels, knit caps and cotton legwarmers. Then, discount stores like Kmart, seeking to emulate the haute couture coming off the runways of Milan and Paris, stocked their shelves with flannels, knit caps and cotton legwarmers. Which is where Cobain and his ratty, working-class peers bought the clothes in the first place.
And so it goes, the nonstop churn of the cultural digestive system. The so-called dustbin of history isn’t a dustbin at all. It’s a recycling bin.
These were just some of the thoughts lingering in my mind as I woke up one morning, groggy and disconcerted, at an apartment on Hester Street, between Mott and Mulberry, and stepped out onto the street.
What was I doing there? Can’t say, can’t remember. What I can remember was how clean the place was. The guy who lived here must have just moved in, I remarked, generally pointing to the lack of anything to point to. Nope, said my companion, who didn’t live there. He’d been living here for over a year. Really? Hanging on the walls were some old, framed “Peanuts” cartoons, a few on the floor, and almost nothing else. This may have been a very weird guy.
The whole place gleamed white. Everything was white, it seemed: a clean white couch and a pile of clean white underwear. My absentee host paid $2,600 a month for the apartment, I was told. Across the street, in a brand new condominium building, one-bedroom apartments start at $799,000.
It was almost a railroad apartment, consisting of a single narrow passageway with the bathroom on one end (near the kitchen) and the bedroom on the other. The whole place had three windows: one on each end and, in between, a barred porthole looking out onto the brick wall of the neighboring building. I was in an old-fashioned tenement building, from the late 19th or early 20th century. This apartment’s odd shape could very well be attributed to the way in which, over the years, apartments were subdivided to accommodate more lodgers, then expanded again as the real estate market evolved.
Upon escaping, trying to both lose my companion and catch my bearings, I looked at a street sign. Hester Street. OK, I thought, I know where I am. Hester—the word itself called up a welcome host of meanings and identities: bubbies and pushcarts and the abject poverty of the city’s Eastern European immigrant community. But this wasn’t that Hester Street. I was too far west. Everything smelled of garlic and, a block east, rotting fish and fish heads and strange fruits.
One joy of city life, if you are willing to explore a little, is that it can unmake your jaded disposition, which presumably brought you into New York in the first place. But not on this block, not quite. Everything around here bears the stamp of our worst prejudices of the tourism industry’s ersatz authenticity: The entire building and the two next to it are painted red, white and green—the Italian flag, get it? A mat of green pseudo-grass covers the sidewalk in front of the Puglia restaurant, and I had to step around its early-brunch diners to access the street!
This is Little Italy, where tourists feel right at home amidst the plastic doo-dads and chalkboards advertising prix-fixe linguine and lasagna. They know that when they take pictures, they are effectively photographing a photograph.
But Little Italy’s pilgrims aren’t just fannie packers and snap-shooters. Travelers who come to this neighborhood—and wander through this block, where Chinatown pokes in—might be just as likely to bring a rosary bead as a camera. Just around the corner sits the Church of Our Most Precious Blood. Notes the website NYSonglines.com, the “blood is that of Saint Januarius, i.e. San Gennaro, whose feast is annually celebrated on Mulberry Street.” Held on the last Saturday of September, it’s one of the biggest G-rated parties of the year, with games and music and lots and lots of sausage.
The real action, however, is in Naples, where, every year during their San Gennaro feast, some dried gunk in a vial—said to be the blood of the 4th century saint—turns back to liquid. And all we get is 11 days of food, folks and fun.
And so it goes, the nonstop churn of the cultural digestive system. The so-called dustbin of history isn’t a dustbin at all. It’s a recycling bin.
These were just some of the thoughts lingering in my mind as I woke up one morning, groggy and disconcerted, at an apartment on Hester Street, between Mott and Mulberry, and stepped out onto the street.
What was I doing there? Can’t say, can’t remember. What I can remember was how clean the place was. The guy who lived here must have just moved in, I remarked, generally pointing to the lack of anything to point to. Nope, said my companion, who didn’t live there. He’d been living here for over a year. Really? Hanging on the walls were some old, framed “Peanuts” cartoons, a few on the floor, and almost nothing else. This may have been a very weird guy.
The whole place gleamed white. Everything was white, it seemed: a clean white couch and a pile of clean white underwear. My absentee host paid $2,600 a month for the apartment, I was told. Across the street, in a brand new condominium building, one-bedroom apartments start at $799,000.
It was almost a railroad apartment, consisting of a single narrow passageway with the bathroom on one end (near the kitchen) and the bedroom on the other. The whole place had three windows: one on each end and, in between, a barred porthole looking out onto the brick wall of the neighboring building. I was in an old-fashioned tenement building, from the late 19th or early 20th century. This apartment’s odd shape could very well be attributed to the way in which, over the years, apartments were subdivided to accommodate more lodgers, then expanded again as the real estate market evolved.
Upon escaping, trying to both lose my companion and catch my bearings, I looked at a street sign. Hester Street. OK, I thought, I know where I am. Hester—the word itself called up a welcome host of meanings and identities: bubbies and pushcarts and the abject poverty of the city’s Eastern European immigrant community. But this wasn’t that Hester Street. I was too far west. Everything smelled of garlic and, a block east, rotting fish and fish heads and strange fruits.
One joy of city life, if you are willing to explore a little, is that it can unmake your jaded disposition, which presumably brought you into New York in the first place. But not on this block, not quite. Everything around here bears the stamp of our worst prejudices of the tourism industry’s ersatz authenticity: The entire building and the two next to it are painted red, white and green—the Italian flag, get it? A mat of green pseudo-grass covers the sidewalk in front of the Puglia restaurant, and I had to step around its early-brunch diners to access the street!
This is Little Italy, where tourists feel right at home amidst the plastic doo-dads and chalkboards advertising prix-fixe linguine and lasagna. They know that when they take pictures, they are effectively photographing a photograph.
But Little Italy’s pilgrims aren’t just fannie packers and snap-shooters. Travelers who come to this neighborhood—and wander through this block, where Chinatown pokes in—might be just as likely to bring a rosary bead as a camera. Just around the corner sits the Church of Our Most Precious Blood. Notes the website NYSonglines.com, the “blood is that of Saint Januarius, i.e. San Gennaro, whose feast is annually celebrated on Mulberry Street.” Held on the last Saturday of September, it’s one of the biggest G-rated parties of the year, with games and music and lots and lots of sausage.
The real action, however, is in Naples, where, every year during their San Gennaro feast, some dried gunk in a vial—said to be the blood of the 4th century saint—turns back to liquid. And all we get is 11 days of food, folks and fun.
