The Year of the “Staycation”

We are in summer’s home stretch headed toward the fall, and this year the new popular vacation spot among the masses is nowhere, meaning wherever you would normally be when not vacationing. This year, the term “staycation” was often (over)used to describe the vacation plans of ordinary working New Yorkers. The increased numbers of unemployed, high fuel prices and the general sad state of the economy have conspired to put the kibosh on many travel plans this summer. This Labor Day weekend I have joined the staycationing masses.

New York City has not been as deathly hot as it is known to get in August. We’ve lucked out this summer, at least heat-wise. We seemed to get our bad heat wave early, in June, and we had warmer-than-normal June and July weather. Where they have not received a reprieve is New Orleans. My good friend Voodoo Rue is currently holed up in a filthy hotel in Grenada, Mississippi. Hurricane Gustav is expected to reach Louisiana by Monday. We can only hope the levies hold. If New Orleans survives this latest hurricane, it will be luck and the preparedness of its citizens, not the work of our leaders.

Today I met my friend Mike Moosehead and his wife Christine for lunch and a movie. We all wanted to see Tropic Thunder. Everyone I know who has seen the film has raved about it, and I was eager to see it.

Walking through Union Square before the film started, we weaved through the crowds at the Farmer’s Market. Onions, apples, bread and all other manner of fresh food was available for sale under small tends and canopies. Other vendors, such as painters and people selling homemade crafts, were there as well. In the middle of this buzzing commercial space was a lone author, Michael De’Shazer. He was selling his books from a small table and handing out flyers, which request help in pressuring the Oprah Winfrey Show to book him as a guest author. I wanted to stop and tell him that Oprah Winfrey is a vapid egomaniac and the product of a declining culture and that I would respect him much more as an author if he avoided Oprah’s show like the plague, but I did not think a discussion with this author would be fruitful. He’s selling books in the middle of Union Square, and is determined to move units, as they say in the world of commerce.

The film did not disappoint. Tropic Thunder is a classic comical farce and expertly pillories the movie industry and the action film genre. My only regret is that I could not resist the concession stand and the resulting popcorn and soda cost almost as much as my $12 movie ticket.

Once the film was over and I bade farewell to my friends, it was on to the nearby Strand bookstore for more reckless spending. Sure enough, I found an armful of bargains in the 48-cent sidewalk bins before I even set foot in the store. I spent roughly an hour in the Strand, but could have spent hours more. It helped me clutter two successive New York apartments with books. I walked out of there with 12 books for $43.08.

I returned to Union Square Park as I chatted with my brother via cell phone, all the while looking for some speck of bench to park myself on. Finding a small, out of the way corner of the park is not possible on summer weekends, but I found a place to sit on a bench between an elderly man eating potato chips and a Chinese man waiting for a phone call. I paged through one of my books, The Complete Encyclopedia of Pistols and Revolvers (only $10), as city life buzzed around me. The Chinese man got his call and began speaking with someone in Chinese. The old man finished his potato chips and moved on. Soon, it was time for me to start heading home. I made my way through the crowds of people without losing my temper and caught the trains I needed back to Inwood.

My “staycation” is well under way.

East Village Then And Now

Twenty years ago, I marveled at the footage of the Tompkins Square Park Riots on television. The city was shamed by the sight of radicals smashing the lobby of a nearby condominium and hurling bottles at the police, and by the sight of police officers covering their names and badge numbers while they indiscriminately beat people. The police took down homeless encampments that had taken over large parts of the park.

The battle was, on the surface, waged over a curfew that may or may not have been legal. But it was an episode where East Village regulars rebelled against oncoming gentrification. Looking at the East Village and Lower East Side today, there’s no doubt that gentrification won.

More than 20 years later, I stood outside Manitoba’s on Avenue B and watched as police closed the park promptly at 1 a.m. The greenery of Tompkins Square Park is surrounded by iron fencing now. While people often jump over this to actually enjoy the park’s greenery, they never spend the night.

Our public parks cannot be open-air camps for drug addicts, the homeless and mentally ill, but neither can the character of the city survive if artists and musicians are replaced wholesale with stock brokers and lawyers. And there is no doubt that city government wants the rapidly increasing gentrification to keep happening; it increases property taxes which mean more revenue for the city. Also, many city political figures are in the pockets of developers.

And the authorities continue to Case in point: an open can of beer at a Tompkins Square Park punk show earns one a ticket, an open bottle of wine on the Great Lawn of central park during an orchestral performance does not warrant a second glance by New York’s Finest. This same selective enforcement was in vogue well before the Tompkins Square Park riots of 1988.

I remember going to the East Village when I was in high school. It was a scary place. Along St. Mark’s Place and The Bowery, homeless men sold junk and trinkets on blankets. It’s unreal how much the area has been transformed since then. Expensive hotels and wine bars permeate where destitute people once congregated. CBGB is now a store that sells overpriced designer clothing. While it’s good that the homeless aren’t crowding our sidewalks and the open-air heroine markets and rubble-strewn lots have gone, gone also are music venues, record stores, real artists’ lofts and a sense that the neighborhood was distinct. The Lower East Side looks more like the Upper East Side every day and I can’t stand it.

There have been some survivors in the yuppiefication of the East Village, and those were people who were working and creating things while others threw bottles at the cops (or at least between throwing bottles at the cops). C-Squat, a squat on Avenue C populated by punk rockers, endures, as does Umbrella House, a wrecked building that was taken over by squatters in the 1980s and renovated (it had been named “Umbrella House” because of its leaking roof). It was recognized as legal by the city in 2002.

This is the story of New York City today: a sense of great cultural loss that accompanied some welcome reductions in crime. It’s great that there are not homeless junkies crowded every other inch of sidewalk between Broadway and Avenue D, but a law-abiding person should be able to drink a beer on a park bench, and a small studio should not cost $2,000 a month unless it comes with a functioning glory hole attended to hourly by Scarlett Johansson.