Mars & Micheline

With Mars Bar gone and vanished, replaced by the "Jupiter 21" luxury building and now a TD Bank, along with a new bar coming that will serve organic juices and quinoa, I've said what I had to say about its considerable significance in the neighborhood. On a more personal note, for me the place will also be indelibly linked to Beat poet Jack Micheline. He introduced me to it when I was young and still new to the East Village.

For what it's worth, I include here my journal entry about that night, my first time at Mars Bar--when I didn't even know the name of the place. It was exactly 20 years ago.


Jack at Mars, photo: Ellen Lynn

May 16, 1994

Last night I ran around the East Village with Jack Micheline. I met him up at Harris’ bookstore and we went out for coffee. We walked up and down the streets, stopping in bookshops and bars. He smoked Camels, unfiltered, one after the other, coughing and farting. We went into a bar somewhere around 1st Street.

We smoked and talked. He told me about Franz Kline, “Larry” Ferlinghetti, Janis Joplin, Allen Ginsberg, and an ex-girlfriend of his who was cruel and mean. Later he found out she’d been college roommates with the woman who shot Andy Warhol.

A song came on the jukebox by a woman Jack knows. Her band is called Nice Undies. He said he gave them a song he had written for Janis Joplin, but “Janis was into this heavy lesbian relationship at the time and it’s a real hetero song.” So Nice Undies got it.

Jack told me about the time he was "shit-drunk" with Bukowski. Jack pulled out a toilet plunger and kissed it. He said it blew Buk’s mind. Jack told him, “If you can’t kiss a toilet plunger, then you can’t be a great poet.”


Jack at Mars, photo: Ellen Lynn

Later, alone, I retraced our steps back to Mars Bar (which I now thought was spelled "Marz" because of the way the name was painted on the side at the time) and eventually took friends to the place. I also spent more time with Jack.

In my journal I wrote:

"Jack came in and sat on my couch and chain-smoked Navy Cuts. The cockroaches were crawling on the walls. He'd just been to his art show with Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg. He told me more about his days with Janis Joplin, getting drunk with her. 'She was just a person,' he said, 'a regular person. She was a good kid.' He explained how uncomfortable she was offstage, with her low self-esteem, and about all her lovers. One woman, he told me, wrote a book called Going Down on Janis, which was all about what it says it's about and, according to Jack, 'terrible.' I lent him my harmonica for his show. He played a few tunes, then we went to Kiev."


my last drink at Mars Bar

In these journal entries and others, I was so young and excited to be in the East Village, hanging out with poets. There are all these scenes--being kissed by Allen Ginsberg, drinking beer at the Cedar Tavern with Anne Waldman, Ed Sanders, and Joanne Kyger (who amazed me by eating sugar straight from the packet with her fingertip).

There are all these meals (at Kiev and the Jones Diner) and drinks (at the Telephone Bar and back at Mars Bar again) and trips to bookshops like Tompkins Square Books and Harris Books (does anyone remember Harris Books on the second floor?).

Twenty years later, all those places are gone. The East Village is no longer a bohemian space. Mars Bar just opened as a TD Bank. Jack's gone, too. He died in 1998, alone on the BART train out of San Francisco. I never did get my harmonica back, but it doesn't matter.


Previously:
The Loss of Mars
Blue & Cream on Mars
Before Mars Bar
Remembering Kiev

Slugger Ann

Reader Joe Preston writes in with photos of a vanished gem, "I thought you might find some interest in this photo of my Grandmother’s bar, Slugger Ann’s Bar & Grill, circa 1960 on the NW [correction: NE] corner of 12th Street & 2nd Avenue."


Slugger Ann's, photo courtesy of Joe Preston

Joe says, "She owned it from the early 50s until her death in 1980. She is also the grandmother of my first cousin and godfather, Jackie Curtis of the Warhol Factory. (Our Mothers were sisters.) Slugger Ann, as she is most famously known, was not only the super for this building, but the Village East Cinema diagonally across the street as well, where Jackie and Peter Hujar also lived. Jackie also lived in a small studio in this building, which has the address of 301 East 12th St. It was a first floor apartment."

He adds, "The Naked City TV series along with Kojak was filmed here many times."


shot from Naked City

After Slugger Ann's, the bar became Dick's, a gay dive that closed without warning in 2007. Now it's the fratty-looking 12th Street Ale House.

Melba LaRose recalled the bar to Warhol Stars, "It was a typical Lower East Side bar--this was before we called it the East Village. A lot of local characters hanging out, and Slugger was the biggest character of all. Jackie could often be found at the bar, in whichever gender. His doctor said it was amazing how his body survived going back and forth so many times with the hormones. I remember when he called and was on his way to visit me in LA, a friend said, 'Aren't you going to dress up?' I said, 'For Jackie? Are you kidding? I don't even know what sex he'll arrive in.'"

Jackie grew up with Slugger Ann, and often wore her clothes. Which made sense. Slugger was quite the glamorous lady.


Slugger Ann circa 1950, photo courtesy of Joe Preston

She was also tough as nails. Joe explained how his grandmother got the name Slugger:

"She worked as a taxi dancer in dance clubs, along with my mother and my aunt, in both the Times Square area and Union Square, and when the male customers got 'fresh' with putting their hands where they shouldn't have gone, she hauled off and let them have it. She also belted her female co-workers when they got out of hand. She continued this slug fame during the 50s and 60s, and even some of the 70s when she and my grandfather Joe would physically throw patrons out of the bar when they got drunk and disorderly. She was short in height, but made up for it with a tough Sicilian demeanor and fists like cured hams. Believe me, you didn't want to mess with her."


Slugger Ann circa 1955, photo courtesy of Joe Preston

Joe Preston produced and directed Jackie's play Glamour, Glory, and Gold at LaMaMa in 2003, and was the associate producer on the movie Superstar in a Housedress, directed by Craig Highberger, about the life of Jackie Curtis.

He hopes to make a film about his family, with their hundred-year history on the Lower East Side, his cousin and the Warhol scene, and his charismatic grandmother.


Slugger and husband Joe Verra, circa 1960, photo courtesy of Joe Preston

From Superstar, here's Leee Black Childers describing his first meeting with Slugger Ann, a tough "bleach-blonde woman with this marcelled hair" and "red, red lipstick and black, black mascara...with kindness and love in her eyes."




Update: Joe just sent in this article with Slugger Ann in boxing gloves:



Updated update: Here's Slugger Ann with her pet monkey, Rufus, circa 1970, in front of the bar. Writes Joe, "Notice that 2nd Avenue is still cobblestone. Every car you drove in rumbled over those bricks! Rufus was eventually confiscated by the ASPCA for biting someone. She never got over that, kind of heartbroken."

9th Street Bakery

By now you may have heard that the 9th Street Bakery is closing after 87 years in business. The landlord has doubled the rent. So I went inside, on a freezing winter's afternoon, and sat down with a cup of hot coffee.

The bakery was cold. The tops of the tables like slabs of ice. I kept my coat on. The radio played classical music, Beethoven's "Appassionata." Now and then, a customer came and went.



1. "Can I have an onion rye?"
"Slice it?"
"Yeah."
The air judders with the vibrations of the slicing machine.

2. "Do you have a small challah, besides this one?" She coughs and lowers her grocery bags to the floor with a heavy sound. "That's Beethoven's sonata. Nice to walk into a store and hear something like that instead of the garbage they play everywhere. I listen to almost nothing but classical music. I guess I'm more monochromatic that way."

She leaves. The refrigeration condenser comes on growling, rattles on a bit, then stops. The bakery man counts money. It shuffles softly in his hands. A voice on the radio tells us it will be cold tonight and snow will fall but not accumulate. The bakery man yawns.

3. "Can I have two whole-wheat rolls? And a large rye?"
"Sliced?"
"No, thanks." The young woman waits, softly humming and bouncing on her heels. 

Across the street, the Bean mini-chain is full of people--drinking coffee, eating pastries, all gazing into the light of their laptop screens. People walk by the 9th Street Bakery, smiling lovingly into the faces of their iPhones. Inside, one customer departs, minutes pass, and another enters.

4. "Challah, please. Oh, I want to come in here with claws on and just make people have tea! I love this place. There's no TV, so it's a good place for conversation. So much better than the other places." She wishes the bakery man luck and leaves with her challah loaf.

5. "I'll take a coffee and a doughnut. And I'll give ya 20 dollars tomorrow." He sits without paying (he must run a tab), hurriedly dunks the doughnut (chocolate glazed) in the coffee, gulps it down in sopping, dripping pieces, and leaves.

Outside, it's getting darker. In the headlights of an idling black SUV, snow begins to fall, just like the radio promised. The classical station flickers out, breaks into static, allows a voice from a neighboring station to intrude, screaming: "Check out the awesomeness! Yaaaah!" The room's blood pressure jolts. But the bakery man fiddles with the dial and soft music soon returns us to our reverie.

6. "Apple strudel and coffee, please." He sits down in his black beret and opens a book on the table in front of him. "Is that a Mozart French horn? I believe it is. You always have good music in here. I approve."

Now it's my turn to leave. I step outside feeling transformed by the 9th Street Bakery. I feel calm, less angry than I usually do on the street. It's as if I've been drugged with some mild and delightful soporific. The East Village seems benevolent, and I find myself humming as I walk through it. More and more, we are losing the places that make us feel better about life and the city. What happens when they're all gone?

Follies Burlesk

I've written before about the history of 1551 Broadway, and the Gaiety Theater upstairs. But the story seems never to end. Every time I come upon another image of the building, I feel compelled to post it here. Like the 1980 shots by Andreas Feininger and a magnificent color photo from the 1940s, when the Orpheum Dance Palace was still upstairs (and HoJo's was a Childs restaurant).

Here are a bunch of photos from the days in between the Orpheum and the Gaiety, between the dime-a-dance and the jerk-off grind, when the second floor of 1551 Broadway belonged to the Follies Burlesk.


Bob Gruen, 1972, via Ephemeral New York

In its heyday, the Follies Burlesk sported major signage for "the most beautiful showgirls in the world," "glorified burlesk," and the "all live whirly girly revue." 1974 saw the arrival of one Lisa Ct. Cyr ("plus 6 young new oxotics"), surely a poor man's knock-off of Lily St. Cyr, star of 52nd when it was "Strip Street" two decades earlier.



Here's a gal under the Follies marquee, with the performers' photos in the background. The photographer also has a close-up of the marquee, wrapped in light bulbs and featuring DESHA SHAUNEE, whoever she was, wherever she went.


obwantiag's flickr

Another color shot shows the spectacular signage from across the avenue. The billboard above advertised nothing more glamorous than plain and simple WOOL.



When the Gaiety opened in 1976, replacing the Follies Burlesk, the signage above HoJo's shifted--from girls to boys.


close-up, Gruen


close-up, Feininger--same view

By 1978, the painted strippers on the old Burlesk sign had peeled and flaked. They would be replaced by 1980 by a billboard for Howard Johnson's (And behind that Burger King sign hides the remnants of the grandest old Automat.)


1978, via Lost City

Wrote Josh Alan Friedman:

"Perched from my upstairs, extra-seating table view,
I saw the lights go on for the All Live Whirly*Girly Revue,
Broadway's worst burly-Q, first time since '62"


1980s, Carl Burton

I remember standing in Times Square in the early 1990s and looking up at the last remnant of the Follies, the sign for the ALL LIVE WHIRLY GIRLY REVUE. That's all that remained. And then it, too, was covered by billboards. I wondered when they tore down the building to put up an American Eagle Outfitters, was the sign still there? Did anyone bother to save it?


1992, Greenwich Village Daily Photo

Laundromat and Marc

For years, every time I passed a certain laundromat on West 4th and Bank Street, I'd take its picture. Especially at night.

There's something sad and a little bit romantic about a laundromat at night.

But I also took the laundromat's photo because I worried about it vanishing. It has that look--old and shabby, and therefore real, a Velveteen Rabbit of a place.

The woman who works there could often be seen at a makeshift desk by the laundromat's rightmost window, working behind the shop's odd, geometric metal grill. She would regularly hang the grill with orange peels. Over time, the peels dried and created a sort of abstract art. I loved seeing the woman and I loved seeing the orange peels. (At this time of year, she also hung candy canes.)

I worried about the laundromat because it was old, but also because it was being encroached upon. A Marc Jacobs store opened across the street and another came right next door.

The juxtaposition of the two windows at night always captured my attention--the Asian woman silently working, head bowed behind her orange peels, and on the other side of the wall, a room full of young, excited people delirious for retail. I knew it couldn't last.

The laundromat has not vanished. But it has gotten smaller. You might not notice. It's not the sort of thing you notice unless you've been paying close (perhaps obsessively close) attention. And you might not think it's worth bothering about--the laundromat is still in business, so what does it matter if it's a few feet smaller?

But the window with the orange peels is gone. And that made all the difference.

The ever-expanding Marc Jacobs empire has expanded a bit more, broken through the laundromat's wall, and taken over the woman's former spot. "Little Marc Jacobs" got much bigger and the laundromat got much smaller--in size, yes, but mostly in feeling. With her window gone, you won't see the woman anymore, sitting at her counter at night, taking a little space for herself at the end of a long day of hard work. All you'll see now in that space is more expensive stuff to buy your kids for Christmas.

Today

Lost Laundromats:
Lee's Laundry
Harry Chong's
Chin's Laundry

Meatpacking 1980s

When Yvonne B. commented on my post about Ivy Brown and the Triangle Building, I wrote to her and asked if she might share some of her memories of life as a young transgender woman in the Meatpacking District in the 1980s. Very generously, she sent along not only her memories, but also a group of wonderful photos. The following is all Yvonne.



I didn't live in the Meatpacking area. I just went there cause of the Vault club. I wasn't one of the regular street walkers, I was mostly a loner who at times would get picked up by passing guys who cruised looking for transsexual hookers. I wasn't dressed sexy like the other girls. I was a punk t-girl, but some guys thought it was a cute style, so they took me. I needed money to live.

I looked quite young for my age and I believe I attracted a maybe more perv type of guy, maybe pedophile type. They were nasty. I met them in Times Square, as well. One night a guy drove up to me and he looked just like a teacher I had in school. It felt strange so I walked away.




As I said, I was mostly a loner. I went to the Vault club quite a few times in the mid eighties. I had two friends that I went with, Jimmy and Linda. I would like to know what happened to them, maybe just to know if they are doing OK. I met a few strange characters at the club. One was a guy dressed in rags crawling around the floor. There was also the horse guy with a saddle on his back. It was a bizarre club but it seemed like the men outnumbered the girls in a big way, and single girls seemed kinda rare.



I do remember one night a bunch of street girls ran into the bagel store when a police car cruised by, as if the police would never think to look for anyone in the only store open in the area.



I don't remember the bone trucks. But I do remember the bone trucks where I grew up in the Bronx. People called them the glue trucks cause they thought the bones were used for making glue.



I did go to the Meatpacking area in the daytime when I sometimes went to Lee's Mardi gras store. I knew that Lee Brewster was an influential figure on the rights of the transgender, so I thought that buying things there was the least I could do to say thanks. The building that housed Lee's had an elevator that opened right onto the street. There was no lobby or entrance way, just an elevator door. Someone from Lee's would come down with the elevator to sort of escort one to the store. I kinda knew two people that worked at Lee's, Shannon and Robbie. Shannon was in the movie Wigstock. She was in the scene fitting Joey Arias with a wig that was like putting on a helmet.



I was told through the rumor mill that Raquel Welch would shop at Lee's, but I don't know for sure. The store had its mix of people, from transsexuals to hairy suburban crossdressers. I heard that some of the crossdressers were truck drivers shopping after they unloaded their goods and had spare time to shop for frilly clothing.

University Diner

VANISHING

It Was Her New York and Alex in NYC both shared the upsetting news yesterday that the University Restaurant diner, on University and 12th Street, is closing. Today is their last day in business.



I went by for a quick cup of coffee. This is one of the last--if not the last--diners in the neighborhood. It was my go-to place in that area, and I will miss it.



The last time I went, I sat next to a crotchety, older New York couple. She was counting out her vitamins and he was helping. Sort of. I wrote down everything they said on a Milky Way advertisement in the magazine I was reading. It's the kind of scene you just don't get except in diners like this one. (Names have been changed to protect the innocent.)


(this is not the crotchety couple)

Woman: There's something wrong with Sunny. She's eating too much cat food. She doesn't sleep with me anymore.

Man: No, she sleeps with me.

Woman: Does she? Seriously, tell me, where does she sleep? Tell me the truth so I know!

Man: Yeah, she sleeps with me. I'm cheating on you with the cat.

Woman: Oh, be quiet and help me with these vitamins.

Man: You have to take them all, because--

Woman: I told you to help me, not lecture me. Now which one's which?

Man: Don't you remember?

Woman: No, I don't remember!

Man: And they call you a genius.

Woman: ---

Man: Okay, this one's the probiotic. This one's for your skin. This one--

Woman: I don't care what it's for! Just tell me the name!

Man: You're not nice to me. I'm going outside.

The Man leaves and then returns.

Woman: I've got two tickets for the movie tonight, with Daisy, but I don't feel up to it. Can you take them back and get my money?

Man: You should go. She's your daughter.

Woman: She's too much to deal with.

Man: I wish I could go to the movies.

Woman: So go.

Man: I can't! The house is a disaster and I got to clean everything. You go. I'll be home waiting for you with your grapefruit juice, just like you like.

Woman: Oh, be quiet.

Man: You love grapefruit juice.

Woman: I said BE QUIET!

The Woman throws her balled-up napkin at the Man. They get up to leave. The Man turns to me.

Man: [stage whispering] I have no idea why I bother to love this bitch!


More vanished diners:
Joe Jr's
Chelsea Gallery
Galaxy
Tramway
Tiffany
Rockaway Sunset
Cheyenne
Moondance

Sweet Banana

Originally published for Eater's "Bodega Week" in March (hence the bodega questions), my profile of the Sweet Banana Candy Store, which is slated to be shuttered by the Stonehenge Group by the end of this month, along with several other long-time small businesses on the block.

The Sweet Banana Candy Store has been run by "Candy Lady" Patricia on 9th Avenue and 17th Street in Chelsea for the past 15 years. Wearing its age proudly, without a hint of vanity, it sits on a ragtag block that has somehow managed to stay frozen in time, almost untouched by the hyper-gentrifying waves that push in from all sides.

The shop's battered awning slumps down over a front window spattered with graffiti and ads for USA Gold brand cigarettes and Slush Puppie frozen drinks. A neon sign advertising "Fresh Coffee" has lost its light.



Patricia doesn't consider her shop a bodega. "It's a candy store," she tells me with a shrug from behind her counter where a postcard of a handgun-toting Jesus Christ guards the cash register. But Sweet Banana does have many markings of the bodega breed: lottery, ribbons of scratch tickets, bags of plantain chips, a display of vintage pocket hair brushes that fit right in the palm of your hand ("Slip it over your middle finger and feel the relaxation spread as it glides through your hair and gently massages your scalp").

And there's the quintessential hardworking bodega cat who likes to lounge among the newspaper stacks.



A few years ago, when Sweet Banana got a new landlord, we thought we'd lose it, but it somehow survived, despite the rapid changes that surround it. Asked how her business has been since the the rising tides of "MePa" and the High Line began flooding the neighborhood, Patricia shrugs and says, "So-so. It's okay." She's a woman of few words.


Patricia the candy lady

Sweet Banana also serves as a social center for many people of the neighborhood. Men and women hang out here to talk and spend time together.

On most days you can find a friendly woman named Hassie seated behind the stuffed candy rack, selling hot homemade empanadas from an insulated bag for a dollar apiece. They are delicious and come straight from her kitchen on 22nd Street where she has lived for her entire 52 years.



"We keep each other company," Hassie says of her time spent in Patricia's store. She appreciates how Patricia keeps her prices low so the neighborhood people can afford to shop, and she likes to watch the kids come in from the junior high and high school nearby. They come in packs, laughing and gossiping, to grab handfuls of their favorite candies out of the big wooden bin--individually wrapped Circus Peanuts and Swedish fish, mini Butterfingers and Laffy Taffy, Charms Blow Pops and Dum Dums.

Hassie tells me how she and Patricia have watched many of their neighbors grow up. "From little kids, they go to college and come back, and they visit her. They always come back here."

Sweet Banana is more than a candy store or a bodega, it's a meeting place and a home base, a part of the family for many local people. They go away from the neighborhood knowing that Sweet Banana will be here when they return. Of course, with the massive changes happening all around it, how much longer can it last? [This was written before we knew the answer to that question would be June 30.]

Further reading about this block:
New Barber Shop
Death of a Block II
Death of a Block
Saving 9th Avenue
Sweet Banana Candy Store
Chelsea Liquors
New China

Retzky on Little Rickie

After my post on Little Rickie and its devolution into a Starbucks, I talked via Facebook with the shop's founder, Phillip Retzky. He gives us the whole story of the shop, the time, the place, and everything...


Phillip & Fanny at the first shop

How did Little Rickie get started?

I got a call from my then boyfriend, Steven Rubin, who owned the eponymous Paper White flower shop on 2nd Ave between 4th and 5th, next door to Bink and Bink, the great food store, that a store on 1st and 1st was available, and was I interested? I said yes to the vacant store front (72 e. 1st Street), spent some months making drawings of what Little Rickie would look like, inside and out, and began conceptualizing the whole thing, like an art project, installation, Joseph Cornell box. When I opened the store, it was totally about what I liked and had been buying all my life. I've collected flotsam and jetsam since the 4th grade.

I moved the shop to 1st and 3rd in 1987, with my then life partner and soul mate, Mitchell Cantor. We started dating when I was renovating the 1st Avenue space that had been Tensor's Army Navy for 50 years prior. I used to buy my jeans there when I lived on 1st Avenue, way before Little Rickie.


Mitchell & Phillip at the first shop

Did you always have an artistic sensibility?

I had been to art school (San Francisco Art Institute, in photography, hence the B/W photobooth), and grew up hanging around the May Company department store (on Fairfax and Wilshire) in Los Angeles as a child and early teen in the 1960s. My mom worked there as a salesgirl, making 50 bucks a week. We were poor, but boy did I get a great early retail experience.

When other kids were doing sports, I was window shopping and making my rounds at all the cool shops. I studied art on the streets and in museums, galleries and stores. Aside from studying photography at SFAI, I studied performance art with people like Chris Burden, and had classes and was friends with people like Karen Finley. I studied drawing with David Hockney who became a dear friend.

At Little Rickie, I hired the genius local artist, Ilona Granet to paint the store sign in the window on 1st Street, later hiring the genius Julie Wilson to paint the reverse window paintings in all the windows on 1st and 3rd.


photo: Julie Wilson

What was it like to run the shop in the 1980s and 90s?

The neighborhood was full of characters. For example, it was not that I chose not to capitalize on Paul Reubens' tragedy in Florida by not raising prices on the items from his show. It was that Paul shopped at Little Rickie when Pee Wee's Playhouse was being shot in New York. Paul bought some of the best vintage items I had for sale, like a pair of 1950s shoes with springs attached to the soles, so one could walk like a pogo stick. I probably priced them at 25 bucks, which was the underlying philosophy of the store, make it accessible, nothing elitist. 10 cents bought you a cool novelty. 25 bucks, a museum quality collectible toy.

People like Taylor Mead became a good friend, and always stopped by the store to hang in the photobooth for the afternoon. At night we were all at The Palladium, Area, and local bars, like The Bar. There was a complete sense of local. We lived in, worked in, hung out in the neighborhood.

People on 1st street left their kids in the store with me for a few hours, while they ran errands. I loaned money to everyone (Nan Goldin still owes me 50 bucks!). I hired the local kids as soon as they were old enough as staff members. Sometimes their parents worked in the store along with them. People spent locally, and the money went right back into the community. This is the whole concept of buying local. Starbucks is not local. The majority of the money goes back to Seattle, or wherever the fuck they are headquartered, and into the pockets of shareholders. A mom and pop store (in this case sans Mom), as I see it, weaves a thick carpet in a community.


Taylor Mead & Phillip

Tell us about that wonderful photobooth.

The photobooth was an integral part of the store from day one. No other business had a B/W booth in New York at the time, save for a few Woolworth's, PlayLand in Times Square, and the arcade in Chinatown. I had been using photobooths since 1959, at the Thrifty Drug store across from the aforementioned May Company in LA.

When people were not in the booth, my dog Fanny slept on the floor in her bed. Fanny became a Little Rickie fixture of sorts.

I immediately put customer photobooth strips in the window on 1st street, in a grid, in homage to Walker Evans, the great photographer. The pictures in the window said: Everyone has a place here, no one is excluded. The images of gay and multiracial couples dancing, painted on our front windows, said we permanently support inclusiveness. We sold the Hells Angels calendar every year, and so the 3rd Street chapter were "our buds." We celebrated the births of so many neighbors, and the deaths from AIDS of what seemed like almost everyone, including Mitchell, my dearest of partners.

Mitchell was beloved during his 5 years at Little Rickie. From the moment we became a couple, he was an integral part of everything Phillip, and everything Little Rickie. Even when he was down to 80 pounds and had to take naps often behind the photobooth, people remember Mitchell as the shining light that he was.

AIDS had a big impact on Little Rickie, and of course on me. Many of the photobooth strips in the window were of people we lost. So it held great importance to me, all of it, and when I decided I'd had enough and needed to move on to the next phase of my life, in 1999, it was not without tremendous deliberation (it took years to make that decision). My heart was broken, shattered, by losing Mitch in 1991, and I never quite healed afterwards.


Mitchell & with Phillip

How did the Starbucks lawsuit over those "Fuck Off" stickers contribute to the store's closing?

It had nothing to do with why I closed the store, just odd timing. I did not make the stickers, I was selling them for a local guy who did make them, and I thought they perfectly stated what I thought of the fast moving corporatocracy of our country.

I used to buy flip flops at a Vietnamese store on the corner of W.Broadway and Chambers street for years, for $1.19 a pair. Then one day they were gone, maybe 1995, and a Starbucks moved in. No more flip flops--shitty coffee and the rents of Tribeca went through the roof. No more cool little shops. End of story. I was saying Fuck You to what Starbucks symbolized, and the satire of it is protected in the 1st amendment.

That did not stop Starbucks from paying their lawyers over $500,000 to sue me. First they sent a SWAT team of 6 suited, earphoned FBI-looking guys to confiscate the merchandise and attempt to scare the jeans off me.

What did you do after the store closed?

Finally, at age 47, I knew it was the store or me, and I chose myself in the end. I bought an old farmhouse in Provincetown, and moved there full time to write, sit, and ride a bike. I went back and got my masters and am now in private practice as a psychotherapist in New Mexico.

My house is for sale in Santa Fe, and when it sells, I might come back to New York and open another store. However, with rents as high as they are now, even in Brooklyn, that dream might be prohibitive. Commercial rents are killing creativity and opportunities, not only for old guys like me, who may want a second act, but for the new generations to follow. People may think, oh good, Starbucks, easy, good enough, or even like the crap, and then support them. That support will only create more of the same elsewhere, ad nauseum. It's like the 99% supporting the Republicans. Know where you put your money, and what that means, not only for yourself, but for your community.


Fred Schneider & Joey Arias at the shop

The East Village, like much of the city, is turning into Anywhere, USA.

The encroachment of NYU on the EV, the story of RENT, the Kate Spadification of downtown (my word), and yes, cellphones and a new crop of people, were all writing on the wall for me. I closed the store in great part for my own personal needs and growth, but I also mourned the changes in the neighborhood, in a serious way.

I liked that Little Rickie at any given moment could be filled with drag queens, Hells Angels members, Susan Sarandon, Happi Phace, every cool art person in the city, grandmas who lived in the projects across the street, anyone local, every age, color, race and predilection. It was a true neighborhood-city-cacophony, and I liked it that way.

I still have the thousand or so photo strips from the windows--one day to be a book for all of us to sit, laugh, and cry by.


Phillip today

Inside the Elk

Mark Schulte has been a lease-holding tenant at the Elk Hotel for the past 5 years, moving in permanently after 15 years of being a transient guest at the 87-year-old flophouse off Times Square.

On February 7, he tells me, he and the rest of the Elk's tenants arrived home to find new staff working the front desk and two days' notice to vacate the premises. Without warning, the building had been sold in a purchase that nearly completes the acquisition of an entire block of tenements along 9th Avenue between 41st and 42nd Streets.


all photos: my Flickr

As Mark walks me down the Elk's murky hallways, I step carefully across checkerboard linoleum floors so mushy it feels like my feet will break right through. Here and there, we pass over the litter of syringe wrappers, cigarette butts, and beer bottles. We peer into abandoned rooms, miserable warrens of cracked walls and moldy ceilings, some just big enough for nothing more than a twin-sized mattress. In one room, a dead mouse swells on the carpet.



"The new landlord picked off the low-hanging fruit," Mark says, by offering small buyouts of $2,000, then $5,000. The drug addicts and many of the elderly took the cash and left. About a dozen lease-holding tenants remain.

One who might have taken the buyout, but didn't get the chance, was a woman whose body was found by Mark and a neighbor on February 10 in Room 211. It had been decomposing in bed for two weeks. As we stand in front of the NYPD-sealed door, the smell of human decay is still pungent.

"I wasn't sure what I was looking at," Mark says, "It was not recognizable as a body." It looked like a pile of blackened rags with a hot-pink wig lying on top of it. A friend down the hall who just happens to work as an embalmer identified the body as a well-known tenant who had recently dyed her hair pink. She used to sit outside Port Authority and panhandle with a sign that said "Times have been tough." This is how the woman paid her $180 monthly rent at the Elk.



Another tenant, called "Pops," isn't budging. An 85-year-old war veteran, Pops can only hobble from his room to the shared bathroom and back. He can't walk down the stairs, so he sends his neighbors out for coffee and sandwiches. His window looks out on the well-known Pepsi sign--his view for many years.

Then there's the tenant that Mark and his neighbors "affectionately refer to as Coo-Coo." Suffering from some unknown mental illness, Coo-Coo roams the halls in dirty underwear, picking through the garbage to take items back to his room--empty tuna cans are a favorite--where he hoards them in a kind of nest. He begs the neighbors for cigarettes, and carries a thick bankroll of Guyanese dollars--worth almost nothing. Coo-Coo's response to the buyout is: "I'm staying."



While the Elk was known for being a holdout of Times Square seediness, with rooms on the first floor renting by the hour and filled with the dramatic moaning of prostitutes, most of the permanent residents who remain are like Mark--"average guys," he says, who found themselves couch-surfing on one couch too many, and discovered cheap rent and privacy at the Elk Hotel. They make their living as cooks, musicians, performers.

Retired, Mark spends his time writing and doing volunteer work, mostly for LGBT causes. He's a veteran of ACT UP and Queer Nation, he says, "So I'm not afraid of getting in people's faces." He has a lawyer and is fighting for his rights, as life at the Elk has deteriorated fast in the past few weeks.



"On Saturday, February 11 at 8:30 A.M.," Mark tells me, "a demolition crew came in, removed all the doors from vacant rooms, and carried out everything but the sinks." On the night of February 13, with about a dozen holdouts remaining after the buyout deadline, "the heat and hot water was turned off... We spent a very cold night," says Mark. The next day, the tenants went to court and got their heat back.

"Now we're just waiting to see what the landlord's next move will be," Mark tells me. "I'm going to ride this out. They're probably going to demolish the building and I'm willing to leave, but I need more than $5,000. That's not even enough for a deposit with first and last month's rent someplace."

And what will happen to Pops and Coo-Coo, he wonders, and to other tenants like them who cannot advocate for themselves and have even fewer resources? $5,000 won't help them find and keep a new home. It will, however, pay one month's rent on a two-bedroom at the Elk's high-end new neighbor, the Orion.



A 58-story glass shaft of luxury condos and rentals, the Orion towers over the Elk. It also used the Elk's air rights, so nothing tall can be built on that corner. According to online records, the Elk's new landlord now owns almost the entire block, from 568 - 578 9th Avenue, minus 572.

These buildings house a simple, but motley collection of first-floor businesses, like Dave's Tavern, the New Panda Chinese restaurant, a bodega, a barber shop, and Papaya Dog.

How long will this block remain standing?


Orion--right next to the Elk's entrance

Over drinks at the 9th Avenue Saloon, Mark recalls his years at the Elk, remembering when the first-floor business belonged to LaFleur's, a transgender hustler bar run by locally famous drag queen John LaFleur. That was the 1990s and the neighborhood was a much different place.

"But I knew this was coming," Mark says of the hotel's demise. "Because it didn't make sense that the Elk was still there, being what it was. It used to be there were a number of hotels like the Elk. It's a way of life that's disappearing. You could come to New York with nothing, arrive on a bus at Port Authority, and get a cheap room around the corner, so at least you had a place to stay. And that's all vanishing."

"How do you think people without money come to New York today," I asked.

"They don't," Mark said.


Mark looking up at Pops' window

See more:
Elk Hotel vanished
Elk Hotel
More photos inside the Elk on my Flickr