This Land

by Dan Barry

  Here was Ferrell Miller, 63, the school’s principal, whose father used to say the “N” word as if it were just any other word. Dr. Miller came to Junction City more than 40 years ago as a soldier, met and married a young woman from the Philippines, returned to his Ohio hometown—and then moved back to Junction City because that place in Ohio “didn’t have the diversity we were looking for.” But Junction City did.

  And here were the cafeteria workers, white, Hispanic, black, most of them wearing hairnets, taking a break from food prep to share in the moment. Margaret Langley, 73, a German woman who married a G.I. in the mid-1950s, is proud to be a naturalized citizen; Nellie Vargas, 29, from Houston, married to a soldier stationed at Fort Riley; Phyllis Edwards, 46, of North Carolina, married to a retired soldier and with a son in the eighth grade here.

  “I’m just so nervous,” said Ms. Edwards, failing to find the words to match her emotions. Finally, the moment. The announcer asked people in Washington to please stand; the students of Junction City remained seated. The chief justice of the United States said, “Congratulations, Mr. President”; those students burst into applause.

  As President Obama began his Inaugural Address, the seventh-grade students began their lunch. They filed into the kitchen to collect their trays of chicken-patty sandwiches, fries and chocolate milk. Few opted for the peas.

  Kimberlee Muñoz set down her tray and rendered her review of the Inaugural Address—“It was the bomb!”—while at a table nearby, Reggie Campbell ate his lunch in forced exile, having gotten into it with another student who was making fun of him. He said he lived with an uncle who was in Iraq at the moment, and he said he enjoyed watching the inauguration.

  “I think it’s nice to have a black president for once,” he said.

  Meanwhile, the adults at the middle school began the orderly transition from historic to mundane. Ms. Edwards took her place behind the buffet table, wishing all the while that she was in Washington. Ms. Vargas left her cafeteria work early to drive her husband to the airport; an emergency leave had ended, and he was returning to Iraq.

  And Mr. Walker, in his dark suit, white shirt and red tie, set off for another meeting in another building in Junction City, leaving in his wake one word: Wow.

  On the Bow’ry

  NEW YORK, N.Y.—MARCH 14, 2010

  Open the door to a small hotel on the Bowery.

  A small hotel, catering to Asian tourists, that used to be a flophouse that used to be a restaurant. That used to be a raucous music hall owned by a Tammany lackey called Alderman Fleck, whose come-hither dancers were known for their capacious thirsts. That used to be a Yiddish theater, and an Italian theater, and a theater where the melodramatic travails of blind girls and orphans played out. That used to be a beer hall where a man killed another man for walking in public beside his wife. That used to be a liquor store, and a clothing store, and a hosiery store, whose advertisements suggested that the best way to avoid dangerous colds was “to have undergarments that are really and truly protectors.”

  Climb the faintly familiar stairs, sidestepping ghosts, and pay $138 for a room, plus a $20 cash deposit to dissuade guests from pocketing the television remote. Walk down a hushed hall that appears to be free of any other lodger, and enter Room 207. The desk’s broken drawer is tucked behind the bed. Two pairs of plastic slippers face the yellow wall. A curled tube of toothpaste rests on the sink.

  Was someone just here? Was it George?

  Six years had passed since I was last in this building at 104-106 Bowery. Back then it was a flophouse called the Stevenson Hotel, and I was there to write about its sole remaining tenant, a grizzled holdout named George; toothless, diabetic, not well. He lived in Cubicle 40, about the length and width of a coffin.

  All the other tenants, who had paid $5 a night for their cubicles, had moved on or died off, including the man known as the Professor, and Juliano, who used to beat George. The landlord, eager to convert the building into a hotel, a real hotel, had paid some of them to leave. But George had refused, saying the last offer of $75,000 was not enough.

  It was as though he belonged to the structure, a human brick, cemented by the mortar of time to the Professor and Alderman Fleck and all the others who gave life to an ancient, ordinary building on the Bowery.

  The cubicle of George Skoularikos

  Now the place is the U.S. Pacific Hotel, and George is nowhere to be seen. I dim the lights in my own glorified cubicle, and give in to musings about his whereabouts, and long-ago murders, and the Bowery, where, the old song said, they say such things and they do strange things.

  On the Bow’ry. The Bow’ry.

  The building at 104-106 Bowery, between Grand and Hester Streets, has been renovated, reconfigured and all but turned upside down over the generations, always to meet the pecuniary aspirations of the owner of the moment. Planted like a mature oak along an old Indian footpath that became the Bowery, it stands in testament to the essential Gotham truth that change is the only constant.

  Its footprint dates at least to the early 1850s, when the Bowery was a strutting commercial strip of butchers, clothiers and amusements, with territorial gangs that never tired of thumping one another. Back then the building included the hosiery shop, which promised “all goods shown cheerfully”—although an argument one night between two store clerks, Wiley and Pettigrew, ended only after Wiley “drew a dark knife and stabbed his antagonist sixteen times,” as The New York Times reported with italicized outrage.

  Over the years the Bowery evolved into a raucous boulevard, shadowed by a cinder-showering elevated train track and peopled by swaggering sailors and hard-working mugs, fresh immigrants and lost veterans of the Civil War. The street was exciting, tawdry and more than a little predatory. The con was always on.

  By 1879, 104-106 Bowery had become a theater and beer hall, with a bartender named Shaefer who was arrested twice in two weeks for selling beer on Sunday. The adjacent theater, meanwhile, sold sentiment.

  During one Christmas Day performance of “Two Orphans,” precisely at the audience-pleasing moment when the blind girl resolves to beg no more, someone shouted “Fire!” A false alarm, it turned out, caused when a cook in the restaurant next door dumped hot ashes onto snow. The crowd returned to rejoice in the blind girl’s triumph.

  The theater changed names almost as often as plays: the National, Adler’s, the Columbia, the Roumanian, the Nickelodeon, the Teatro Italiano. In 1896, when it was known as the Liberty, the police arrested two Italian actors for violating the “theatrical law.” He was dressed as a priest, she as a nun.

  But the building’s dramas were not relegated solely to the stage. One of its theater proprietors skipped to Paris with $1,800 in receipts, leaving behind a destitute wife, six children and many unpaid actors. One of its upstairs lodgers drowned with about 40 others when an overloaded tugboat, chartered by the Herring Fishing Club, capsized off the Jersey coast.

  In 1898, two men were laughing and drinking at a vaudeville performance when a third walked up, drew a revolver and shot one of them in the head. Hundreds scrambled for the exits to cries of “Murder!”

  The shooter, Thompson, told the police that he had seen the victim, Morrison, on the street with his wife. “He has ruined my life; broken up my home,” Thompson said, as he gazed at the man groaning on the floor. “It’s a life for a wife.”

  And the fires, the many fires. The one in 1898 gutted the building and displaced the families of Jennie Goldstein and Sigmund Figman, while the one in 1900 sent 500 theatergoers fleeing into the Christmas night, prompting a singular Times headline: “Audience Gets Out Without Trouble, but the Performers Were Frightened—Mrs. Fleck Wanted Her Poodle Saved.”

  Mrs. Mabel Fleck, whose poodle survived, was the wife of the proprietor, one Frederick F. Fleck: city alderman, bail bondsman and self-important member of the court to the Bowery king himself, Timothy D. Sullivan—“Big Tim”—a Tammany Hall leader said to control all votes and vice south of 14th Street
.

  Alderman Fleck was there whenever Big Tim staged another beery steamboat outing for thousands of loyal Democrats, or another Christmas bacchanal for Flim-Flam Flanigan, Rubber-Nose Dick, Tip-Top Moses and hundreds of other Bowery hangers-on. There to provide bail when some Tammany hacks were charged with enticing barflies at McGurk’s Suicide Hall to vote the Democratic ticket in exchange for a bed, some booze and five bucks.

  When Alderman Fleck was not demonstrating his Tammany fealty, he was managing the Manhattan Music Hall, here at 104-106 Bowery, a preferred place for dose in de know.

  But the city’s good-government types, the famous goo-goos, hated how the Bowery reveled in its debauchery. In 1901, a reform group called the Committee of Fifteen raided Alderman Fleck’s establishment and charged him with maintaining a disorderly house. He responded by calling the arresting officer “a dirty dog.”

  Undercover agents testified to having witnessed immoral acts on stage and off. One reported seeing a woman lying on a table, moaning; when he asked what was wrong, he was told she had just consumed $60 worth of Champagne, and so was feeling bad.

  But this was Big Tim’s Bowery. A jury quickly acquitted Fleck, prompting a night of revelry at the music hall. A Times reporter took note:

  “Strangers as soon as they entered were piloted in the same old way by a watchful waiter to the gallery and curtained boxes upstairs, and as if by magic women ‘performers’ in abbreviated costumes appeared on the scene with capacious thirsts, which could be satisfied only with many rounds of drinks at the same music hall—$1 per round.”

  Soon, Alderman Fleck was competing in the “fat man’s race” at one of Big Tim’s annual outings, weighing in at 260 pounds. Soon he was back in his rightful place as a minor character along a boulevard so chock-full of characters—the predatory, the dissolute, the tragicomic—that slumming parties of uptown swells would tour the Bowery to gawk and feign allegiance. Some locals were even hired to portray Bowery “characters” to meet tourist expectations.

  But denizens who lingered too long on the Bowery often paid a price. A few doors up from Fleck’s place was a saloon owned by the famous Steve Brodie, whose survival of a supposed leap from the Brooklyn Bridge earned him the lucrative lifetime job of recounting the tale. After his premature demise at 43, the saloon’s new owners hired his son, Young Steve Brodie, as a tough-talking character, but he soon drank himself into the more tragic role of Bowery inebriate.

  As he lay dying in the gutter, young Brodie, 27, gazed up at a concerned police officer and whispered: “I’m in, Bill. Git me a drink of booze, quick.”

  The officer obliged. It was his civic duty.

  The downfall of Alderman Fleck, who once sported diamond-encrusted cufflinks, was less dramatic. First the city marshal came after him for not paying for 281 chickens he had ordered for yet another Tammany dinner. Then his poodle-loving wife sued for divorce. Then he wound up spending a night in jail, following a row with a butcher over another unpaid bill.

  His obituary a quarter-century later made no reference to goo-goo raids or fat men’s races, to precious poodles, Big Tim Sullivan or a street called the Bowery. It described him instead as having been in the theatrical business for many years, which seems close enough.

  The theaters and music halls, the museums for suckers and the likes of Steve Brodie—they all gradually faded from the Bowery. Big Tim Sullivan, who in later years championed women’s suffrage and labor law reform after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911, was seen less and less, in part because disease, probably syphilis, had rendered him mentally incompetent.

  One afternoon in 1913, Sullivan escaped from his handlers, only to be struck and killed by a freight train in the Bronx. His body lay unclaimed in the morgue for 13 days, until a police officer, glancing at yet another corpse bound for potter’s field, did a double take and shouted: “Why, it’s Tim! Big Tim!”

  More and more, the Bowery became the place for men with nowhere else to go: thousands and thousands of them, from war veterans to would-be masters of the universe, often seeking the deadening effects of alcohol and, later, drugs. They found cheap beds and brotherhood in flophouses that fancied themselves as hotels.

  After housing a variety of passing ventures—a moving-picture theater, a rag-sorting operation, a penny arcade—the building at 104-106 Bowery became the Comet Hotel, a flophouse. And it remained a flophouse for decades, as wholesale restaurant suppliers and lighting-fixture stores moved onto the street; as many other flophouses disappeared; as the fits and starts of gentrification claimed loft space.

  In the late 1970s, the Comet’s lodgers would trudge up the 17 steps to the lobby, where a television hung from the wall and a proprietor in a cagelike office collected the fee—slightly less than $3 a night—slipped under a grate. One of the floors upstairs was an open room, with 65 beds and 65 lockers. The other two floors had 100 cubicles combined, each one measuring 4 feet by 6 feet, with partitions 7 feet high and a ceiling of chicken wire.

  Cubicle No. 40 was home to a Greek immigrant named George Skoularikos. A sometime poet, he moved here in 1980 and stayed, and stayed. As it became the Stevenson Hotel. As the other men left or died. As the current owners, Chun Kien Realty, tried to entice him with money to move.

  By 2004, when I visited George, he was 74 and this flophouse’s last lodger, sleeping in a cramped, green-painted cubicle that he secured with a loop of wire. A Housing Court judge and a Legal Aid lawyer were advising him to take the landlord’s offer of $75,000. Looking with exasperation upon this frail, sick man, the judge had said, “And who do you think will last the longest?”

  But George would not, perhaps could not, leave.

  Today, at 104-106 Bowery, what used to be a hosiery store and a beer hall and a theater and a penny arcade and a flophouse is now a hotel of less than luxurious means. Tucked between a Vietnamese restaurant and the Healthy Pharmacy, it has a blue marquee in English and Chinese. The cubicles and chicken wire are gone, as is George.

  I found him, eventually, in court files. In late 2004, a few months after my column about him, a city-appointed psychiatrist came calling to the squalid and all-but-deserted flophouse. She later wrote that George was delusional, paranoid and in need of a guardian who could help move him to “more amenable accommodations.”

  But George refused to go. At one point a social worker tried to take him to a hospital, but George barricaded himself on the flophouse’s second floor. Police officers eventually forced open the door to conduct a search by flashlight. And there they found him, hiding in a cubicle, a Bowery holdout.

  In late 2005, the matter of George Skoularikos was adjudicated in State Supreme Court in Manhattan.

  ORDERED, that the landlord pay George’s court-appointed guardian the sum of $80,000; ORDERED, that the guardian arrange for “an appropriate place of abode” for George in Greece, and set up a mechanism for payment of his bills; ORDERED, that a caseworker accompany George to Greece to make sure his new residence is properly established.

  In a sense, this Bowery building that once received George had returned him to his native Greece, where he would die a few months later, in April 2006. There was enough money from his settlement with the landlord to pay for his funeral and marble tomb.

  Screams at the bottom of the night disrupt a Bowery sleep. A woman on the other side of the hotel is crying, “I love you, I love you,” to someone who seems not to love her back. Her wails last an hour, unleashing into the pitch a swirl of imagined sounds and whispers.

  The glass shimmers of a million beer mugs. The faint strains of a thousand vaudeville ditties. The entwined polyglot murmurs, of English and German and Yiddish and Italian and Mandarin—and Bowery. The stentorian blather of a Tammany blowhard. The final exhalation of a dying inebriate. A weepy farewell toast to Big Tim. The shouts of “Fire!” The bark of a poodle.

  The echoing clatters of a lone man building a barricade.

  At morning’s light, the sounds recede into the walls. It’s a
new day on the Bowery.

  Annie and Gloria

  NEW YORK, N.Y.—OCTOBER 17, 2010

  The fish men see her still, their Annie, in the hide-and-seek shadows of South Street. She’s telling her dirty jokes and doing anything for a buck: hustling newspapers, untaxed cigarettes, favors, those pairs of irregular socks she’d buy cheap on Canal. She’s submitting to the elements, calling out “Yoo-hoo” to the snow and the rain and her boys.

  For several decades, Annie was the profane mother of the old Fulton Fish Market, that pungent Lower Manhattan place fast becoming a mirage of memory. Making her rounds, running errands, holding her own in the blue banter, she was as much a part of this gruff place as the waxed fish boxes, the forklift-rocking cobblestones, and the cocktail aroma of gasoline, cigarettes and the sea.

  Some ridiculed and abused her; others honored and protected her. Young men new to the market were occasionally advised to make acquaintance with Annie’s prodigious breasts; kiss them for good luck. And the veterans, young men once, often slipped her a dollar, maybe five, for a copy of a fresh tabloid; pay her for good luck.

  Young and old, they all had heard that the faded color photograph on display at Steve DeLuca’s coffee truck—of a striking young woman, a raven-haired knockout in a two-piece bathing suit, running barefoot against a glorious sky—was of Annie in her younger days, decades before her dark fish-market terminus. But some could not see the coffee-truck goddess in this bent woman at shadow’s edge, clutching the handle of the shopping cart she used to hold wares and provide balance, wearing a baseball cap, layers of sweaters, and men’s pants, navy blue, into which she had sewn deep, leg-long pockets to keep safe her hard-earned rolls of bills.