The door to any apartment with anything of value in it had to have at least two deadbolts on it. Every window was barred. There was a locksmith on almost every block. Some residents put axle grease on their windowsills and littered them with broken glass so that skinny, single-minded, and totally desperate junkies would think twice about Spider-manning onto an air conditioner or scaling an air shaft to their window. Lower East Side bar and restaurant bathrooms were guarded like bank tills. Proprietors installed buzzers on toilet doors as a kind of velvet rope system to keep junkies from inadvertently graffiti-ing a stall with their blood while shooting up or with their puke afterward. If a junkie managed to get into a men’s room, sharp-eyed bartenders would snap off the appropriate breaker and plunge the addict into darkness. One bar on Second Street and Avenue A installed blue lightbulbs in its rest rooms. A glowing harvest moon reflected in the toilet bowl water when you pissed and if you tried to shoot up your blue veins were nearly indistinguishable from the rest of your arm in the murky light.
“This is Ed Koch, your mayor. You know the Sanitation Department cannot sweep this street if you don’t move your illegally parked car. Please get it outta here!”
When Ed Koch shook my hand at the NYPD commencement ceremony in Madison Square Garden in 1983, I was surprised, as people often were, by how tall he was. I wasn’t surprised at what a smooth operator he was. At the time Koch was heading for his third term and was famous for asking crowds “How’m I doing?” The taped message about moving your car blasting from a select group of street sweepers dubbed the “Ed Koch talking brooms” was more the mayor’s real style. Koch had the politician’s gift for one-way communication down to a science. In any public dialogue Koch paid close attention to people agreeing with him and closer attention to the sound of his own voice dismissing anybody that didn’t. Either way he came away from any encounter truthfully claiming to have fulfilled his mayoral duty by dialoguing with the voters. No matter how controversial or problematic the exchange, Koch was always “doing” just fine.
Homesteaders and activists on the Lower East Side hated Koch for being the de facto auctioneer at a decade-long selling out of a neighborhood that nobody had given a shit about for years. But you can’t blame Koch for wanting to see the city get back up on its feet financially by putting new price tags on old buildings. Anyone assuming the mayor’s office at the time would’ve done the same thing Koch did. They just might not have looked so happy about it. The seventies had been a fiscal disaster for the city and a political disaster for the politicians who oversaw it. Among the souvenirs of economic hardship on hand when Koch took office were hundreds of derelict residential buildings and empty lots all over the Lower East Side left in the city’s care when they were abandoned, foreclosed on, or seized for unpaid taxes.
Real estate, like narcotics, is a great opportunity for middle men. In the late seventies housing speculators gambled that it was worth risking the relatively cheap purchase price of city-administered properties in the Lower East Side (particularly around Tompkins Square Park) in the hopes that they would become more valuable. They guessed right and a lot got rich. The city was only too happy to offload buildings and lots for cheap so that they could become tax-revenue generating, neighborhood-transforming, commercially viable apartments, storefronts, co-ops, and condos. Agencies created years before to help small-time real estate owners and buyers now mobilized to remove legal and financial roadblocks for big-time speculators and the developers that followed.
Most of the neighborhood’s residential tenants were protected by rent control and rent stabilization laws that had been on the books for decades. Old-time businesses didn’t have the law on their side and new owners and old landlords alike began exterminating old stores and restaurants by hitting commercial tenants with absurdly high rent increases when leases came up. Mom-and-pop shops were shuttered overnight as new and often short-lived galleries, boutiques, and bars took their places.
The Lower East Side’s separate, undiscovered vibe began to evaporate. By the late eighties the hippie dream of a fringe community utopia was already impossible. When it comes to real estate dollars, you really can’t fight City Hall. Not in New York. Manhattan had only so many square miles and apartments, and in the eighties, a lot of financially set new arrivals were willing and eager to trade some safety and yuppie amenities for the thrill of buying into a place that was pretty much the capital of cool.
The writing was literally on the wall—“Not for Sale,” “Speculators Go Away,” “Rent Is Torture”—but the reality had been looming since the mid-eighties. When developers finished erecting the Zeckendorf Towers at 1 Irving Place in 1986, the immediate fallout from this luxury housing high-rise complex just beyond the northwestern limits of the Lower East Side was that it forced some West Village residents to buy watches. The Zeckendorf’s pyramid shaped top floors cut off an entire neighborhood’s view of the massive two-story ConEd clock tower. But the real shadow from the three-tower complex reached east and south across Tompkins Square Park, to a building called the Christodora House on Avenue B.
For more than half a century the Christodora House was the only non-project high-rise on the Lower East Side. It went up in the late twenties as part of the same American settlement house movement that earned Lillian Wald a housing project named in her honor. The idea was for volunteers to mix and mingle and work with recent immigrants and the poor in the Christodora’s meeting rooms, classrooms, music studios, dormitories, and medical facilities. Rental properties in the top floors of the building were supposed to pay for the upkeep and supplies of the charity work and public facilities downstairs. It didn’t work. After World War II, the building was vacated, condemned, and purchased by the city.
The Christodora lay vacant and, outside of various legal and illegal underground activities, unused for twenty years until city cops from the Ninth Precinct raided the lower floors, cleared out the people they found in there and welded the Christodora’s doors shut in 1969. After five bidless years, the city sold the building at auction in 1975 for about one and a half million dollars less than they’d paid in 1948. The speculator that bought the Christodora flipped it (without doing any work anywhere on it) in 1985 for about twenty times what he had paid for it.
Even though it was a complete wreck on the inside, the Christodora was still a high-rise on the outside, and therefore a strong anchor with which to stabilize new development in the area. The Zeckendorf Towers had already driven the last nail in the coffin of a mini-tenderloin area of SROs, porno theaters, seventy-five-cent mug bars, a pool hall, and a boxing gym around Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue that had been a sort of scaled down Forty-second Street for years. Scenes with the child prostitute character and her pimp in Taxi Driver were shot just a few blocks from where the Zeckendorf went up ten years later. Once the Christodora was renovated and reopened, it would help sanitize Avenue B the same way the Zeckendorf started the clock on the area surrounding it. Despite what some of the big mouths protesting gentrification in Tompkins Square Park may have said, it wasn’t a nefarious conspiracy. It was a simple fact of the free market. “Private reinvestment improved housing conditions, stemmed deterioration, and strengthened neighborhood commercial areas,” an eighties city-funded study concluded. More development money converting cheap local real estate into expensive local real estate would smooth the rougher curbside edges of the Lower East Side.
In response to charges that he was selling out longtime low- and middle-income residents, Ed Koch, whose own mansion on the Upper East Side was a job perk paid for by the taxpayers, simply offered, “If people can’t afford to live in a neighborhood, they shouldn’t be there.” Those that didn’t have the skyrocketing price of local fair market rent or a mortgage would be, in the words of one Lower East Side would-be Donald Trump, “pushed east to the river and given life preservers.”
The frustration for developers looking to send old guard immigrants and bohos swimming to Brooklyn was a series of high-r
ise obstacles along Avenue D—the end of the neighborhood alphabet and the last residential avenue before your feet got wet. Protestors, activists, and homesteaders may have been a pain in the city’s ass, but sanitizing and upgrading the Lower East Side was severely handicapped by the Avenue D projects and the drug sales going on inside of them, not by shouting slogans and staging the occasional riot in Tompkins Square Park.
Soon after New Year’s 1984, Ed Koch and the NYPD reassigned a couple hundred uniform and plainclothes city cops to the Lower East Side in a heavily publicized program called Operation Pressure Point. Citing “complaints from the community” the department instructed Pressure Point cops from the Ninth and Seventh precincts to arrest drug dealers and users. By the summer of 1986 there were more than twenty thousand arrests logged by Pressure Point cops. But only five hundred of those ever went to jail. Pressure Point was toothless. Uniform city cops were denied that neighborhood power to transform impulse into reality when it came to dope arrests. And just like everyone else, they were scared shitless of going into the projects. High-visibility, low-yield PR moves like Pressure Point were mostly a thorn in the side of decent law-abiding people that lived on the D and the visiting junkies and hell-raisers with little genuine connection to the area. Under Pressure Point, drug sales barely slowed but if you double-parked or drank a beer out of a bag on the street, look out.
I read once about a boomtown in Alaska that was accidentally built over a polar bear migratory breeding ground. Along with a nearly endless winter, the people that lived there had to contend with bears coming in their windows, raiding their kitchens, eating their pets, attacking them on the street, you name it. Their hometown was also the two-ton marauding mammal capital of the world. Census surveys in the eighties showed that the Wald and Riis houses on Avenue D were more densely populated per square foot than the most overcrowded cities in Asia. The estimated twenty-five thousand residents of the nearly fifty project buildings throughout the Lower East Side were mostly hardworking, low-income families of Puerto Rican descent. As if life wasn’t already hard enough for the people who lived in the Wald and Riis houses, they weren’t just trying to live while sitting on top of each other, they were going about making a life in the center of Smacktown, USA.
In our first year on patrol in Alphaville, Gio and I saw mothers and fathers fighting through hallways crowded with junkies like they were in a zombie movie. We watched kids on their way to school kicking used hypodermic needles in front of them like cans. Mothers breast-fed infants on park benches a few feet from nodding dopers somehow still standing though nearly comatose and bent sharply over at the waist. They waited on city-run food lines on the same block as rows of junkies lining up to buy smack before lunch. They paid for milk with food stamps in the same bodegas where junkies sold their food stamps to pay for a fix. Arrogant and violent young kids earned a million dollars a year moving heroin while hardworking fathers grew old making barely enough to keep their families fed and healthy.
Along with rising rents, high crime, and high expectations, new arrivals and old-timers alike all faced a potential complication in their lives. Scores of people came to the Lower East Side on the pretext of running away from a life that didn’t suit them to a life lived on their own terms, only to wind up strung out, fucked up, and on their way to an early grave. If the Lower East Side of the eighties had a motto, it might have been “Come for the Neighborhood, Stay for the Drugs.”
For me the crazy snow globe of the Lower East Side wasn’t based around Tompkins Square Park, the Christodora House, Cooper Union to the west, St. Mark’s Place, or any of the other parts of the neighborhood that were buzz words or hangouts then and are sought after real estate or tourist destinations now. My Lower East Side was the ground zero for a heroin epidemic that gripped the neighborhood—the Avenue D projects and the smack flowing out of them. When I officially began working in PSA 4, the housing projects of the Lower East Side, Gio and I were assigned to Sector D, an area that included several different parts of the neighborhood and that was big enough that we patrolled it in a squad car. The roughest part of Sector David was a strip of city-run residential real estate along Avenue D—the same area that had pissed me off so much during that drive to the academy a few years before. As far as cops were concerned Alphabet City’s street dealers only worried about two things: the first was buy-and-bust operations staged by the Manhattan South Narcotics Division. The second was the Housing PD. I found out later that Manhattan South Narcotics didn’t actually like sending undercover officers into the Lower East Side projects. Their guys often were robbed of their buy money on the way in just like the visiting junkies. And housing? Well, I was itching to test the waters on that one. Gio and I were looking for action, and we soon realized that if we hung out around the Wald and Riis houses on Avenue D, we’d find it.
Avenue D
Davey Blue Eyes maintains a highly lucrative balance between hands-on and hands-off operations that keeps the cash rolling in while keeping Davey himself unknown to anyone below his top tier of main dealers and the neighbors he grew up with. Territorial challenges from outside the neighborhood like the Colombians from Queens are the only things guaranteed to get him to use his own gun. When a new Harlem dope crew begins selling and diverting customers who have been coming downtown to score, Davey takes a personal and direct interest in keeping the playing field pitched his way.
A quick look through a chop shop in Long Island City yields an unregistered Dodge Astro van stolen off the streets of Yonkers. A wad of cash later, Davey drives the van into a Chinatown auto body shop for a rendezvous with the Alvarez brothers—main dealers on the D with a car service front on Attorney Street and a way with a cutting torch, a wrench, and a jack. Over the next week they execute a punch list of modifications Davey writes out on a paper napkin at a Cuban-Chinese lunch counter on Canal Street. The Judas Priest mural on the outside of the van gets a coat of rust brown primer. The interior, wheel wells, fenders, and doors are bulked up with steel armor plate, stock windshield and windows are replaced with tinted bulletproof glass, and the undercarriage is fortified with special shocks to deal with the new weight and to prevent betraying the movements of anyone inside. A periscope goes in along with a heating, ventilation, police scanner, and electrical system that run independently of the engine while the van is parked for long periods of time.
Late one Saturday night a pair of Davey’s Harlem competitors and two heavily armed associates emerge from the 1018 Club on the site of the old Roxy. Inside the club Mike Tyson holds court alongside porn stars and coke dealers. Outside the club the two dealers, both drunk and high and fresh from getting blown for a taste by two girls they invited into the VIP lounge, goof on a transvestite prostitute on the corner and head over to another hype night spot a block away. Neither they nor their two bodyguards take any notice of a van parked at the end of a block of warehouses.
Inside the van Davey watches his targets draw closer like a duck hunter in a blind. “Shit’s on,” he whispers to the five men with him.
He phoned each member of his crew the day before telling them to get some rest because they were going to party in his new van and surprise some homeboys on Eighteenth Street tonight. One by one they appeared on designated corners to be picked up. Some are already wearing their flak vests and guns, others had them in gym bags and put them on after getting in the van. Once they parked outside 1018, they pass joints and sip from forties, waiting for the two dead-meat uptown pendejos to arrive. The velvet rope crowd parts for celebs and anyone else the doormen know. Davey’s Harlem quarries go inside around midnight backed by two bodyguards. It’s nearly 4:00 A.M. now and they’re walking right up to the van and into a world of hurt.
As the Harlem foursome turns the corner, Davey’s crew rolls back the van’s side door like a Huey helicopter in Nam and opens fire with nines and .357 revolvers. The dealers and their entourage reflexively and uselessly cover their heads and faces with their hands and are cut down mid strid
e. At the first shot bystanders storm the velvet rope then crawl under cars and try to hide behind lampposts like kids playing hide-and-seek when they discover the club’s doors are locked shut.
Just as the van is about to pull out and disappear down Tenth Avenue, a passing blue-and-white surprises Davey and his gang and blocks them in. While the officers on scene survey the carnage and yell into their radio for backup, Davey and his crew ditch out the back door of the van and escape on foot to a second car they have stashed nearby. Investigating detectives give the van a once-over and immediately call the bomb squad. Among the beer empties, chip bags, handguns, and ammo boxes inside is a crate of grenades Davey’s crew is forced to leave behind.
It’s the first time any of Davey’s operations come under direct police scrutiny. The Colombian confrontation is a write-off. But the 1018 hit is a fuck-up. When Big Arthur Washington comes out of jail a few months later, Davey decides to let Arthur do as he pleases for a while and hang a face on the Lower East Side dope rackets other than Davey’s own.
Nine
When it came to crime, if New York was a melting pot, then the Lower East Side was a microwave. Neighborhood tenements had nurtured Lucky Luciano, Bugsy Siegel, and Meyer Lansky and provided a boot camp, hunting ground, and hideout for the full range of the worst of human behavior. So much so that it also became a proving ground and testing range for reformers. As far back as 1854, various private concerns had experimented with building or renovating model housing blocks for “improving the conditions of the poor.” Inspired by more sustained government-funded efforts in Europe, Mayor La Guardia spearheaded the first totally publicly paid for, constructed, and maintained housing block in the country in 1934. Even at the height of Roosevelt’s New Deal it took some doing. La Guardia first set his lawyers on Vincent Astor, the “boy millionaire” who had inherited a fortune after his old man went down with the Titanic. Once a court ruling halted haggling over a piece of real estate Astor owned on the Lower East Side, La Guardia oversaw the assembling of a poker hand of federal grants and state funds that paid for the mixed demolition and gutting (the Feds would only pay for “renovations” not new constructions) of a two-dozen tenement block on Astor’s former parcel bordered by Avenue A, First Avenue, and Second and Third streets on the Lower East Side. In 1936, the First Houses were born.
Alphaville: 1988, Crime, Punishment, and the Battle for New York City's Lower East Side Page 15