Every generation goes through this, with each decade defined as much by its music and the cut of its pants (bellbottom vs. baggy vs. super skinny) as by its slang. The 1920s were the era of the “bee’s knees” and “the cat’s meow.” The late ’40s were “so reet.” The be-bop ’50s had its Beat “cool cats” and “daddy-o.” The “groovy” ’60s were “far out.” The disco ’70s were “dynamite” and “out of sight.” People were “buggin’ out” in early ’90s hip hop, had “bling” in the late ’90s. Rad came to prominence during the Valspeak era alongside other hokey, surfy terms such as “bogus” and “gnarly,” yet somehow, rad outlasted them all. It’s always baffling how certain words stay relevant while others die out. The dueling processes of cementation and erosion seem arbitrary. I don’t hear people saying “hot dogger” or “tubular.” (Then again, I never heard anyone in the late ’80s say “I’m gonna cream that mother!” the way The Dagger’s leader in Thrashin’ did.) Yet “right on” never died out. “Killer” never did either. Or maybe I’ve been saying both for so long that I failed to notice how dated I sounded. Theoretically, “golly gee” and “far out” could come back into fashion, but more likely these sayings, like MC Hammer pants and Kid ’n Play haircuts, will forever remain artifacts of their respective times, sunk in the murky bottom of that cultural La Brea Tar Pit where all the VHS tapes, “jive turkeys” and giant, old school mobile phones go, props for period pieces, too dated for even future scenesters to touch. (After all, before there was the pejorative hipster, there was the pejorative scenester.) While “as if!” sleeps on memory’s casting couch, waiting to see if irony will ever call it back to duty, people say rad. A lot. Maybe because its appeal mirrors its definition: as a word that means cooler than cool, it will likely always remain the epitome of cool.
When wisemen say “everything comes in cycles,” I have to keep my eyes from rolling. That canned phrase is so vague as to be almost meaningless, and it reeks of such woo-woo New Ageyness that I can almost smell the BO at Burning Man. But as a saying, it too has never fallen out of favor, no matter how much I wish it would (and wish it would take “everything happens for a reason” with it). Also, I have to admit, in some sense the line is true: what is old often becomes new again. Trendy, yes, but not in an annoying way. Some things are evergreen, like Son House’s 1941 “Depot Blues,” which will never sound anything but stirring and heartfelt, and Link Wray’s driving instrumentals such as “Ace of Spades,” and a thick strawberry milkshake shared with your soul mate at a mom and pop roadside stand in the coming summer heat. Maybe The Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine” sounds “of an era” as they say (now that’s a great phrase), but age has reduced none of the melody’s potency. My mom was a kid when that song ruled the airwaves in the spring of 1963. I was born in 1975. Yet when it plays, we both sing along and sway our heads. You have to. The song is contagiousness. Maybe all great cultural artifacts work the same way. If it’s good, it’s good, built of marble, never to erode. Like the word cool. Like Bob Dylan’s visage in most any early black and white photo where he’s smoking a cigarette with his sunglasses on. Like a blue and white, 1956 Ford Fairlane. Not like the movies Thrashin’ or North Shore or Rad, which will age more like wet wooden wine barrels than the sturdy vintages they contained—unraveling, rather than improving—and endure as entertainment for future drunken teenagers going through an ironic phase, as well as commentary on the Hollywood mindset at a certain point in history. Definitely not like the word rad.
Frankly, the word never really went away. Like headbangers who love Iron Maiden, and cockroaches who will survive nuclear apocalypse, rad was always there, lurking in the margins while we all did something else, like watch the rise and fall of nü-metal and Creed and American Idol winners. Will hair-metal ever come back? Hopefully not. I spent enough of my childhood surrounded by dirtheads in torn acid washed jeans and those brown tasseled moccasins to repeat that nightmare. But as long as there is air to breathe, somewhere a hesher will play air guitar to Ratt, just as other slang words will lay in wait after their generation has finished playing with them, letting the dust of decades settle upon their dormant husks before the new kids on the block (NKOTB) rise from their (vintage, refurbished) playpen to pick them up again and naively, like all previous generations, think they invented what was never really new to begin with. Because as Carl Sagan said, “You have to know the past to understand the present.” And Confucius before him: “Study the past if you would divine the future,” which resembles in content but not origin that famous line in Ecclesiastes 1:9, “There is no new thing under the sun,” which bears witness in today’s contempo garage bands who ape Thee Headcoats who aped The Kinks, just as The Kinks aped rhythm and blues, for homo erectus is descended from apes, and so too will future thirty-somethings with receding hairlines spend way too much time dissecting the films and vernacular of their now retro youth while begrudging the cruel nature of time and, in turn, reveal their own uncoolness (not a word) by completely draining the cachet from an actual word by thinking too much about it, which is somehow antithetical to cool, even though to appear cool you have to think a lot about what you’re going to wear and what you’re going to say and how to style your hair. For as The Dude in The Big Lebowski said, “Yeah? Well, you know, that’s just like, uh, your opinion, man,” so too did Stanley “Stoney” Brown (Pauly Shore) in Encino Man say, “Don’t harsh my mellow,” a phrase I quote here for the first and last time, and will never utter again.
BETWEEN DISAPPEARANCES
Moore Street, York Street, Edgar Street, Gay Street—there are a number of little streets in Manhattan that few people have heard of. The only one that matters to me is Cannon.
Like the children of so many European Jewish immigrants, my Grandma Silvia Greissman was born in 1919 in a Lower East Side tenement. “Cannon Street,” she said over and over throughout my life. “96 Cannon Street. I can still picture it in my mind.” When she was two or three, her family moved to Brownsville, Brooklyn, on the other side of the East River. By the 1910s, Brownsville had acquired a reputation as a notorious Jewish slum rife with organized crime, yet in the words of my Grandma Sylvia, “It was as an upgrade.”
I wouldn’t know. The closest I’d ever been to Brownsville is Alfred Kazin’s memoir A Walker in the City, partly about growing up in Brownsville in the decades before the Great Depression. But my grandmother’s childhood secured her and my place in the great, ongoing story of the Jewish-American diaspora, the saga of migration, alienation, aspiration, and assimilation, which is itself a quintessential New York story. Tenements, the Williamsburg Bridge, upward social mobility via eastward borough mobility—the touchstones of her early life are now the easy symbols of the immortal Gotham tale, elements so familiar that they have become clichés. Yet for someone like me, born in the American West, her cultural DNA once seemed to provide just enough of a pedigree that I, no matter how little I really knew about the City, could always counter my ignorance and insecurity in front of other people with the sense that, “Hey, you might have lived in New York in the late nineties, but my family is from here.” Only in my early thirties did I start to reevaluate this.
Cannon Street formed one locus in the triad of sacred places that defined my family’s mythology. There was Cannon Street. There was Flatbush, Brooklyn, where my mom’s aunt, uncle, and cousins lived. And there was my mother’s childhood home in Flushing, Queens, the house where her family lived until they decided to finally leave New York for the Southwest in 1969.
Growing up Phoenix, I heard about the Flushing house all my life. It was a five-bedroom stand-alone with a yard at 48-40 190th Street. Even in scorching, cactus-covered Phoenix, my grandma and Uncle Sheldon referenced the house as if it were down the street. The talk was always about how Flushing was partially rural when the family moved there from Canarsie, Brooklyn in 1950, the year after my mom was born. There was talk about the area’s large Jewish and Italian populations, about how Flushing hosted the World’s Fair in
1939–40 and 1964–65, how the state pavilion, observation towers and twelve-story tall Unisphere still stood in Fresh Meadows-Corona Park, a tidal marsh which had, before the World’s Fair, served as a dump. “When we moved there,” Grandma liked to say, “it was the country, and we were moving up in the world.”
Although I only lived in New York for one year, the Flushing house, like my family’s loud voices and Yiddish sayings, formed part of my mythology and identity: if not by birth, then by bloodline, I was a New Yorker. Yet I’d never seen the house.
In her late eighties, my grandmother got dementia. As her memory failed, the details of her life began to fade. Important dates, our family history, the stories she’d always told, they were all disappearing. After I moved back to Arizona, Grandma repeatedly asked, “Did you visit Flushing?” I told her I hadn’t. When she asked why, I didn’t have a good reason.
A few months after leaving New York in the summer of 2007, I flew back to see jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins play a historic concert at Carnegie Hall, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of a landmark gig he did there in 1957. During my free time, I made a family pilgrimage. Since I didn’t have time to travel all the way to Flushing, I focused my attention on the Lower East Side.
Unfortunately, Cannon Street didn’t appear on the maps I found in local bookstores. Everyone I asked gave the same response: “No, never heard of it.” Some cursory web research revealed the street’s location. It was down by the Williamsburg Bridge, not far from the East River. My grandma had always said she was born by the Williamsburg Bridge. On a slip of paper I drew a simple map and set out from the YMCA where I was staying near Columbus Circle.
Cannon Street sits in that easternmost corner of the City where the great curve of lower Manhattan Island—the tip of which was known as Corlears Hook during Dutch and British times—breaks SoHo and Chinatown’s orderly grid into a wedge of sideways streets. The FDR winds by like some grey buoyant boom keeping the neighborhood’s innards from spilling into the East River, while Delancey Street funnels traffic over the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn. Delancey is one of the main filaments that holds together this edge space of triangles and trapezoids. Other than residents, few people had reason to venture this far on it. There was no good Chinese food there at that time, no row of art galleries or boutiques to draw the yupster or shopping set. All of the Lower East Side’s remaining ethnic landmarks—Guss’ Pickles off Broome, Yonah Shimmel’s Knish Bakery on Houston, Kossar’s Bialys on Grand—were further west. But I had a reason to come. This sense of purpose and provenance filled me with an almost smug privilege as the B train rattled down its tracks toward Houston.
I took the B to Broadway-Lafayette and walked to Katz’s Delicatessen. Katz’s may be a culinary landmark, but it’s also a symbol of the neighborhood’s Jewish history. Since I’d only eaten there once before, and eaten only pie, I ordered a ridiculously oversized brisket sandwich heaped with mustard and sauerkraut, and three fat pickles. Even this lunch, I told myself, was part of my heritage.
The story of the Lower East Side is well documented. It was one of the main neighborhoods where immigrants lived after arriving in New York. During its heyday between the 1880s and 1930s, the Lower East Side, or LES, housed a dense, rambunctious mix of Germans, Italians, Irish and Eastern Europeans. This was the portal into America. For Jewish Americans, though, the LES maintains a particularly powerful grip on the imagination as a symbol of new beginnings. It was ground zero of the Jewish diaspora, a homeland before Israel, for it was here that many of the Jews who fled Europe’s late 19th century and early 20th century anti-Semitism started their new lives.
In 1825, New York was still populated primarily by native-born citizens, but people from all over Europe soon started pouring in, intent on improving their economic station. Between 1820 and 1870, approximately seventy percent of the more than seven million immigrants who entered the US entered through New York State’s various immigration stations. Naturally, this influx altered the composition of the City. Awash with Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Austrians, Latvians, Rumanians, Lithuanians, Greeks, Turks, Arabs and Lebanese, New York became the multicultural mélange that it would forever remain. By the 1880s, immigrants’ motives expanded. In addition to financial improvement, most of those who arrived were fleeing political and religious persecution. Chief among these were the Jews.
New York’s first Jewish resident was Jacob Bersimon. He arrived from Holland on July 8, 1654, when New York was still called New Amsterdam. A month later, a group of twenty-seven people arrived from Brazil, escaping the Inquisition which had swept through the country after Portugal captured Brazil’s last Dutch stronghold. Their move set the standard for the majority of those who came after.
In 1846, New York City housed 10,000 Jews, in 1880, 80,000, most of them German. In 1881, Czar Alexander III began a formal campaign of persecution by establishing pogroms and forbidding Russian Jews from owning land. Jews streamed out of Russia. It was the largest mass exodus since their flight from Egypt. Some of these exiles were my grandfather’s parents. Another Russian pogrom in 1882 caused 81,000 more Jews to flee to New York. According to Edward Robb Ellis’ book The Epic of New York City: A Narrative History: “Between 1881 and 1910 a total of 1,562,000 Jews came to America. A majority stayed in New York, and a majority of this majority settled in the Lower East Side, converting it into the world’s largest Jewish community. By 1910 there were 1,252,000 Jews living there. Irishmen and Germans hastily left for other parts of the city, leaving New York’s oldest dwellings to the newcomers.”
Despite their numbers and the Statue of Liberty’s “bring us your tired” dictum, the old prejudices existed in New York, and many residents worked to exclude Jews from various neighborhoods, schools, clubs and jobs. Numerous LES Jews became peddlers, since so little capital was required to sell merchandise from a pushcart. Street peddlers sold everything from hats to toys, jewelry to sweet potatoes. In her book Lower East Side Memories, Hasia R. Diner paints a vivid portrait of the neighborhood: “Heaped high with merchandise, [the pushcarts] stretched in endless lines up and down the main streets . . . They were edged up close to the curb and wedged together so tightly that one could not cross anywhere except at the corners. The pushcart peddlers, usually bearded men in long overcoats or old women in heavy sweaters and shawls outdid each other in their loud cries to the passers-by.” LES residents made maximum use of limited space, creating a noisy, bustling commercial life that resembled nothing else in America. The arrangement had its problems.
As most new immigrants did, Jews associated largely with fellow Jews, acclimating to their new home by seeking the food, language and customs of the old country. The Lower East Side became a neighborhood where, in the words of Hasia R. Diner, “Jews lived in a universe of almost total Jewishness.” Here, Yiddish was primarily spoken, because the hybrid language helped bridge the communication gaps between those who spoke Russian, German or Polish. It also helped created “a foreign land right in the midst of America.”
In addition to its cultural isolation, the LES suffered sanitation problems. In his book American Metropolis: A History of New York City, author George J. Lankevich described the tenements’ medieval conditions as “crowded and loathsome,” a place where the incidence of tuberculosis soared. “In 1900,” Lankevich wrote, “the population density of the Jewish East Side ghetto reached 640,000 persons in a square mile, the highest such figure in world history.”
From Katz’s I walked down various side streets south on Essex, once a major local thoroughfare, and turned east on Delancey. The Katz’s cashier who I asked hadn’t heard of Cannon Street either, and because my grandma’s dementia was gradually worsening, I started to wonder if she might have mixed up details. The further I walked, the less hopeful I became. The neighborhood was depressing, an industrial ecosystem of brown, brick housing projects and a few small trees, hardly a historic or visibly distinguished area.
In the shadow of one projec
t, I asked a young Latino man the direction of Cannon Street. “Cannon Street?” He squinted his eyes. “Cannon Street.” His dark, baggy jeans hung low on his waist. He chewed his lip, tipped his black ball cap and glanced east and west, then he said, “Nah man. And I’ve lived here pretty much my whole life.”
I continued east, toward the thick scent of river water blowing between buildings and the Williamsburg Bridge. Then it appeared: a tiny green sign to my right listing Cannon Street. I turned to face it. Cannon was less than half a block long. Sandwiched between a parking garage and an elementary school, there were no tenement buildings here, no historic residences of any kind, only rows of projects rising in every direction, indisputably Soviet in their bleak utilitarianism.
I straightened my posture and walked south along Cannon. Craning my neck in search of an address, I scanned the garage’s weathered back side, staring as if the building would suddenly fade into a tenement the longer I looked. In a matter of steps the street ended at Broome, and I turned back around. I must have appeared confused, because a man standing on the front stairs of the school asked if I was looking for something. “Yeah,” I said, “Ninety-six Cannon Street. My grandma was born there in 1919, and I wanted to see the building, take a picture for her. Know where ninety-six would be?”
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