The only reason I lived on East Ninth Street between First and A in the 1980s was because my mother refused to let me live in the Chelsea Hotel. I was 19 years old and, having already run willfully off the rails to pursue a series of misadventures — dropping out at 18 to move to Paris and then, after a bit of wandering, returning to New York to re-enroll as a student at Columbia University — I was feeling very adult and very jaded (so much ennui!): I couldn’t go back to living in a dorm and I didn’t belong on the Upper West Side. I wanted to live downtown, of course, where the rock and roll was.
I remember going into a small, crowded, off-campus-housing office at Columbia and finding an index card on a bulletin board by the door advertising a studio for rent at the Chelsea Hotel, where Sid Vicious had killed Nancy Spungen.
Perfect! I could hardly believe my good fortune. I dialed the number on the index card and took the One downtown to meet the hotel manager, Stanley Bard, a small and pleasant man who showed me a single room with a Murphy bed that lowered down from inside a wall and big double windows right next to the neon sign that spelled H-O-T-E-L. I said I’d take it on the spot. Who had lived at the Chelsea? Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Mick Jagger; Dylan Thomas, Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, Nico. . . . I didn’t know about Leonard Cohen yet, at 19.
Then I called my mom, the person footing the bill.
“Absolutely not!” she shouted down the phone. The Chelsea Hotel was dangerous, she said. “Your Uncle David has some bad friends there.”
I never got to the bottom of which friends, exactly, my Uncle David had been consorting with at the Chelsea, although I assumed it was drug-related. He was a poet and something of an underground legend and had lived, himself, on Avenue B for decades. I shouted back that there was nothing dangerous about the Chelsea Hotel itself, as long as you didn’t invite heroin dealers named Rockets Redglare back to your room or play games with hunting knives, but my mother was adamant. Hell, no, to the Chelsea Hotel.
And so I moved to Alphabet City in the depths of the crack epidemic.
I slept for some months on a bunk bed in a shared apartment on East Third Street with two other girls I knew from college, and then took over the lease on a floor-through on East Ninth, up one flight of stairs. The Ninth Street apartment belonged to a guy I had dated the year before, from Romania, named Adi, who worked during the day as a doorman uptown. Adi was a night clubber before the term “club kid” was invented and sublet it to me because he was moving west with a new girlfriend — about whom I remember little except that Adi said she was a better cook than me, and that she left her kitten in the apartment when they moved out.
The apartment on Ninth was so big it had both a front and a back door, each with heavy bolts. It could have housed four adventurous teenagers, a whole colony of bohemians, with a loft bed in the huge back room, a queen-size futon on a low platform in the huge front room, and a sitting area facing the street, where I arranged my ragtag pieces of vintage furniture: an original antique Eames chair (that I left behind when I myself moved out a few years later, and that must be worth $10,000 today) and an original antique Eero Saarinen Womb Chair (that must be worth even more). I paid $325 a month in rent. It was a ridiculous rent, even then.
Adi’s brother, Cornell, had left a floor-to-ceiling papier-mâché sculpture of the head of Nefertiti — a colorfully painted bust in profile about eight feet tall — in the area towards the back of the apartment that was, in theory, the kitchen. Cornell had constructed the Nefertiti head for either the Pyramid nightclub or King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, both around the corner on A. I wish I could remember which; I think the Pyramid?
The tenants had been on rent strike for a long time. I paid my $325 a month to the tenant collective, while some lawyer, somewhere, fought it out in court. The building had glass double doors with locks that were always broken — the landlord wasn’t going to fix them while we were on rent strike — and when you came home late at night you’d reliably find young men nonchalantly selling crack right there under the stairs. The drug dealers weren’t a problem, actually; they had no motivation to hassle the tenants.
Directly across the street on Ninth a new bodega opened and when I stopped in to look around, and plunked a York Peppermint Patty on the counter, the big man sitting behind it gestured me away. “Go, go,” he said. I was slow on the uptake; it wasn’t really a bodega and they weren’t really selling snacks.
One time, standing in the lighted space between the two glass front doors, I was sort of mugged. It was the middle of the night and I was talking to my friend Jeff from Salt Lake. It must have been winter because I was wearing a luxurious, retro-1970s shearling coat, buttery soft with shaggy cuffs and collar. (Although this was only 1986 or 1987, we the cool were already doing a 1970s fashion revival, a stylistic mashup of glam rock and the Ramones.) A kid appeared next to us in the doorway, tugged on my sleeve, and said, “Gimme your coat.” Jeff from Salt Lake turned to him, as if to reason with him calmly — Jeff was white-blond, very mild-mannered, and extraordinarily handsome — and the mugger punched him hard in the face, knocking him back beyond the second glass door. I’m not sure why I didn’t just give him my coat, but instead I looked at him, also calmly for some reason, and said, “The police are coming.” It was a lie; the police were coming for no one in the winter of 1987 in Alphabet City. But I kept the coat.
It was in this apartment on East Ninth that I wrote my history papers for Professor Foner’s class on the Radical Tradition in America, using an electric typewriter. It was in this apartment that I heard the news that the Challenger Space Shuttle had exploded. The kitten grew into a huge, brawling bruiser of a Tom who I named Angus. Even Angus was violent. I remember him, once, waking me up by poking a hole in one of my eyelids with an extended claw. I would list for you the bands and band members who came through this apartment when I lived there, but you wouldn’t recognize their names. (Sharky’s Machine, the Raunch Hands, the World Famous Blue Jays, Royal Trux, White Zombie.) This was when the underground was underground.
Am I making these years sound like bad years on East Ninth? They certainly weren’t. I’m retrospectively so glad I got to participate in that wild bohemian netherworld — the food fights at 4 a.m. when the kasha varnishkes flew at Kiev Restaurant on Second, the pranks outside the Hell’s Angels clubhouse on Third Street, the bars, the beers, the boys, and the all-night loft parties when six garage bands played in a row. Have I told you about the time Joey Ramone chatted me up while waiting for the bathroom at a Midnight Records party? I was pretty then. Everyone who ever lived in Manhattan eventually finds themself playing the role of the insufferable blowhard who lays claim to having lived in “the real New York,” and Ninth Street was my real New York.