Toll the bell

I met Bob last weekend on avenue A, it was a nice surprise to see someone from the old days there. I haven't seen Greywolf since I got here.

Greywolf is an old Cherokee man, mixed with New York city blood and filth and piss and liquor. He lived in Alphabet city around Tompkins Square park for years, he was there back in the eighties, when everything was different around the neighbourhood.

I've heard stories of nightly gunshots, drug-gang snipers on the rooves of buildings, ready to pick off any cops who wandered past avenue A. Stories of fires being lit in storefronts, of fire on the streets, of transvestite prostitutes, of colour and of dilapidation. And cheap rent. And artists renting. A different time.

Greywolf had a flute he used to play on Avenue A. It was six hundred years old, he told me, passed down through the generations to him. He also told me of having composed the music for some Disney movie, and of having toured with Santana. I've heard some crazyassed stories on the streets of Manhattan, really nothing is unbelievable here.

Greywolf lived on the street in all weathers. I don't know what he did in the winter, but his home was avenue A, and Tompkins square park. And that's where he sat every night, half naked, and welcoming, and always up for a chat.

Greywolf has disappeared.

I've heard a story he's living in the projects on avenue d, but that was from Francis the Irish cowboy Texan, who may or may not know what the hell he's talking about.

Bob is a neighbourhood alphabet city photographer, been living there for thirty odd years, basically his whole adult life, used to have a storefront and just saw the neighbourhood get chipped away at gradually, over the years. There seem to be some mournful stories in Bob's face, all about gentrification and hard times and the neighbourhood changing.

He stands out there on Avenue A on mild evenings, hanging out and meeting people. It's like an elaborate mourning ritual, marking the passing of this incredibly colourful neighbourhood of New York city, the stomping ground of his youth. Mostly he's just hanging out, talking the talk of avenue A. It was good to see him again. I hope to see him this weekend, if I'm in alphabet city.

It's a popular topic in that part of NYC right now. Huge changes have happened in what is now called the East Village over the past 20 years since the Tompkins square riots, where the homeless derelicts and junkies and hippies and hangabouts on Tompkins square had their Stonewall moment and laid a tent over a part of the park and declared it their home in rebellion against the increased pressure from the police to up sticks and remove their filthy selves from the neighbourhood. There were riots for days. That was 20 years ago.

In the past year, a number of landmark Lower East Side clubs have closed. Sin-e is gone, Tonic is gone, CBGB's is gone, amazingly, a big hoarding all around it and a block of condos on the way up. It's really quite obnoxious what's happening to areas like the LES and Williamsburg/Greenpoint lately. The lower east side has become a kind of hip theme park, and the place the bankers pour into on the weekends, ordering $300 bottles of liquor and drinking until dawn.

The LES is so fucking over and it's a terrible pity. And in that sense, in that sort of Laurie Anderson or Velvet Underground or Blondie-CBGB's or Bowery or Washington Square Park or even MacDougal Street in the fifties and early sixties sort of way, in that downtown sort of way, New York IS over.

New York is brimming over with endless variations of life, and that reality is what I resonate to, what my body rhymes with every minute I'm here and feeling like a reservoir of devotion to her. It's the diversity of life, it's the living strangeness of it all, the endless opportunities, the thousands and thousands of strange strands of life happening and weaving across each other's paths with so little human warmth and kindness and yet a kind of white heat pulsing through it all every minute of every day.

But it's probably not a place to find a community of artists who couldn't be arsed with earning a living and don't have to care much about that, either, but work their arses off on their work, for the sheer love of it. There's a sense here that if you're not making a lot of money, that you're lazy. That if you're not selling what you do, that you're not successful. That's the set-up. It's pernicious. But very interesting.

I can't tell you how important the business of money is, here. Like nowhere else I have ever been or felt. Fortunes and potential fortunes are dealt in every day. Dreams, hopes and expectations are of dollars and fame and prestige and status. Wealth is the Shangri-la, the dance, the game, the hunt and the kill.

So the creative nutters and experimenters have been eased and kicked out, in large part. I mean the people who aren't just trying to create some sort of hip new underground market brand. It's a different place, you know those were different times. It is what it is, and what it is is thrilling and beautiful in its own peculiar condominiumized sort of way. Hail hail nyc, toll the bell for the changing neighbourhoods.

Greywolf is off the streets.