575 Lorimer Street
by
John McMahon
Most of north Brooklyn was a mix of row houses and warehouses. Pinched between the East River and Newtown Creek, the area had always been industrial. For decades factories had freely dumped their chemical waste into the waterways so that the whole area is essentially a super fund site. Still movies and TV shows have used the jumbled skyline of Williamsburg and the menacing factory alleys of Greenpoint to create that unmistakable New York feel for decades.
It was during the first phase of nineties gentrification—avant-gentrification. Most of the neighborhood landmarks were still intact. John’s Italian Deli was still John’s. The Falcon was still showing movies. Kellogg’s was still a greasy spoon, and if you wanted a drink at the Sweetwater, you still had to negotiate the greasy coating along Fourth Street from the slaughterhouses.
I lived at 575 Lorimer Street, right on the line where Greenpoint was still Polish and Williamsburg was still Italian. The L Café had just appeared on Bedford ave., and Oznot’s opened among the little brick houses along Berry Street. Ocularis was showing films against abandoned factory walls on the riverfront, and there were raves at the noodle factory.
At the same time there were still cheap Polish working mens diners where you could order a huge carb laden plate of food for four dollars. Some of the last little mom and pops were still holding on with wooden fruit and veg bins in the front and mostly empty shelves inside, not able to keep up with the foreigners who were opening twenty four hour bodegas jam packed with every item and service imaginable
My building was one of those old clapboard two-families split into six apartments. The neighborhood’s remnants were mostly aging second and third generation Italians like my upstairs neighbors, Judy and Sal. They had lived in the building since they were married at the church around the corner decades earlier. Sal was a bantam weight, a postman who walked a local route until he was forced to retire in his seventies, but continued to walk it for years afterward just to keep his eye on things..
Judy on the other hand had the typical physique of an Italian grandmother, twice Sal's weight and was forever in a house dress, with a kerchief over her hair. She spent much of her adult life sitting at an open window, leaning on a pillow with a cigarette in her mouth, righting the wrongs of the neighborhood with the other housewives between fixing meals. She and Sal had raised two girls in that cramped apartment, both were grown and rarely came around when I was living there.
Judy never came downstairs if she could help it, communicating between floors with a well practiced yell. Sal seemed to be always standing around the vestibule, waiting for the mail, which he would sort out for the six apartments and deliver to our doors, hoping to catch someone in conversation.
Then I stopped seeing Sal around. The mail didn’t get sorted, and no one was monitoring the slamming of the street door, which drove Judy crazy. She’d yell down, “Stop slamming that goddamn door!” Judy had the mouth of a longshoreman.
Sal was down—seriously ill, bedridden. Judy started to ask me for small favors now that they were both shut-ins. She needed things from the shops: there were envelopes to mail, food for the cats, medicine for Sal, cartons of cigarettes for herself. She smoked like a diesel in the apartment despite Sal’s illness.
On a cool autumn morning, Judy asked if I could get my barber to come up and cut Sal’s hair. “He always had pride in his uniform and his hair,” she said. It was a tough ask, but the shop wasn’t far.
Model Barbers had occupied the corner of Metropolitan and Union for over sixty years. A two-chair operation with an ancient flecked mirror running nearly the length of one wall. Everything in the place was old—the waiting chairs, the stand-alone ashtrays, the jumble of Sports Illustrated and Playboy magazines decades out of date. The men who sat in the corner playing cards and smoking were ancient themselves.
I was on friendly terms with my barber since I passed the shop twice a day between home and work, always exchanging a nod or a quick chat if he was lounging in the doorway. Sam—short for Samair—was from Syria, another early gentrifier. He’d done it right though, working the second chair for a few years before buying the shop outright, earning the locals’ respect and their last years of business.
Sam greeted me, then his face sank as I made the request. He told me I had come at him “like the grandfather with the pumpkin,” apparently a Syrian folktale. We struck a deal: I’d redo his doors—thick with generations of paint—if he came to take care of Sal. He packed a bag with his shaving kit, scissors, and combs, glaring at me and muttering curses in Syrian under his breath.
Sal and Judy’s apartment was the mirror image of mine before I renovated. The worn vinyl flooring and low arches between rooms made the place feel closed-in, muggy, shut against the cold autumn wind. I wouldn’t have called it a mess but neither was it neat and It smelled distinctly of old age and death.
Judy was at the kitchen table smoking when we arrived. Sal lay motionless in the double bed in the back room they must have shared for fifty years, under a heap of blankets. His eyes were shut. His face was wan. He was absolutely still—his skin like a skein of chalk.
Sam announced through clenched teeth, “This man is dead,” and
walked straight out of the apartment without another word. Judy barely looked
up from the mound of cigarettes in her ashtray, pretending not to hear. I told
her he had passed.
“Well,” she said,
“maybe you could just clean him up a little?”
Not that Judy was indifferent—just in denial.
I told her we shouldn’t touch him and had to call 911. Still, she talked me into carrying him downstairs, wrapped in a blanket. She didn’t want to be in the room with a corpse. He was simply bones under the blanket, and I felt none of Sal’s energy in the body—it was just a husk.
After the mourning period my wife and I took Judy to dinner—not at The Diner, or Planeat Thai, or any of the new cool places, but at a neighborhood legend called Bamonte’s on Frost St, a place Judy thought of as real fancy. A place frozen in time when big men still held parking spots for Cadillacs and every half-celebrity who’d ever eaten there was memorialized in the tiny front bar. It was old-school Italian American, family-style. The dining room was all red velvet and gold brocade.
She told stories of the neighborhood past, greeting old acquaintances with loving kisses—then tearing them down as soon as they were out of earshot, dishing dirt that went back thirty years in language that had my wife in hysterics. Judy may have been the only person I ever met who spoke with that Bugs Bunny Brooklyn accent
It wasn’t long after Sal died that I woke to shouting outside
my window. My internal clock was off—we’d just returned from working in France
for three months.
What the hell are these goombahs yelling about now? I thought, stumbling from bed to the window. But it wasn’t just the usual ballbreakers and hangers on who stood in front of Junior’s bar and pizzeria night and day—it was the whole street.
“A fucking plane hit the Trade Center,” someone shouted as I stepped outside. I followed the crowd to the end of the block, thinking it must have been some mad pilot in a Cessna. From the corner of Lorimer and Metropolitan, downtown Manhattan was plainly visible. A plume of thick black smoke was already pouring into the otherwise perfect blue of what promised to be a beautiful September day.
By the time I’d dragged my TV out of the closet and woke my wife, the second plane had hit. We knew then it wasn’t an accident. It was something much bigger, something that was going to change everything though we didn’t yet realize how personal those changes would be.
After calling family, workmates, a couple of friends, my wife and I joined the procession moving—almost in a trance—toward Grand Street Park. The park sat on the East River, offering a clear view of the city.
What a lot of humanity we were: Poles from the few remaining factories, Italians from my neighborhood, Puerto Ricans en masse from the South Side, and a smattering of us gentrifiers of every color and kind, behind a wall of black-hatted Hasids in their tattered gabardine suits. All of us one in awe of the spectacle before us.
We stayed there for an hour, maybe more. What else could we do but stand and bear witness? Jess wanted to go home, to bed—whether from jet lag or comfort-seeking, I couldn’t tell. As we walked back to the apartment, I asked if she wanted me to come. She didn’t, or didn’t say. Instead I went for a bike ride in Prospect Park. Doing laps for hours and I wasn’t the only one and I wondered if we were all there for the same reason, putting off the future.
It wasn’t long after the Trade Center fell that my wife returned to her life in Australia. She’d had enough of New York—and enough of me—and so she was no longer my wife. She left a note telling me all this on the counter I’d built for her. Only half of it was true.
Months later, I was in Malaysia when friends from Williamsburg emailed to say something was going on at my apartment. I’d never met the owner; he’d been in federal prison for racketeering for all the years I lived in the building, and dealt only with his son. The family was in the trash-carting and concrete business.
The old man got out, saw the gentrification boom, and illegally kicked everyone out of the building—no notice, no process. In my absence, they simply broke down my door and threw my belongings out.
We tenants made a weak attempt to fight the eviction in Brooklyn Housing Court but were basically laughed out of the building. We had court-appointed legal aid when what we needed was the kind of law firm none of us could afford. The local precinct had no interest in what was happening when they heard the family name.
I was told one of Judy’s daughters had taken her away before the illegal evictions. She couldn’t take care of herself anymore, and I would guess Sal’s pension came into play. Judy and Sal had been in that building since 1964, the good old days she would always say, before the BQE split the neighborhood up. “Sally was too damn cheap to get us out of here when he could’ve” she had told me in confidence after he had passed. In the end she got out and so did I, just when everyone else was trying to get in.
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