Horrors!! Shrouded in construction netting, 285 Bleecker St. near the corner of 7th Ave. is now being renovated for the first time in 50 years to the best of my knowledge. A 19th century walk-up tenement building and the first place we lived in the West Village circa June '77. On the ground floor: the legendary Village butcher shop Ottomanelli's, with dead rabbits and other wild game hanging on hooks in the window and all sorts of offal on display (yecch). Right across the street, the legendary Matt Umanov Guitars. Down the block, Italian pastry joint Rocco's (best cannolis in NYC). A great location!
During the super-hot sweaty Summer of Sam, we lived 4 flights up in a railroad flat, a middle-aged dominatrix operating her by-appointment-only trade next door (lots of spanking and barked commands could be heard emanating through her door at random times of the day). At night I would sit in a comfortable chair gazing out the huge window at the Brechtian Street Scene below. Lots of foreign tourists always, the endless passing parade slowly funneling down to the real Human Zoo around McDougal in the central village on Bleecker east of 6th Ave.
At around 9pm nearly every night until mid- summer the French mime Philippe Petit, several months away from walking the World Trade Center, rolled up in full whiteface make-up and tattered frock coat on a unicycle directly under my window, quickly gathering a big crowd of rubberneckers as he strung a taut rope hitched from a fire hydrant to a lamp post at a 45 degree angle, and pranced up and down the rope from bottom to the top while juggling bowling pins, somehow managing to stay upright. I had a front row seat every night and a water pipe! Folks showered him with tips and then he would cycle off, coming back there night after night for at least most of mid-June into early July.
And then came the BIG BLACKOUT of July 13-14th. The power went off all over the city around 9:30pm but somehow the phones kept working. The Times had recently run an article about "The Feral People", the homeless living for years in the sub-basements of Grand Central Station many levels under the tracks, who rarely came up for daylight (a very lurid article that made them sound kind of like the race of trogolodytes lurking in the London Metro in the 1972 UK horror film "Death Line"). When the lights went off Bill Moseley called me and insisted we get flashlights and somehow make our way to Grand Central, go down into the basements, and explore the catacombs so to speak. A notion I was unable to sign on to...more later whenever.
