Rothko's Rolodex

I don’t know how it is that such a short time can last for so long. Every time I am here on this block, my brief visitations, every single time I look at decorative molding and ironwork. My attention is not specific to this street. In Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, no bargello of bricks escapes me, nor black iron licorice twists, metal stars like appliques on Landlubber jeans. I surely did not know this forty years ago. No way I understood the magic of the old, the eighty-year-old blackened hallways and stairs trod on by famous, notorious architects and ingenues. And I, and him.

The tenement was the stuff of movies, books, one terrific novel. Ever hear of “Ragtime”? Did E.L. Doctorow stop in front of number 22, just like I am doing and have done?

The building is gone. It fell in 2007. A black outline remained on the next-door wall for a while, before the developer came. That empty space; the ghost of a ghost.

I absolutely did not understand the magic there. Evelyn Nesbit’s milky hand on the banister, my hand with skin-picked fingertips on that banister too. We climbed the same stairs. It’s been forty years for me, over one and one-quarter century for Evelyn!

The sidewalk was repaved, so the imprints of my shoes, his boots, are nowhere now. The block is still here. I keep saying that, because I keep thinking it. The way my mind works, the space beside and before all buildings, especially the historic, contains the forms of everyone who filled that blank air with their bodies. There is energy left behind, sure, but it is casual, incidental. You do not see it. You need to think it, as I tend to do, too often, anywhere I go.

Sandwiched neatly between numbers 20 and 24, the new building looks completely out of place. And oh boy, is it ugly. I know I am biased. The tenement was not pretty, brooding and even malevolent in appearance. But it was correct. It was exactly as it should be, and that is how it stayed for 107 years. This thing, though, this co-op? It is plain and bland and boring. There is ironwork on the first row of balconies. It looks prefab. Its geometric pattern resembles nothing but a cheap makeup case.

I’m standing in front of the new building, then across the street from it. The block is so crowded. There is a variety of restaurants of different, and some indeterminate, cuisines. There are people eating outdoors, there are people walking dogs, people in Pantone sneakers, jaywalking into restaurants, loping from Sixth Avenue to Eataly on the corner. Dozens of people. If you told him, or me, this is how it would be…

Back then, the street was dark and empty. Maybe sometimes we’d see Sven, a bouncer from the Peppermint Lounge. He often held a pint of Haagen Dasz and a spoon. There were guys pushing carts into what likely were warehouses. This is years before The Cutting Room. I spent a lot of time here in ’84, ’85, ’86, then stopped. I still carry this block; it’s a permanent cyst. I don’t want to remove it, ever.

Suddenly, I am right in front of the original building, next to the narrow door and buzzers. It is a January morning, single-digit windchill. I just took a really early train, walked from Penn as always. The flower district would be setting up; how I loved the flower district. My routine was to stop at the loft before heading to my internship. Cold wind blows, projectile, filling the street. I pass the Masonic Hall with its sparkly sidewalk to reach this doorway.

I decide to check out the Masonic pavement, to see if it still glitters. It doesn’t. The corner with the flea market is now stuffed with building. I walk back to 22, past the restaurants. It is odd that no food smell reaches the street. It is like these eateries are hermetically sealed.

I wasn’t here that long. It was very, very brief, but when you’ve only been alive 18 years, I guess 2.5 years is something. Being young, eating a hot fudge sundae at the Hard Rock Cafe before cabbing down to Danceteria, 18 so no fake ID needed, meeting an older guy (23! Old!), chocolate residue on your teeth. This new person did not live with his parents. He was a grown-up.

This new building is an insult. To him, to me, to Evelyn and even Stanford. To his family, which is not my family. I once awoke from a vivid dream, set in some New York apartment, it was me and his wife and I said, loudly, “You are living the life I was supposed to live.” New York, urban life, no freeways, interesting shoes. Walk to Balducci’s in the rain, duck under the green and white awning. He stayed in the background, dark curls turned gray.

I love my life today. I love nearly everything about it, and I love the few things I don’t love, because I am with my husband. I am just acutely aware of the speed of it all. Like muriatic acid being poured in a line, longer and longer, until it stops. And it will stop somewhere.