Rochelle Newman-Carrasco

The Price of Air

I was flying red-eye from Los Angeles to New York for business. Red-eye flights never bothered me and an early morning arrival would put me in New York on Labor Day. With no meetings until Tuesday, I would have a whole day to myself. I was born and raised on New York’s Lower East Side. Although my family moved to Los Angeles when I was fourteen, the Lower East Side remained my answer to the question “where are you from?” This wasn’t my first trip back to New York. I had been flying in and out of New York for several years, but my business trips were too short and too stressful to allow for any detours or sightseeing. Over time, the Lower East Side had become a remote corner of the city where I knew no one. Everyone I once knew had either moved or died. This would be my first trip back as a tourist.

With several hours left in the air, I started scanning my laptop to see if there was anything special going on downtown. I came upon a site called LowDown: News From the Lower East Side. A headline grabbed my attention. Breaking: Katz’s Deli Sells Its Air Rights But It’s Not Going Anywhere. There was also a picture of Katz’s deli, a one-story building on the southeast corner of Houston and Ludlow where they have been serving pastrami for the past one hundred and twenty-six years.

The article said Katz’s was staying put, but the idea of selling air rights made me claustrophobic. Could people really buy and sell air? For the rest of the flight, googling Air Rights became an obsession. I tried to find out as much about them as I could. Air Rights, it seemed, were a principal of property law, the gist of which was summed up in the Latin phrase Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos --“whoever’s is the soil, it is theirs all the way to Heaven and all the way to Hell.”

From my aisle seat on the plane, I could only see a piece of the sky, but I was no stranger to the surreal scenery one sees looking down from thirty thousand feet; the cotton clouds, the sci-fi rock formations, and the patchwork earth quilt broken up by lines, circles and an occasional baseball diamond or swimming pool. I discovered that it was the invention of flight that first called the definition of Air Rights into question. After all, if planes were to fly overhead, how could mere mortals own air up to the heavens?

Air Rights.  I searched again.

Formally, Transferable Development Rights, or TDRs – originated with the 1961 revamping of the city’s zoning laws. In essence, if a building adjacent to a construction site is lower than neighborhood zoning laws allow, the developer can acquire the building’s unused air space, add it to his or her project, and erect a taller building.

The more I learned, the more I wanted to know. My sleepless fingers typed search words on the laptop keyboard. I clicked on countless links. I had flown all night but I wasn’t tired. I just wanted to get into the city and make my way down to the Lower East Side before it was swallowed up. I imagined the neighborhood I grew up in shrinking. Vanishing vertically. Skyscrapers rising, looming over six-story tenements, blocking light and blocking air.  An Etch-o-sketch skyline gone in a shake.

***

I want to exit the subway station on East Broadway, but I’m feeling the effects of sleep deprivation and the signs aren’t clear. As I make my way to the top of the steps, I realize that my choice of exits is wrong. I should be seeing the park. There should be nothing blocking my view of the street. Instead, I see a wall covered in bright paint, not quite graffiti, more of a mural. I want to stop but I keep moving. It’s a subway stairwell, I remind myself.  I reach the street, the corner of Madison and Rutgers, which I don’t know as well as East Broadway. Madison and Rutgers are closer to the water and closer to the projects, lower-income housing, so growing up we knew not to go there. I don’t remember how we knew but like many rules of city survival, we just did. In the distance I see water and the girders of a bridge—the Manhattan Bridge, I guess. Between the water and the trees, the corner where I’m standing seems safe enough, almost serene. It’s quiet, but not creepy quiet. People are out but there are no signs of troublemaking teenagers or knife-wielding thugs. It begs to be explored. But childhood street smarts kick in and I head toward more familiar territory, East Broadway, Essex Streets, the streets that framed my world and kept me safe. Everything is changing so fast. It’s not just that Chinatown has moved further east. Everything is cleaner, which should be a good thing but it feels too new, generic, like it could be anywhere. I stand on the corner of Rutgers and Canal. I take it all in, the new, the old, the air. Lower East Side air. Growing up here air. I imagine it still carries molecular particles from the white gusts of winter breath that I once exhaled, that everyone I knew exhaled.

As I often do in the city, I look up. The tops of New York City buildings always have stories to tell. Historic dates, names and other architectural finds make looking up worth the occasional misstep. Tripping off a curb. Crashing into an oncoming passer-by while you’re busy making eye contact with a gargoyle. With air rights on sale, what will become of the gargoyles? The building across the street gets my attention. I’m looking at it from the side but it still stands out. Not a tenement, taller, perhaps ten stories tall but it seems like a giant on a block of dwarfs. It’s not new. It’s part of the neighborhood, part of its history. The word Forward is etched into or is it painted onto the red and cream-colored wall of the building? The side wall facing West. I cross the street and stop at the front door, peering in through glass panels. The doors are locked and the lobby is dark so it’s hard to see. This was once The Forward building of Yiddish newspaper fame. Now it’s an upscale condominium. So much for the paper’s socialist past. Although it retains its name, I imagine that the new tenants only ever pronounce it Forward. I hope someone teaches them to say Forverts every now and again in honor of the Yiddish immigrants and socialist spirits that might still roam the halls.

Next door to the Forward building is Wing Shoon Seafood Restaurant, another reminder of how much the neighborhood has changed. Chinese restaurants belong in Chinatown, at least that’s how it was. A for rent sign is slapped on the building. Metal gates rolled down over every door and window are a canvas for graffiti artists. Wing Shoon sits vacant on a corner that remains vibrant. This is the spot where the Garden Cafeteria once served strictly dairy meals to the likes of Elie Weisel and Isaac Bashevis Singer. I know the Garden’s history but I look it up on my cell phone anyway. Perhaps things feel more real that way. Or perhaps I just need to know that someone has written all of this down. My grandparents liked The Garden and I liked eating there with them. I would watch Pop Meyer and Nana Jenny turn borscht pink with a dollop of sour cream and drink steaming tea from a glass with a sugar cube in their teeth. The Garden Cafeteria was a dairy restaurant like Ratner’s on Delancey, but not as fancy. You entered the self-serve cafeteria through a turnstile. But first you took the ticket with two rows of numbers—dollars and cents. The clatter of thick white dishes was constant as you made your way along the rail, studying the stations of food, tray in hand. If you got a vegetable plate, for example, your ticket got punched with every different vegetable you chose. After the dessert station, you reached the cashier. He added up all your punched prices and that’s what you paid. Then you looked for a table, tray in hand, often finding people who really weren’t eating, people who just wanted to sit there and read. That wasn’t encouraged, so depending upon how busy it was, you could either turn the other way or get them to leave.

If self-service wasn’t your thing there were other dairy restaurants, but none more popular than Ratner’s. Ratner’s reigned over Delancey Street. It was not far from Katz’s, just up the street but a world apart. Ratner’s was dairy and kosher. Katz’s was meat and kosher-style, meaning you wouldn’t find pork or seafood, but you might mix meat with milk. As different as they were, Katz’s and Ratner’s did share one thing in common. Rude waiters. And that was part of their charm.

I recite the names of Lower East Side restaurants as if I’m reading names of the deceased. The Garden is gone. Ratner’s is gone. Shmulka Bernstein’s—the Kosher-Chinese restaurant with waiters who wore red and gold fez caps with tassels—gone. I whisper their names like a rabbi does in a synagogue when words like Kaddish and Yahrzeit form on the congregation’s lips. I don’t really know the rituals, but I remember the sounds.

Standing on this corner, I am at a crossroads. A straight walk down East Broadway will bring me to Grand Street and put me closer to the corner I grew up on, where Grand ends and the Drive begins. I can pass the Educational of Alliance, which we called “the Edgies.” I once studied Hebrew there but didn’t stick with it long enough for the language to sink in. Just long enough to satisfy my father. I can pass the corner of East Broadway and Clinton and find out if the corner bodega is still there with it bins of penny candy outside. To this day, I feel a twinge of guilt about having shoplifted penny candy from them on my way to and from Junior High School 56 only a few blocks away—off I went with pockets full of Bit O’ Honey’s, Bazooka gum and Tootsie Rolls. Of course, the candy was nothing compared to the Nancy Drew books I took from the drug store on Grand and Clinton. If I keep walking straight, I will pass the Seward Park Library where, growing up, I read so many books in the children’s section they had no choice but to give me an adult library card before I hit adult-section age. I remember how steep the steps to the slim three-story grey and pink building seemed and how heavy the arched iron door was as I left with as many books as I was allowed to take. Or as I came back with the books I had to return, some overdue. In the winter, I knew my towering stack of books was not supposed to wind up in the snow, but it was hard to hold on to them when I was all suited up like a puffy snowman, my mittened fingers barely bendable. I would do my best balancing act as I walked from East Broadway to Grand Street, my eyes tearing up and my scarf slipping just enough to expose my skin to the burning, biting chill of the East River winds.

I look toward the Seward Park Library and then up toward Essex Street. I see taxis. Not just one or two, but a row of gleaming yellow taxis parked right outside of the F train stop; taxis lined up and facing the subway steps that exit onto East Broadway. A sign of change. When I lived here a taxi was impossible to find. Drivers avoided the neighborhood, telling you their shift was over when they learned where you were headed. Or saying things like “Sorry lady. My life isn’t worth the fare,” before driving off. It wasn’t the safest neighborhood but it wasn’t that scary either. At least to those of us that lived there.

Rather than walk down East Broadway toward the river, I decide to wander up Essex Street toward Grand instead. I pass a stretch of tenements sitting side by side by side. Zigzag fire escapes hover above the street side retailers and basement stores below. I had read that Gus and his pickle men had left Essex Street to set up shop near the Tenement Museum on Orchard Street where they could double as an exhibit.  It seems strange to walk down Essex Street without stopping to look into an open pickle barrel. The acidic smell of sauerkraut lingers in my mind, but on Essex Street it is gone. A few storefronts down from where the pickle barrels used to be is G&S Sporting Goods. Their windows were always filled with boxing gloves, trophies, team shirts and bats. No more. I can tell from across the street that G&S is closed. If anything remains in their display windows it’s out of sight, hidden behind a solid metal shutter. We all bought our autograph books here, little zippered and locked books with pastel pages that our teachers, friends and family would sign. Not only did G&S sell the books, but you could ask the store clerks to make the first pages special, drawing hearts in Elmer’s glue, sprinkling sparkly glitter on top and keeping our books safe until the glue dried. The G&S sign is still there. I wonder when their sixty-seven year run came to an end. And why.

Seward Park High School is on the next corner, less than a block away. Seward had been my father’s alma mater and my mother’s as well; only she didn’t talk about it half as much. She wasn’t one for school but my father was. He kept all of his yearbooks and was especially proud of the ones that featured essays and poems by the actor Walter Matthau, spelled Matthow at the time. The high school was behind scaffolding when I last walked down these streets. Since then the building has been renovated and split up into several smaller schools.

Looking up Grand Street toward the East River only a few tenements remain but they still line every street headed west toward Chinatown. Were my father alive he’d tell me about the tenements he grew up in, about his father the cheese man and the men who delivered ice. There were stories about sleeping on fire escapes knowing that one wrong turn could mean falling to your death. I should have listened more. Now there are things I want to know and Google is the best I can do. There is a Tenement Museum and walking tours but I know I can’t be trusted to just listen and observe. I imagine I would interrupt any guide with a script, insert myself into their narrative and announce to the real tourists that they had a genuine third generation Lower Eastsider in their midst.

From the corner of Essex and Grand, the Essex Street market isn’t quite in view. The buildings that house the market have been in a state of disrepair for years although some tenants remain. A brighter, cleaner Lower East Side—that’s what Fiorello LaGuardia envisioned when he pulled pushcarts off the streets and put them under a roof. If he couldn’t erase the Lower East Side’s sordid immigrant past, he could at least hide it. My mother shopped at the Essex Street market in the sixties, when I was little, but I can’t remember why. The Co-op supermarket was closer and it had everything. There was a kosher butcher and a bakery on Grand Street as well. Over time, we would go to the Essex Street Market less and less. Perhaps that’s why so much space, four city blocks, was allowed to wither and waste away. I remember walking from one side of the Market to the other, passing stall after stall. There were bins piled high with fruits, vegetables, fresh fish, meats, and bric a brac, like candles and buttons and things called notions. It smelled a little stale, but it was perfume compared to the putrid smells of fish and fruits sitting outdoors and rotting in the sun. The Essex Street market stalls were fun to weave in and out of, scouting for unrecognizable items, something exotic, which often meant Puerto Rican. It was all indoors and there was even an entrance just steps from the Delancey Street subway stop making it easy to get out of the cold.

As I work my way down Essex Street toward Delancey, I know not to expect much. The market is either completely shut down or close to it. I had read that a major project called The Essex Street Crossing will soon be underway. A brighter, cleaner Lower East Side is in the works once again. Sophisticated but sanitized. I think about Times Square, where my hotel is, where a pedestrian mall entertains tourists on the same scandalous ground that was once walked by prostitutes and is synonymous with porn. Now Times Square has gone Disney. Is that what’s in store for the Lower East Side?

No sooner does my mind wander into the future than a blue glass monster of a building appears, jutting out of nowhere. It looks like an uninvited experiment, a crash landing of alien proportions, a futuristic architectural exercise gone wrong. Yet there it stands. Somewhere near Houston or Delancey. From where I am on Essex, I can’t see its base; I can’t tell where it begins. All I can see is its looming high-rise body, cutting into the sky, oddly arched and angled, covered in reflective blue glass triangles. Out of place. I want to scream, this does not belong here. I want to throw a tantrum like a child does when they are drawing a picture and you pick up a crayon and add your touch. That does not go there. Now you ruined it. But the yelling stays in my head. There is no one to talk to.

People walk by. They seem oblivious to the monstrous modern blue glass building. I find it hard to turn away. I wonder about the next intrusion. I think about the disrupted lives. Rising buildings and obstructed views are bound to mean rising rents and shifting values. Does a neighborhood’s character count for anything? Does holding on to its history make sense? Or is that what museums are for? Open a gift shop. Hold an exhibit. Conduct a tour.

I turn around and make my way back to Essex and Grand Street where the changes are many but seem manageable in comparison. On Grand, there is still a long low-rise line up of stores—the drugstore, the toy store and the liquor store. There’s a clinic where the Essex Street Theater once was. The Essex Theater had gotten old and dirty and was closed decades ago, so no surprises there. Kossars Bialys is still in tact and on this stretch of Grand Street Kossars is really what matters. Through their big front windows, I would watch bialys being made by hand. Lumps of dough, sitting on flat wooden planks that looked like oversized spatulas, slid into cavernous ovens covered in powdery dust; the smell of roasting onion and garlic was everywhere. The same planks were used to pull the bialys out. Baked, crisp and ready to eat or to hold onto for the warmth. The window and the warmth are still there. A donut shop has moved in right next door, which doesn’t seem necessary but still makes sense. There is even a kosher deli on Grand Street, but that’s all it is. Just some deli. Would it be anything more in time? Not to me.

As I head east on Grand Street, the old Catholic church comes into view. It has always been there. Saint Anne’s? Saint Mary’s? I can never remember this church’s name. Growing up Jewish made churches something to consider from a distance. Although as an adult I have joined my husband at many a midnight mass. Just not on the Lower East Side. That feels wrong.

I keep walking up Grand, pausing at the triangle-shaped sliver of a park where my grandparents sat when they weren’t sitting on foldout chairs in front of their apartment building. No one sits in front of those buildings anymore. Tenants with too much money and too little humanity complained. It appears those tenants don’t like the aged and they like aging even less. The park benches sit empty, but I can still hear the sandpaper sounds of Yiddish, full of throat clearing and phlegm. The language of dirty jokes, gossip and sorrow. Adults spoke Yiddish when they didn’t want “de kinder” to understand. It was a secret language then. It’s a dying language now. I can still hear Puerto Ricans shouting in Spanish out of windows. It’s the language we learned in school. Yiddish faded away, its static sound becoming background noise. Spanish sang out of radios. Spanish and English slang blended into a musical stew. Round women wheeled shopping carts while rolling their r’s, purring like stray cats, ready to pounce and scratch your eyes out. Or just rub up against your leg.

As I sit in the triangle park, I get hungry. Willett Street could take me to Houston Street and then I wouldn’t be far from Katz’s. That route means walking past my grandmother’s apartment in the Hillman Buildings, which is only a block away. It also means passing the Bialystoker Synagogue and I have mixed feelings about that. When I was little, younger than six I think, I would go to shul with my father. I was allowed to cling to his side, wrapping myself in his prayer shawl and playing with the fringes of his tallis. I pretended to understand the sounds and the songs and the ceremony that unfolded on the main floor where the men sat or stood davening—rocking back and forth with an occasional bend of the knee. Never a kneel. Jews don’t kneel. Up in the balcony, it was all women. One day that’s where they sent me. There was no air up there. In the summer it was sweltering and women would faint from the heat. Smelling salts appeared and, once waved under noses, closed eyes fluttered open and women were brought back from the dead. Between the fainting women, and my mother’s tendency to belittle my father’s religious beliefs, spirituality became stressful.

I recently read that the Bialystoker was a stop on the Underground Railroad but I find that hard to believe. Wouldn’t I have learned that as a child? I want to believe it but it feels like part of a new mythology that Lower East Side landmarks are creating to attract attention. Reinvention is good for real estate prices.

The triangle park puts me right across the street from my grandmother’s apartment, from the shul, and from the Henry Street Settlement, with its hundred-plus years of history and a roster of notables who either taught or performed there before they were anybody. Orson Wells, Eartha Kitt, Aaron Copeland, Martha Graham. Around the corner from my grandmother and down the street from the Old Amalgamated Courtyard, filled with fountains and flowers, is my elementary school, PS 110. These few blocks deserve a longer visit but for some reason they seem permanent, untouchable. I let them be, promising to come back.

Before going to Katz’s I decide to walk all the way down to the East River Drive. I need the air. No one can take away my East River air. I grew up looking out on a river view, twenty stories high, and now on very little sleep I’m determined to make it all the way back there again. As far East as one can go before you hit the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive. The FDR. East and lower. Green spaces. Parks with slides, seesaws, and swings. The closer to the water the colder, but other than winter the river is always a special treat. East River seagulls. Tugboats. A distant glimpse of an oxidized Lady Liberty. The Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges competing for attention in the foreground. It’s quiet. In spite of the neighborhood’s dark side, it’s almost quaint. I think of it as a hamlet, without really knowing what a hamlet is. East River, Brooklyn, the Williamsburg Bridge. This was once my looking-out-my-living-room-window world. Swirling script letters that read Domino Sugar hanging on a building that tried to hang on to its sweet cubist past. Until the condos moved in. I read that the sign is now locked up somewhere; that they haven’t thrown it out.

As I work my way from the East River Drive to Houston Street to Katz’s, the Williamsburg Bridge stretches out before me. It once connected Brooklyn and Lower East Side Jews but it doesn’t play that role anymore. Williamsburg is more hipster than Chasidic. The Lower East Side more affluent than immigrant. There is less Lower East Side every day.

My mother used to take me to Katz’s deli just so she could point at her favorite sign behind the counter. “Send A Salami to your Boy in the Army.” I can still hear her reading those words out loud. When she accentuated the rhyming words, she was playful but uneasy. Her laugh would shift from childlike joy to an uncomfortable self-consciousness. Like the laugh of someone being tickled a little too long. Something embarrassed her. I never knew exactly what. We didn’t eat at Katz’s very often because it was only kosher-style, which means it wasn’t really kosher. My mother didn’t care, but my father did and Katz’s was too close to where we lived for my mother to get away with cheating. For that, she preferred Chinatown.

I see the building, the red and white Katz’s Deli sign. Nothing and everything has changed. The big white knobs on the Etch-o-Sketch will soon be twisting, walls will be going up and shadows will be cast. Dim memories will grow dimmer but there will always be a reason to walk these streets. Breathe the air. No matter who the air belongs to the memories belong to me.

Rochelle Newman-Carrasco credits her NYC Lower East Side roots with her love of culture, humor and language. She holds a BFA in Theater from UC Irvine and an MFA from Antioch, Los Angeles with an emphasis in CNF and Literary Translation. Her bilingual children’s book, Zig-Zag, co-authored with Alonso Nuñez, was published by CIDCLI of Mexico City. For over three decades, she has specialized in US Latinx marketing, writing for Ad Age, MediaPost and other industry publications. Her essays have been published in such literary journals as Lilith, Off Assignment, Lunch Ticket, Role Reboot, NAILED, and others. She has also done travel writing, stand-up and an 80-minute one woman show which has inspired her memoir-in-progress.