Hammering down the Anvil!
Back in the olden days, the dark ages before there were desktop computers, email and cellphones, I lived another life. A life so radically different from the one I lead today it seems as if it was another person who experienced it.
Those were the days when I wrangled the yellow beast through the concrete canyons of the city. Today with things like the internet, people romanticize the whole cab driving experience (see
Melissa Plaut’s New York Hack blog to see what I’m talking about) but, it’s not something I find altogether romantic.
Taxi-driving then as now, was a difficult job. The difference back then is that for the entirety of your shift you were cut off from the rest of your life. You didn’t have a cell phone (or even a two way radio) so, keeping in touch with people meant finding a pay phone and stopping. Parking was no easier to find then than it is now and constantly pumping change into a pay phone isn’t really conducive to long conversations. Plus it’s not like you could give out a number of a pay phone you knew you were going to be by at a particular time.
So, back then it was a different life.
This past weekend I was down in what was once known as the meat packing district. The area is still called the meat packing district but, it is so far removed from that the name doesn’t fit anymore. I took the picture above, late in the afternoon, of a building being demolished on 14th and 10th Avenue. This holdout is one of the last buildings to go under the wrecking ball and the transformation into something else more in line with the new character of the area.
But, I remember other days...
There’s something funny about that too, because today all the things that this cast off neighborhood offered up have become mainstream!
See, this neighborhood back then was off on the edge of the city, mostly industrial and because of that there were a certain number of establishments that gravitated there. Places that wanted to operate underneath the radar so to speak. I remember the neighborhood so well because in those wee hours of the morning when fares were scarce, this was the area you’d make your way over to. Taxi driving can be a bit like fishing at times and you always want to put your line in where the fish are biting. Late at night after most of the bars had closed down, during the week when the majority of people had long since gone home so they could get up for work, there was a whole other group of people leading very different lives. This was when New York had a true underground.
Chelsea Piers has been up and operating for a long time now but, I still vividly remember the gay bars on West Street that were overflowing on weekends. Places with names like The Glory Hole. There were straight nightclubs, gay bars and sex clubs all within blocks of one and other. Seedy motels where a room could be let for enough time to have a quickie. Hookers of every variety, women, men and men dressed as women calling out to passing cars and pedestrians.
It was nasty, I’m not saying these were days that should be glorified but, looking around today it’s hard to imagine a city like that even existed. I found an article that talked a little about it to which you can read here:
What had been a vacated industrial wasteland to most people — and a sexual playground for society’s outcasts — is now the trendiest place to live. Before it’s too late, we need to document the nightlife that once made this a vivid destination.
