Annie Nocenti

“Edifice Complex"

I landed in the big bad apple in 1980 with only a bicycle to my name, and got mugged for it. Back then muggers leapt out of the shadows and hot-branded the reckless. It was the price paid for living in the streets of possibility, in a city abandoned by cops and open to creative lawlessness. I chased that bicycle thief down, leapt on him, fought hard for that bike. He kept onlookers at bay by pretending to be my husband. “Back off! This is personal! This is my wife!” In the end, I let him have it.

The cheapest rooms for rent were in half-abandoned warehouses. I bunked with other artists in the Coogan Building on 26th street, built in 1875 as a men’s racquet club, and imagined the bygone smell of sweat and tennis balls. The building was torn down, and I found a squat in a vacant basement methadone clinic. My room still had the wire-meshed glass sliding hospital windows from back when junkies were served their tiny cup of relief. The building’s super let the streetwalkers hang in the lobby on bad weather nights, and sometimes they’d come down to my underground room and show me how to “put on a better face.” 

One night in a bar called Riverrun, so named after the first and last word in James Joyce’s Finnigan’s Wake, a bartender gave me a lead on a loft in Tribeca. These were the days when the derelict spice and coffee warehouses of old could be rented “as is” for cheap. It was a former cheese factory/machine shop, floorboards gouged with oil-slicked holes. While I worked on making it habitable, I took a room in a converted meat warehouse. My bedroom walls were thick layers of wood and metal, a sham Reichian orgone box. Long ago it would have been filled with giant ice blocks and hanging cows. Behind the wall was a club called Area, and the owners gave me free access to the dance floor for putting up with the pounding disco. I’d wander over in my slippers and nightgown, and in the hopes of starting a more comfortable fashion trend. 

The New York City I loved was an impromptu dance of street-life, where stoop sitting and the kismet of passersby spun into parties. I wanted to live in the whimsical, eyes-on-the-street village community Jane Jacobs fought for, not the town eviscerated by the bully highways of Robert Moses. The late-80s early-90s power brokers of Gotham competed to build the tallest towers, including the obnoxious gold T’s of you-know-who. A prescient shrink might have diagnosed Manhattan with an edifice complex. The lofty monuments to egotism rose, which in turn cast long shadows on the rest of us. Their shadows stole our light, killed the flowers in our window boxes, kept us in our place. 

I lived downtown in the shadow of the Twin Towers. Pre-internet GPS was a constellation of skylines. We all used those double monoliths as our compass south. The only romance they held for me was knowing aerialist Philippe Petit pulled off one of the greatest outlaw heists of all time by walking a wire between them. He stole an illegal promenade through the sky. 

Down below, my Tribeca turf was measured by the boats docked in the Hudson River on the abandoned Pier 25. Back then boats could pull up and drop anchor without causing protest. The rules of the sea, as my friend Papa Neutrino would say, docking his floating family band’s raft. The Flying Neutrinos would pull into any port, sing, collect tips, move on. It was a time when immigrants and political refugees could arrive in NYC, get a bunk on a boat, an off-the-books wage, throw a bonfire party, gain a foothold to the big city. 

When the Twin Towers took twin hits and vanished, to me it seemed two teeth had been yanked from my own mouth. With their fall fear arrived, along with its toxic buddies xenophobia and racism—a paranoid cocktail that smelled like end times for Tribeca. We cleaned the fallout dust from our homes, helped the firemen best we could, watched the stinking pit burn down, the fences go up, and the National Guard roll in. My 9/11 remains fixated on the carpenter who built a tower of plywood stretchers, despite knowing they were never going to be needed. That edifice to despair marked my doorstep for a year, before someone finally toppled it.