Jersey City Stringer

walking tour of jc art / stop #21

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 21:40:00 -0500

Fighter for Hire. Handwritten sign taped up in window, north side of street between Summit and Central. Best viewed from sidewalk, or from middle of the street; sign is some 12 or 15 feet above street level.

In the tradition of personal-experience-purveyor Marina Abramovic, or perhaps shape-shifter Cindy Sherman. Block handwriting in black marker itemizes the services the fighter will provide: Instruction, by the hour, in pugilism’s various forms. Useful (the sign notes) for problems at school, at work, at home. At a time when a person might be feeling particularly beleaguered, exposed, battered by the increasing shrillness of the country’s prevailing winds, a well-placed punch could, even for a peacenik, make a few things right. There are other truths that cost less, and hurt less, but they won’t do you as much good.

The fighter knows. He has a little of what you need. Get some, if you can.

A Real Hero by College feat Electric Youth on Grooveshark

music by Dacus

Other art tour stops:

#27

#25

#24

the northeast regional

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 19:37:02 -0500

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVC-mbQtAEM

bedbuggery, part 5

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 12:26:00 -0500

So where was I?

Oh yes.

January, 2009. We’d been exterminated twice and were still getting bit. I had a row of bites along my extremely pregnant belly. It was pathetic. I was pathetic. One night I had to go out to the grocery store. It was sleeting, and the only parking spot was at the far corner of the lot. Feeling like the broad side of a bus, I exited past the bored gaze of the lot security guard, teetered unsteadily across the icy lot with my cart of groceries, and heaved them into the trunk. The misery! I was brimming with self-pity. What kind of world was I bringing this child into? A nursery filled with pesticides? A town riddled with pestilence? WHERE A PREGNANT LADY HAD TO RISK LIFE AND LIMB BRINGING DINNER HOME FROM THE GROCERY STORE?

When I turned to push the cart back to the store, the security guard was standing silently behind me in the sleet, waiting to take it from me.

Two weeks after the due date, my son was born. The bag I had packed in advance for the hospital had been sealed up in a garbage bag for the exterminations, so I put my toothbrush in my purse and wore my grandmother’s fur. It occurred to me, between contractions, that we might have brought bedbugs to the hospital, but then I got narcotics injected into my spine and hadn’t a care in the world. Afterward, awash in hormones, I wept over my newborn son and wished we could stay in the maternity ward forever, where the sheets were perpetually clean and my meals were brought to me on trays and a rotating cast of brisk Irish nurses helped me shower and had nicknames for my hemorrhoids.

bedbuggery, part 4.

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 12:52:11 -0400

Read past episodes here:

part 1.

part 2.

part 3.

For the last couple of months, the sofa in our TV room had been the most comfortable place for me to sleep, which meant that the bugs had discovered me in there, and were finding my shoulders and neck a delightfully reliable source for a meal. We were even getting bit when we hung out there in the evenings, so my husband decreed it off-limits. I would have to move back to the bed.

To make it less inviting, he overturned all the furniture.

My due date, Dec. 26th, came and went: no baby yet. The exterminator came again just before New Year’s, and laid down a thick layer of pesticide that left drifts of a white sediment along the edge of every room in the house. It made me feel better. Sort of.

My mother had taken some time off work to visit when the baby came, so she decided to come up anyway. She was there for New Year’s, which, since the TV room was out of commission, we spent on the uncomfortable thrift-store mid-century modern sofa downstairs, watching the celebration from Times Square on my husband’s laptop on a low-res video feed that seized up at crucial moments, heightening the suspense.

and now a word from what we wish was our sponsor

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 09:19:43 -0400

We interrupt this bedbug miniseries to bring you a report from a recent Barney’s Warehouse Sale. The next semiannual sale begins this Thursday August 19th in Manhattan.

The Barney’s Warehouse Sale reminds me of what the Galapagos Islands would be if the Galapagos Islands were a giant high-end discount sale: harshly lit, unwelcoming, and teeming with specimens that the pressures of survival in the fashion industry have distorted into style dead-ends, grotesque mutants that now lie listlessly around the barren landscape, encrusted with bad ideas.

But even mutants can be appealing when they come from Parisian ateliers, and so the sale serves, like those tours that allow you to mingle with the blue-footed boobies, as a kind of sartorial petting zoo, a chance to get up close and personal with the exotica one has only glimpsed through a shop window, darkly.

The sale is held semiannually in Chelsea, in an echoing concrete cavern staffed with a small army of attendants who are kind but suspicious, like nurses in a locked ward. To get to the women’s clothes it is necessary to go through the men’s section in the basement, a twilit acre of suitcoats stretching into the windowless distance like those rows of terracotta soldiers unearthed at Xi’an. “They are fighting for the shoes up there,” a tiny, dapper man warned me as I headed up the stairs to women’s. He sounded sorry to be missing it.

There was no fighting that morning, just a library hush and the crickety sounds of hangers sliding across metal racks. But the shoe section had definitely been the epicenter of something recently, perhaps a dirty bomb stuffed with a thousand variations on the gladiator sandal. Like a disappearing species desperate to mate, some of the shoes were burdened with so many features that they were inappropriate for any occasion, like the Givenchy high-heeled ankle-wrap sandals, done in zebra-striped horse-hair and sprinkled with crystals and silver studs because why not? Some retained the vestigial features of former lives, in which they had actually been functional. Good news: You have found a pair of Louboutins in your size, originally $1195, now $289.04. Bad news: They are styled like traditional boating deck shoes, down to the leather lacing. They are platform peep-toe high-heeled deck shoes, in peach suede, and slightly smudged.

The sale, which lasts for two weeks, has styles that stretch back several seasons and are discounted in increasing percentages, from 25% to 75%. A few items seemed immune to this marketing strategy, like the pairs of pink tie-dyed roper boots that would probably have to be donated somewhere. But for some items the psychology of the plummeting price point worked wonders, like the Costume National orthopedic-chic white leather t-strap wedges with perforated strap, Band-Aid style, a mistake at the original price of $625, but at $227.40 a witty comment on the seductive power of bedside care. And here and there a shoe that remained maddeningly just out of reach, like the vertiginously high Alaia gold platform sandals, which at a stroke turned me into the kind of leggy, unscrupulous girl my grandmother called a hotskova, and which at $2330 reduced to $937.33 and 40% off, were still too much.

I skipped the mass-market racks, all earth-toned cotton knits already going nubby, and headed to the designers, where an ill-advised union between Lanvin and Acne denim had produced an inky glut of jeans with a buzz-killing wide grosgrain waistband, like maternity jeans, and a version of Elbaz’s long-sleeve tunic dress with its hypertrophic ruched shoulders, which had been electrifying in red silk but which in denim was just thuggish.

I found a pin-straight black leather mini-skirt made out of something called plonge cow, with an attached wool underbust corset, from the Row, the Olsen twins’ line, or so I believe it said on the label, a gold charm the size of a filling. I also found a relatively recent Marc Jacobs charcoal gray jacket with blue pinstripes and knobby little shoulders, and a Comme Des Garcons item that appeared to be from Fall 2008, half tulle gown, half velvet pantsuit, lashed together with straps of black elastic.

The changing area, a communal strip-fest where I first discovered that in Manhattan, there are women my grandmother’s age wearing thong underwear, is lined with cheap mirrors, which are something like viewing your reflection in a chrome bumper. The Row skirt was too small, and anyways at $288 too expensive, with a stripe of what looked like white paint on the front. But the Marc Jacobs jacket silhouette was surprising, and still relevant: Lanky, sly, aggressive without being irritating, it managed to capitalize on the things that I generally consider liabilities, like split ends, and make them look tough and intentional.

The Comme Des Garcons—I turned it around twice and the label was still in front, and the left leg was reachable only by tunneling up through the skirt on the right side, emerging from the Victorian collar at the top and then cantilevering my left leg up over the crotch from inside. The final effect was as though I was poised at the intersection of two parties, one at which I was a balloon seller in turn-of-the-century Paris and the other at which I was a barmaid in the Old West who had fallen into a spiderweb. But I did look remarkably like the runway models from this collection, which I count as a triumph of artistic vision. Like Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, I did not look beautiful, or even recognizable, but I did look exactly as Rei Kawakubo had intended me to.

Still, it was strange—most people were trying on floral-print jersey maxi dresses, and flat white sandals, and other items for which I would be reluctant to pay full price at Target. The more fantastic creatures were left untouched, like the Azzedine Alaias, an entire rack of riffs on the square-dancing skirt, beginning with a fuzzy peach number and working up to a piece in a grayish leather that the label identified as stag, whose intricate gores made it resemble the underside of an enormous mushroom, which had started life at $10,000 and deserved, at least, to be fondled.

Perhaps, like me, shoppers were waiting for the sale’s final days, when mass-market and ready-to-wear would lie down together and the meek could afford avant-garde. As I wandered out I passed a girl in the shoe section, trying to sell her mother on the garment she was clutching in her lap, which looked like it was made of monkey hair and dryer lint. “I think I might get this jacket,” she said. “Will you touch this jacket?” Her mother, studying her feet, pretended not to hear.

Shopper, evolve!

bedbuggery, part 2.

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 12:57:00 -0400

Read part 1 here.

So we had bedbugs.

This being the greater NYC metropolitan area, we had a rudimentary understanding of what that meant, as a prerequisite for modern urban living, like knowing how to handle drunks on the train. But the actual world of bedbug infestation and its potential solutions was far more tortured and disorienting than we had imagined, a science in its chaotic primordial stages, all snake-oil liniments and obsessive ritual and a confusion of tongues. We plowed into it with the courage of the ignorant —

I began calling exterminators around Hudson County —

Meanwhile, my husband got on the internet. For like three hours.

Part I. In December of 2008 I was eight and a half months pregnant with my first baby, and I was...

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 10:53:00 -0400

Part I.

In December of 2008 I was eight and a half months pregnant with my first baby, and I was feeling pretty good. My husband and I had finally gotten the nursery painted, I had finished the last of my freelance writing assignments, and I was spending my days in the kitchen making homemade candies for Christmas presents. I had an old family fudge recipe and a peppermint recipe from an 1879 edition of the New York Times and a bunch of little white candy boxes and foil wrappers and striped string from the hobby store to put it all up in.

The only blots on this domestic idyll were the bug bites we’d been getting for the past few weeks; from spiders we’d stirred up during the renovation of the baby’s room, we figured. My husband even had them on his forehead:

although we thought that might have been some kind of adult acne brought on by the anticipation of the baby. He didn’t really feel stressed, but this was our first, and the preparations had been Herculean. We’d memorized the stages of labor. We’d practiced our breathing. We had dozens of tiny white baby washcloths stacked in our dresser drawers.

I was watching a pot of sugar melt and darken on the stove when I heard my husband come in the front door. He paused in the kitchen long enough to pull down his sock and show me some new bites on his ankle, and then he disappeared upstairs.

After a few minutes he called down from the bedroom.

He had ripped the sheets off our bed and pulled back the mattress pad and was staring at a dot on the underside.

Yeah. I knew what that was.

(to be cont’d)

walking tour of jc art / stop #27

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 09:48:00 -0400

Torino Lighting Design, on Hwy 139, north side, between Concord and Baldwin. Best viewed from the median, through the heat mirages, traffic.

latitude 40.732902, longitude -74.053764

On Highway 139, which connects the morass of roads by the Holland Tunnel to the aneurysm of roads by the Pulaski Skyway. Halfway along this bleak catwalk of transmission repair places, eroding concrete, garbage sifted into the roadside weeds, Torino Lighting Design shimmers into view, a lead crystal fever-dream behind a plate-glass window. The essential question of Torino Lighting Design is the question of life itself: Why?

There is no parking; foot traffic is mostly the afternoon exodus from Dickinson High; drivers rocketing up from the white-tiled dimness of the Holland Tunnel will register it only faintly, a flash as they pass, like a ripple of chimes. Is there even a door? Or is it only a hallucination, dazzling and hermetic, an allegory of human folly, tipping the balance of the universe towards beauty, greed, unreachable light?

To listen to while viewing:

music provided by Dacus

street style paper doll: god bless america

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 19:53:00 -0400

Exchanging pleasantries for the holiday weekend with the lady in the center window at the P.O. on Central Ave. Sleeveless denim vest entirely beadazzled in silver studs. Double-skull totem on the back of wheelchair, cigarettes clenched in teeth; large one says “HELL” on the side. Hula-girl bobble dolls on the back.

hot: the antidote

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 22:20:00 -0400

Tucked among the heat mirages on the Saharan reaches of lower Newark Ave is a place you will shortly want to visit: Nha Trang Market, between Second and First streets, south side of the avenue. The market is a dim and pungent collection of a great many things southeast Asian, efficiently racked to the ceiling and along the narrow aisles, expansive in both breadth (the spice section) and depth (a snowy bank of iterations on the rice-paper wrapper).

But what you are looking for is not on the shelves; it is sequestered in the back and available on request: a chilled fresh coconut from Thailand, its top chopped off (when you order it) to expose a bit of the white meat, which you puncture with an assertive jab of a straw. Those used to the sourish dribbles from supermarket coconuts cracked open with a hammer will not be prepared for the taste of what’s inside, which is like rainwater falling off a flower, and does something deeply palliative, like a natural Gatorade, to that parched feeling in the back of the throat. (Bonus: “This is the best cure for hangovers,” remarked a tattooed redhead who left with one recently.)

Like any luxury, global scarcity determines the value — the coconuts were unavailable recently due to the political unrest in Bangkok, and will likely disappear again soon, says the gentle fellow who is Nha Trang’s proprietor, owing to Thailand’s epic drought. Hurry.

jc art walking tour / stop #25

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 10:02:00 -0400

latitude: 40.735566

longitude: -74.046017

On the north side of the American Self-Storage building, just past stop # 24. Best viewed from across the street. Next to the fire escape, the remains of some liquid arc across the brick, some thirty feet off the ground. A well-deployed mouthful of chaw? Someone tripping with a cup of coffee? Protagonist long gone; stain lingers (as stains will), preserving its artist for the ages like those Paleolithic hand prints in French caves.

To read while viewing: Falling, James Dickey’s epic poem about the stewardess who fell to her death from a plane over Kansas.

Excerpt:

… finding herself with the plane nowhere and her body taking by the throat

The undying cry of the void falling living beginning to be something

That no one has ever been and lived through …

One cannot just fall just tumble screaming all that time one must use

it …

street style paper doll: Jerramiah Healy and the golf shirt, a love story

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 11:48:00 -0400

The times I have seen Jerramiah Healy around town he has been wearing this golf shirt. Black, with white trim at collar and sleeves. Once was in the spring, when he pulled over on Central, just south of the reservoir, and dashed into the deli there. Once was in the dead of winter, the night before New Year’s Eve at Casa Dante on Newark Ave, where he was tucking into a large plate of something. There was another time, around election day, when he was going door-to-door along with a posse of spit-shined politicians, most of them in suits, but it’s possible that on that day it was a white golf shirt, with green trim; memory doesn’t serve. In any case, he has made it his uniform, and it suits him.

Last year around this time Healy hosted the 3rd Annual Mayor and City Council Fishing Derby at Reservoir #3, in the Heights, at which he distributed prizes. (Festively, he wore what appeared to be a white guayabera.)

This year, Mr. Mayor, wherefore the 4th Annual?

We’ve gone ahead and picked out your outfit and everything.

jc art walking tour / stop #24

Tue, 25 May 2010 14:18:00 -0400

latitude: 40.735247

longitude: -74.045641

On the right side of Hoboken Ave at Eighteenth St, where it curves around the American Storage building & heads up the hill to the 139.

Best approached and viewed on foot. Small topographic anomaly, piece of what appears to be mattress or sofa stuffing, curled on itself in repose. Somewhat flattened, bedraggled with exposure to time, elements, pigeons, weary passers-by. Resigned, but not surrendered.

while viewing: Neil Young / Organ Solo

[selected by dacus]

the farming report

Fri, 21 May 2010 09:44:00 -0400

Leo, outstanding in his field

My neighbor, whom I will call Leo, is 98 years old. I know that summer is coming when he retires his down vest, which has a little window in the pocket that frames a picture of his wife and granddaughter, and begins to work in his garden. For the last 65 years or so he has been growing tomatoes in his backyard, and he has gotten so expert at it that the native Rutgers and Ramapo varieties he favors, sturdy, old-school sauce tomatoes, achieve a level of freakish super-perfection, like top-heavy turkeys bred for their breast meat, and the vines become so ponderous and crowded with fruit that he has to lash them to stakes with torn t-shirts until by the end of the summer the plant is immobilized, like the victim of a terrible accident, in a web of splints and bandages.

I can see Leo’s house from our window, but we often talk on the telephone. If the connection is clear I know he is talking to me from the pink wall phone in his kitchen, which was given to his wife by her long-time employer AT&T in return for her years of service. In his front room he has a very old photograph of his wife, who died nine years ago. She has a kind smile and is blond and dazzlingly beautiful. For a while in addition to her regular duties at AT&T she held the position of “Miss Telephone”, which Leo says was due to her superior diction, and for which she appeared in ads that ran before the main feature in movie houses.

Leo met his wife in one of the ballrooms that used to line Kennedy Boulevard — then called the Lincoln Highway — which was the only paved road around. “Everyone used to go dancing back then. I would get dressed up, patent leather shoes, jacket, starched white shirt and tie. When you got home you’d be soaking wet. I was a hoofer, honey. Oh, I was known as quite the hoofer back then.”

The Jersey City of Leo’s memories is a vital, thriving, close-knit place, where “the avenue” was packed on Saturday nights with people who had saved up all week to do their shopping, and Hudson County was an industrial powerhouse — “everything you could want, we made here,”and driving was a luxury people indulged in only on Sundays “between Decoration Day and Labor Day,” and the trees on our street (which is now mostly bare) were so tall and thick that in the summertime the sidewalks were dim and cool below.

Until I met Leo I had not thought much about what it would be like to have essentially your entire life behind you, to be living at the far end of the long trajectory of planning and ambition and plain old muscling-through that makes us who we are. This part of his life — without his wife, in a changed world, on a treeless street — must seem like a brief coda to his real life, which remains so vivid and present for him that I always feel disoriented after we talk, as though I am emerging from a dark theater onto an afternoon sidewalk. He tends to dismiss his astonishing longevity and ongoing good health as a handicap or worse, a curse, something to be endured until he goes, God willing, painlessly in his sleep and can be reunited with his wife. Often, toward the end of winter, when I begin pressing him for his gardening plans, he tells me how little he is planning to do this year, “not like I used to, honey,” and depending on his mood this sometimes leads to a gloomy digression about the current state of things, all things, in comparison to the way things were. “I want to tell you,” he tells me. “It was a beautiful world.”

Every year, though, around this time, I drop by and he shows me the brick oven, as big as a Viking six-burner, that he built decades ago in the backyard when he and his wife threw garden parties. Now retired, it has topsoil in all its orifices, and each one holds a marigold sprout, which Leo grows from seeds each year from last summer’s flowers, a habit he started around the time his wife died. His beds are weeded and tidy, his hydrangea is trimmed back and ready to bloom, his squash and eggplant seedlings are in. The tomatoes are spindly, propped in their cages, but it is early still; we have the whole summer.

street style paper doll: here's to you, ma

Thu, 13 May 2010 14:57:00 -0400

Escorting a woman of a certain age down the boulevard by St Pete’s, on Mother’s Day. All-white three-piece suit, white shoes; dapper to the max. Out-Tom-Wolfe-ing Tom Wolfe.

the weekly meal: Dosa Hut

Sat, 08 May 2010 21:10:00 -0400

the order window at Dosa Hut

The dosa, a kind of giant pancake made from a batter of rice and lentils and wrapped around a filling, is a South Indian dish with a long pedigree; mention is made of it in poetry that predates the birth of Christ. Reading the dosa menu at Dosa Hut, at 777 Newark Avenue, is like tracing the family tree: Here are the matriarchs, Plain Dosa, Masala Dosa (a potato and onion mix), Onion Dosa. Along the way they married into some local color: Chili, Mysore (a red chutney), Paneer (a kind of cottage cheese), and a branch of that hard-working family Palak (spinach). Thus began the begetting: Chili Dosa, Onion Chili Dosa, Masala Chili Dosa, Onion Chili Masala Dosa. Palak Plain Dosa, Palak Masala Dosa, Palak Paneer Dosa, Palak Paneer Masala Dosa. Someone took up with one of those no-good Gun Powder boys: Gun Powder Dosa, Gun Powder Onion Chili Plain, Gun Powder Onion Chili Masala.

If you are not lucky enough to know, already, what these ingredients taste like and what the subtle effects of the various combinations are, you have a gracious and capable guide in Komal, who works the counter most days at lunch and dinner. Komal will remember you, and will keep in her head a continuously updating calculus of what you ordered last time, what you did and didn’t like, and will generate recommendations that you will ignore at your peril.

Make no mistake, the dosa is fast food, created from the magic of starch and hot grease. Let it sit and the cheese congeals, the crust sags, the wet ingredients mingle unfavorably with the dry. But the magic, for those first beautiful minutes, is beyond compare.

The crust of the pancake is a toothsome miracle, chewy and crisp. The trick is the filling; here is where Komal and experimenting will serve you best. There are hits: Classic Dosa, light and fresh, served in pieces filled with barely-wilted spinach and a sprinkle of melted cheese. And not-hits: the Mysore Masala Dosa, one long tube as long as your arm, with a thick lump of potato and onion in the center, like a python digesting a rabbit. The inside of the tube is covered with a swirl of red and green spices, like a weather map of a hurricane. It’s kicky but dry; a carb overload.

Missteps can be doused in the sambhar and the creamy, nutty coconut chutney that come with, or the bowl of potatoes, acid yellow under the fluorescent lights. (Dosa Hut has the ambience of a bus station, but at least you’re not paying for it; all dosas are $3.50 - $7.50, and many are big enough for two.)

For those overwhelmed by the dosa dynasty there are plenty of other options, like the worthy Samosa Chatt, a meal-sized plate of chickpeas in a fruity red sauce over fried samosas, with garnishes atop. Also the very fine dal, a yellow lentil slurry flavored with cumin seeds and whole curry leaves; a perfect balance of salt and smoky lentil, hearty, slightly tangy.

On my last visit Komal recommended the Palak Paneer Dosa, spinach curry; I went instead for the Classic, fine, but spent my meal eying the dosa of the man next to me, overflowing with a creamy, juicy filling, which he was ripping apart with relish.

After the man left I asked Komal what he’d had. “That was the Palak Paneer Dosa!” She regarded me pointedly.

“I told you,” she said.

the nicest man in shoe business

Tue, 04 May 2010 21:09:00 -0400

Jimmy of Bob’s Shoe Repair

The man who runs Bob’s Shoe Repair, on Jersey Avenue between Newark Ave and Columbus Drive, is a really nice guy. His name is Jimmy, and he is so nice, and runs his business with such a magnanimous disregard for policy — how much a customer must put down as a deposit, when a payment is due, how many of those little adhesive heel pads a customer can have for free, and so on — that instead of making a person want to take advantage, the niceness has an inverse effect, and inspires feelings of loyalty and obligation.

Also because of his niceness, the front part of his shop, which is about the size of a large hot tub, is usually occupied by at least a couple of people who are not customers, who are there mainly to loaf, to enjoy the broken-in wicker chairs and the glow from the electric heater perched on the glass display case and the sad 70s love songs from the radio wedged behind it. There are more of these loafers when the weather is inclement, and they consider themselves part of the establishment. When my son was a month old I was backing into the shop in the middle of a sleet storm, jerking the stroller up over the doorstep, when a loafer sitting just inside the door pulled the door open for me and I sat down suddenly in his lap. Next to us was a guy wearing leather gardening gloves with the name “BRUNO” written across the knuckles in ballpoint pen, who was asleep.

The head loafer, who is there nearly every day, is a tall, voluble guy in a baseball jacket to whom Jimmy occasionally gives some responsibilities, like taking down a telephone number if Jimmy’s hands are covered in polish or applying pressure to an insert glued into a high heel.

Jimmy is no relation to the titular Bob, who opened the shop in the 60s and sold it to Jimmy in 1981. Prior to owning Bob’s Jimmy owned a shop on West Side Avenue; it was called Right Shine and is now, he thinks, a chicken place. When Jimmy bought the business from Bob he decided to keep the name, probably partly out of niceness but possible also for shrewder reasons like brand consistency and customer base.

Business at Bob’s Shoe Repair is not what it was in the first years after Jimmy took over the shop.

In those days, he had five men working for him, and they were often too busy repairing shoes to eat lunch. They turned over 1000 repair tickets in two weeks. Today it is just Jimmy, and he turns over 1000 tickets in four or five months. Jimmy attributes this generally to Gerald McCann, two-term mayor in the 80s and early 90s who “raised everything sky-high.” He also blames it on Newport Centre Mall and the arrival of parking meters downtown, which he says robbed the area of its foot traffic. Meters are a sore spot for Jimmy, who hands out quarters to his customers to foil the meter maid.

The head loafer is also vigilant about meters, and once when I found a spot directly in front of the shop but couldn’t get the meter to accept my quarters, the head loafer came over and delivered a punishing series of right hooks to the side of the meter and then inserted one of his own quarters, which it took.

It is hard to imagine six men working in the shop today. The space seems to have thickened around Jimmy like a sclerotic artery, layers of equipment and supplies accreting inward until there is just a narrow cavity in the middle where he does his work. The cash register faces sideways in the path between the front and back of the store; Jimmy operates it by standing next to it. There is a bracing smell in the shop that is chemical and animal, a combination of polish, glue, leather, and feet.

Jimmy started repairing shoes in his early twenties, when he was newly arrived from Egypt with a degree in civil engineering but couldn’t find a job. He enjoyed it, and spent two years at a school on 28th St in the city, learning how to make shoes from scratch. When he set up shop for a living, he made twice as much as his friends in their engineering jobs. Plus, the work suited him; he had a knack for customer service.

Shoe repair, after all, is a numbers game, where success comes through a large quantity of small jobs, and a good customer is measured by how much he cannot afford. “Poor people are the best customers,” Jimmy says. “They fix their shoes.” Since shoe repair is a local service, his customers reflect the demographics of the neighborhood, with the exception of the New Yorkers who have moved to the area, mostly white, who don’t, he says, spend money in the area. “Jersey City to them is like a motel.”

In his free time Jimmy works out and reads—usually historical nonfiction—but most of what consumes his daylight hours is shoe repair. He says there is no problem a shoe can have that he can’t fix. “It is only a shoe,” he says. “There has to be a way to fix it.”

The last time I saw Jimmy the weather was warmer and the shop was empty. When I came in he was talking on the phone and taking down a number using a piece of shoe leather as a notepad. After a moment the head loafer materialized. It had been a month of so since I had seen him, and he asked if I had a quarter to pay back the one he had put in my meter. I didn’t but I had a nickel and two dimes.

“That won’t work,” he said. “I need the quarter for the number, to play Powerball.”

I asked if I would get any of the winnings. “I’m going to give most of it to my mother,” he said. “The with what’s left over, there will be some for me, and some for you.”

street style paper doll: too-cool-for-school and the technicolor afro

Sun, 02 May 2010 19:12:00 -0400

Jaywalking on Newark Ave near Nha Trang Place. Perfect little moto jacket, leggings, neckerchief, hair. Cool! Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

the weekly meal: QBA lunch truck

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 11:04:00 -0400

QBA Cuban Kitchen

After a dank stretch of days like a defrosting freezer, yesterday was lunch-truck weather, all bracing ocean breezes and incandescent sun, and down in the one of the Lunch Truck Districts — the block of Hudson between York and Grand — the sidewalk was cheek-by-jowl with the lunchtime office crowd, open-jacketed and bare-legged in the sunshine. Lines were longest at The Taco Truck, but they were second-longest at the phonetically charming QBA Cuban Kitchen, newly arrived here from the rarified heights of Montclair.

Like a good street game of three-card Monty, QBA’s entree menu gives you three choices: chicken, pork, steak. (Well, four if you count the plantains, but do you?) The steak proved as elusive as the truck’s Twitter-chatter had forecast — steak was promised, then rescinded (sold out), then promised. Then, it was sold out. But here’s how the chicken and pork come: rough-cut, in a pile on a bed of white rice (real and regular, not instant) and black beans (mild but savory, the platonic ideal). Meats are marinated, so says QBA, but that taste is faint; what you do notice is how they’re cooked: juicy mostly, for the chicken, and meltingly shreddable, the pork. Pickled onion bits cut the starch in sour little bursts. Comes with a not-full-enough container of homemade sauce, pick your own: guava-habanero bbq was pleasant but nothing special, and the jalapeno cilantro aji, “not for the novice,” was fresh if basic, and fine for the novice. (The truck also serves a Cuban sandwich, which we did not try.)

The meat entrees are $8, which makes them, like street betting, a little pricey for everyday ventures, but a solid indulgence now and then for a solid plate of starch and protein. The best value is the $1 mojito limeade (non-alc), as sharp and sparkly as the Hudson glittering a short block away. Buy one of these, wander past the twisted-girder WTC memorial, find a bench waterfront and watch the wind rumpling the hedge-funders’ pompadours and doing its best on the trim office-girl skirts.

field notes: vacuum-cleaner tetherball

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 09:13:00 -0400

Impromptu, cutthroat session of that most demanding game at the corner of Manhattan and Kennedy just after school let out, by two talented athletes. Shots to the head, hail-Mary heaves, screaming cord-whips. Winner: unclear. Provenance of vacuum unknown; abandoned at curb when the final whistle blew.