Shortly after graduation from HS, Bob moved to Manhattan. At first he lived on Norfolk St in the Lower East Side but that neighborhood proved to be a zoo full of junkies and other degenerates and he moved to The Village into a walkup on Sullivan St. He was several doors down from St Anthony of Padua church. This church was the home of the locally famous and formidable Father Romano. If a woman's husband neglected his family and drank up his money while carousing with other women and he beat her up for complaining, she would go to Father Romano rather than to the police. I have never met him but he was described to me as a muscular man who typically hurried past with his robes flapping. He had a direct way about him and would not hesitate to crack skulls to make his point. His approach was not to instill fear of Jesus in miscreants hearts but rather, fear of Father Romano. It worked too, I am told. We need more people like Father Romano.
I have forgotten Bob's address but I think it was the yellowish brick building in the second photo.
An interesting stream of people entered Bob's life, which is not surprising, considering where he lived. One time I met a Rock band called The Unicorn Tapestry. One of it's members had visited the Cloisters museum and he was so taken by the famous unicorn tapestries that he began spray painting Unicorn Tapestry all over the place. Garffitti was unknown then but he launched hundreds of imitators and thus started the wave of grafitti that plagued NYC for years The Unicorn Tapestry grafitti then started off a series of newspaper articles and he decided to cash in on the publicity by starting a rock band with the same name.
Across the street lived an underground chemist who made some very fine synthetic mescaline. The apt was a walkup on the seventh floor of a tenement that featured only one bathroom per floor.
At some point, he met Chester Anderson, a pornographer and SF author who went back to the Beatnik days. He would get some great hashish flown in which he would dissolve in lighter fluid. He would dip cigarettes in the fluid and let them dry. This way he would always have dope on him for which he could not be busted. He became editor of Crawdaddy magazine but planned to turn it into a Science Fiction magazine. Perhaps this is what led to the magazine's downfall in 1969.
One day, Bob and I were walking through the Village, tripping on some fine blotter acid, and we bumped into Chester. We turned him on and he suggested that we adjourn to the Crawdaddy offices, with it's fine stereo. We did and I pulled out an LP from a vast pile of albums sent for review, The Moray Eels Eat the Holy Modal Rounders. This became one of our enduring favorites. Two stereo speakers were mounted in the skylight and a very high stepladder was so situated that if you sat on the top step, you had a speaker on either side of your head. I looked for the Crawdaddy offices but I couldn't find them. I believe that they were in a building that occupied a semi empty lot in the last picture.
Finally, I took a picture of 137 Thompson St. This was the block adjacent to the one where Bob lived and was the home of Augies. This was a neighborhood coffee joint where a constant stream of neighbors used to drop in and drink Espresso, eat pastries and talk. Mostly working class people, talking in either Italian, English or both. I always stopped in when I was in the neighborhood. Augie had once gotten me a temp job while i was down and out. People would send in postcards from wherever they had traveled all over the world, which Augie would proudly paste on the walls.
One time I had not stopped in for six months and I got a furious dressing down from Augie. "Where the fuck have you been? Don't you at least have the decency to send a postcard?" I think I was forgiven though. Several weeks later I stopped in and he said that he had a family emergency in Staten Island and would I run his shop until he got back? I ran his shop for the whole afternoon. I didn't get paid for it nor would I have accepted any money because Augie was a friend, almost family. I think any of his customers would have done the same thing.
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