It also made a racket. As the water (aka ex-steam) dripped down the pipe, it hit the new hot steam coming up. The water bounced off the steam, hitting the sides of the pipe like a pinball. But it didn’t sound like pinball. It sounded like a crazy person banging on the pipe with a cast iron skillet.
If the system was going all the time, the pipes wouldn’t get cold and it all worked well enough, though the first floor was always a sweatbox.
Landlords by law have to heat a building. In New York City the law was something like 68 degrees in the day and 55 degrees at night. So almost all boilers were on a timer to save money.
Because the pipes got cold each night, the single-pipe system almost never worked right.
Willy was the traveling super of number 40 on Morton Street, a six-story building with single-pipe heat. The apartment in the top floor was perpetually vacant.
Bullshit.
An empty apartment in New York City?
In the WEST VILLAGE?
Yes, this was way back. Before I was born. Before my dad knew Willy.
A musician named Charlie was broke and homeless. He and Willy were friends, so Willy let him live in the top floor of 40, and the apartment became perpetually occupied.
Winter rolls around and it is a bitter, awful cold.
It isn’t the city’s responsibility to clear the sidewalks of snow and ice. It is the property owners’. If an old lady falls because the walk is covered in ice, the landlord is held responsible for her broken hip.
But physically, it is the super’s responsibility.
At the first hint of snow, a smart super gets out there and salts. If it is really bad the super only digs out a narrow path. Some supers only do paths. Willy always tried to do the whole sidewalk.
In addition to shoveling the walk, a super still needs to make sure the halls are clean.
And no matter how many scraps of cardboard you lay down in the entryway, the snow still gets dragged in and up the stairs.
Willy is cleaning the first floor of 40 when he hears shouting at him from the sixth floor.
It was a stair where you could see all the way up the center. Willy looks up and Charlie is hanging over the railing, screaming: “It’s freezing. What you trying to do. Us poor black people are here trying to live and we ain’t no Eskimos, we niggas!”
Willy said he would try to fix the problem.
The next day Willy introduced Charlie to a 45-year-old widow that lived across the street. She looked like a minister’s wife but with better tits.
Charlie moved in with the minister’s wife and the top apartment in 40 became perpetually vacant again.
By the time I was born, all the garbage can lids on Morton Street were chained to walls or fences. This was so they wouldn’t fly away, get stolen, etc. If there were more than three inches of snow, Willy would unchain them for neighborhood kids.
Rome, Athens, and San Francisco boast seven hills. Greenwich Village had three. They were all located in Washington Square Park and were more like camel humps covered in asphalt.
In winter the humps were covered in snow and everyone under forty inches would sled down them on garbage can lids, crashing into the middle.
When summer came my sister and I would give each hump a belly flop hug. Face pressed to the warm asphalt, hoping no one skateboarded into us.
For a little while Willy ran a “whorehouse” on Morton Street. He was the traveling super of a big white brick building.
It was the first building on the block with an elevator and air conditioner sleeves below the windows. This made the rents higher, so there were always vacancies. Willy would fix up the empty apartments and rent them out to prostitutes.
He wasn’t really a pimp, though he offered one of the girls to my dad. A beautiful one named Lucy who all you had to do to sleep with her was ask. My dad never asked her, but he was touched by the offer.
The first time my dad had jury duty he was selected to be on a liability case in civil court.
Jury duty in New York City today is a dream. Free Wi-Fi, snack breaks, and places to plug in a laptop. Civic pride radiates from the walls. Plus, if you are not picked to be on a jury, it is over in one or two days.
The first time I had jury duty I remember being thirsty and hungry, feeling threatened, confused, and that I was being punished for stealing plastic grapes.
When my dad served as a juror in 1968 it was worse. There was a popular joke: How can you expect justice from twelve people who can’t even get out of jury duty?
On the first day of the case my dad took his place in the juror box, wearing chino slacks and a white button-down shirt.
A young black girl was suing the super of her building. She was small, no more than twelve.
The case was about an incident that had happened a few years before:
It was summertime in a slumlord building. The superintendent didn’t like kids hanging around his turf, so he sprinkled plumber’s lye on the stoop. The small girl sat on the stoop, not noticing the white powder. Water was thrown at her from an unknown source. The water mixed with the lye and splashed up and down her little back, burning and scarring her body.
The bailiff introduces the honorable Judge Crater, who starts the proceedings.
Judge Crater berates the little girl’s lawyer for wearing a bow tie. Only neckties are allowed in his court. The trial will not continue unless this situation is resolved. The girl’s lawyer leaves.
The lawyer returns wearing a necktie and the trial begins. Immediately the small girl is called to the stand. She speaks very softly. It is not a whisper; it is more she is scared to death.
“If you don’t speak up, I am going to throw your case out of court,” the judge screams at the girl.
So the girl speaks up, and does her best to stay loud, even as she must expose exhibit A to the courtroom. Exhibit A is her little naked scarred-up backside, including her bare ass.
The case goes on; they interview a few more people. It’s time to go home, but the case isn’t complete.
My dad leaves the courtroom. He is in the hallway waiting for the elevator. The bailiff comes out, calls him over, and says, “Judge Crater would like you to wear a suit tomorrow.”
“Tell Judge Crater to go fuck himself,” says my dad.
The elevator shows up, my dad gets in and leaves the building.
Outside, two cops stop him and bring him back upstairs to Judge Crater’s court.
“You people all belong in jail,” the judge screams, and then rants and raves about the Columbia riots.
The Columbia riots had just happened—mass protests against Columbia University’s support of the Vietnam War and their plan to build a new gymnasium in a public park. The gym was to have a front entrance for students (mostly whites) and a back basement entrance for local residents (mostly blacks and hispanics). The students and citizens shut the university down for more than a week, taking over the whole campus, chanting “GYM CROW MUST GO” and “PEACE NOW.”
“You will come here tomorrow dressed in a suit and tie or I will throw you in jail,” Judge Crater threatens.
The next day my dad wore a raincoat buttoned to his Adam’s apple.