From Australia's Quadrant Magazine, November 25:
Down on Canal Street
Say what you will about the Mafia,” a Greenwich Village neighbour of mine once told me, as we were chatting on a late summer evening, “but when they were around, you could leave your wallet on the front seat of your unlocked car and it would be there the next morning. People knew not to mess with this neighbourhood.”
My neighbour is an eighty-year-old lesbian who moved to the city in the late 1950s, found her tribe in the Greenwich Village coffeehouses and dark-panelled bars, and never left. She has shown me photographs of herself as an idealistic young woman, dressed in a simple tweed skirt and sweater and sporting a short no-nonsense haircut, off to work for Democratic Mayor Robert F. Wagner, the Good Government leader of New York from 1954 to 1965.
And then a few pages on in her photo album, the tweeds are replaced by bell-bottoms and Day-Glo colours and she’s a downtown hippie marching for peace and gay rights. A few more pages: in outdoorsy clothes at a nuclear weapons protest in Washington Square Park. A few more: testifying at City Hall against the rampant gentrification of downtown Manhattan in a 1990s business suit.
Times change, of course. The current crime wave is turning old liberals into cranky conservatives, which is what crime waves always do.
These days my neighbour is mostly nostalgic about the Pax Mafiosa that ruled Greenwich Village until the late 1970s. And sometimes, after a glass or two of wine, she’s even willing to set aside her progressive politics and say nice things about Rudy Giuliani, who presided over a steep drop in crime during his mayoral administration.
Mostly though, she sits on the front stoop of the townhouse she purchased in the 1960s and complains about all of the rich people moving into the neighbourhood.
Whenever I walk by with a coffee from the local coffee shop—which happens daily—the conversation is always the same.
“Whadya pay for that coffee?” she always asks.
“Five bucks,” I always say.
She shakes her head in disbelief. “Five bucks for coffee! Crazy. Wish I had your money.”
And then I smile and walk home and trudge up three flights to the apartment that I rent which is right next door to the townhouse she owns, which she purchased in 1966 for US$40,000 and is now worth around US$14 million. But whatever you do, do not mention this to her or suggest, ironically, that hey I guess gentrification isn’t so bad because, believe me, you will be in for a lecture.
But New Yorkers are always a little weird about money. The daffy and appealing heroine of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Holly Golightly, is a boy-crazy, socially ambitious pauper who refuses to accept that she is broke. My neighbour, in almost every way Holly Golightly’s opposite, refuses to accept that she is rich.
A famous and successful chef once told me that he has never—not once!—ridden in an Uber. Too expensive, he said. And why, when the subway is only a few bucks? And then he added that his daughter and son-in-law confided to him that they haven’t taken the subway in twenty years. They think they’re rich, he said. (To which I did not respond: they will be, though, won’t they?)....
....MUCH MORE
I have heard that exact line. "They think they're rich" from more than one extremely wealthy parent.
