Space is the PLace for the Human Race

ScrufflesSmack in the center of St. Marks Place lies a red-bricked building with white columns and three characters who live upon on the first floor. On the first floor lies a 600 square foot apartment home to three of the wildest, craziest and most unique fools on the block. It is a place, it is a home, it is smoky dank den, it is a think tank for like-minded St. Mark’s gypsies, but more than anything it is simply my apartment. 3400 hundred dollars in Manhattan doesn’t get you much. You won’t have a dishwasher; you wont get walls thick enough not to here the roommates next door to you getting it on; you wont get warmth, but you will get a little plot of land to call your own, smack dab in the biggest clusterfuck city of them all- New York.

Now, besides the negative aspects of this tiny, at times stinky apartment, there exists a multitude of positive characteristics both within the apartment and right outside its doors. Mainly I have been able to maintain “a sense of place”, a term that James Howard Kunstler alludes to in his critical book “The Geography of Nowhere” when talking about the impact of the automobile upon America. “The Costs of all this driving in terms of pollution, which includes everything from increased lung diseases all the way up to global warming, are beyond calculation…The least understood cost-although probably the most keenly felt-has been the sacrifice of a sense of place; the idea that people and things exist in some sort of continuity, that we belong to the world physically and chronologically, and that we know where we are”(Pg. 118). As soon as someone sets foot onto St. Marks Place, they have a strong sense of where they are. There’s the familiarity of the head shops, and those dudes on the corners always-smoking cigarettes and selling glasses and hats, and the sometimes wonderful, sometimes disgusting Asian restaurants. St. Marks has a feel, it has an essence, it is full of energy and it maintains its unique status as one of the main drags in the east village.

I live between avenue a and first avenue, so I’m a couple of blocks from all the intensely cheesy aspects of St. Marks, and that is why I choose this specific place to be my home. Now on top of the fact that St. Marks has a distinct sense of place, it exists within a community were the reliance on a car is not only unnecessary, it is completely inconvenient. In the good weather months I’m able to ride my bike or take a stroll and get anywhere I would need to be within 10-15 minutes, and public transportation takes me anywhere I need to go. I think in Kunstlers mind he would rate my modern lifestyle a 10 in the fact that I never use a car, I sustain myself in time, space and place, and that I have completely separated myself from the Suburban way of being Taking a tour of my apartment takes about one minutes time, but once someone has entered the heady zone that I call home, there is no telling how long they may stay. Each room is dominated by a full size bed that occupies about 60 percent of the space within that room, so essentially it is impossible for one to do yoga on any floor in any room. Not that I’m doing yoga or that my lazy, mostly drunkenly crazed roommates are doing it either, I just think it’s a good way to judge the sheer smallness or advertised coziness of the apartment. One can use the bathroom, wash their feet in the tub, and brush their teeth in the sink all simultaneously…in the most kosher way possible.

The best part about the apartment isn’t the fire escape facing the street, it isn’t the fact that it’s in a prime location, it’s the 100 square foot deck attached solely to our apartment. This is my favorite part of the apartment because it enables my roommates and I to have a connection with natural world outside of our cramped apartment. There has been many a night where keg beer pours into the wee hours of the morning and where I eventually make a bed out of the Brazilian style hammock that the six floors of neighbors above us jealously stare out day in and day out. If I’m lucky enough to be out on my hammock basking in a rare moment of sunny weather, I may here my cross-dressing neighbor Mario (Maria) sing Spanish opera; I may here my neighbor Anthony banging away on his typewriter cursing the day he was ever given the ability to write; maybe I’ll get yelled out by my super for being loud and obnoxious at 3:30 in the morning on a Tuesday; but the best moments on the hammock are those shared simply with my closest friends, or the 50 or so random individuals that could come to my place on any given night. We have made a vernacular usage of this tiny deck; it is our backyard, our bar, our cigar lounge, our skateboarding ramp, our volleyball court, our bedroom, and a place that is unlike any other existing at this moment in space and time. J.B. Jackson would be damned proud of the way we have accepted and made great use of the space we were given. D.J. Waldie would think our apartment was one of the unholy places he had ever laid eyes upon, but that would all change once he came in contact with some potent stench in the air and realized what the vibe of our apartment was all about.

122 st marks place in da houseCop Car Crashes into my bar...Spinning Fire on the RoofOur apartment is a mirror image of the vibrant and varied history of St. Marks Place, a topic that New York Times journalist Christopher Gray discusses in his article “Streetscapes; The Eclectic life of a Row of East Village Houses”. Though the article is not about my east village space specifically, it embodies the spirit of what every house on this street has undergone in the past 120 years: change. Once home to Germans, than home to polish people, than home to people like Tom Wolfe and the hippies of the 1960’s and now home to trustafarians, this street has undergone massive transformation since its inception in the 1830’s. As a street it is symbol of the constantly evolving landscape that is New York City, a place where from one decade to the next the rent can increase 1000% and where the inhabitants of a neighborhood can go from drug addicts to college students (even though there isn’t that much of a difference between these types of people). For instance, Christopher discusses the life of 19-25 St. Marks place in his article, a place that was once a hotbed for Arian culture turned into a discotheque known as “The Electric Circus”, transformed into a carpentry school for women, and now home to a New Age drug free cabaret.

Yet throughout all this time, St. Marks has adopted some timeless qualities. In talking to the Belgian fry man on Avenue A between St. Marks and 7th who has worked and lived in his store for over 35 years I see a type of essence that could only exist in the east village. There remains a diverse community home to different types of people, restaurants, drinking holes, sexual preferences and individual expression. St. Marks has retained its feel, its mojo is still alive, and its ability to entertain and excite continues to this very day. I mean where else are you going to find a bum passed out in your vestibule, where else is a cop car going to crash into the bar downstairs in a police chase, and where else can two first generation Irish guys and one Jew from Santa Monica come together to create an eclectically perfect atmosphere. Though most of the moments in my apartment involve laughter, games, and sheer amusement from seeing others suffer, there are still many surreal experiences. Some of the most epically intense moments are those spent on the rooftop overlooking the Manhattan skyline. It’s a very postmodern conflicted feeling I experience when on the rooftop because I see so much destruction, pollution, noise, and violence and yet simultaneously I feel this wonderful energy, this vibe that New York emanates. Though I feel that Humans are evolving at a much faster rate than nature can sustain, and the basic principles by which humans live are deeply disturbing the organic processes of nature on planet earth. If the nature of humanity could just begin to coincide and work in harmony with nature itself, than I could accept the negative aspects of modern existence. This means creating cleaner forms of energy, creating an economic system that doesn’t plunder the worlds resources, and instilling in humanity an eagerness to reconnect with that which surrounds them at all time, the ball of water and matter floating elegantly in the deep space of the universe. The approach needs to be an interdisciplinary one, relying on the worlds of ecology, environmentalism, philosophy and politics to come to a consensus on what needs to be accomplished. It will take a complex solution to fix a complex problem, but by working together as one species, people, scientists, politicians and philosophers can save themselves from the imminent ruin that we seem to be heading towards. In the words of James Howard Kunstler we are experiencing “a gathering ecological calamity that we have only begun to measure”(Pg. 60). The future of humanity depends on discovering a new social-political-economical paradigm, a new understanding of the good life; but for now my life on St. Marks Place, my tiny nook of an apartment can be a beacon of potential for a greater generation in the future.

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