Cornelia Street Cafe

Eve Marx

Painting by Naomi Koffman

Word Count 1227

My first apartment was a tiny studio on Cornelia Street, a narrow, one block long street between West Fourth and Bleecker, just off Sixth Ave. I moved in with nothing but a suitcase; over time I furnished the apartment with a few things I found at Azuma and cast-offs picked up off the sidewalk. For several weeks I slept on a pile of blankets on the bare floor until I finally bought a mattress, but no box spring. For a long time I didn’t have a phone. If someone wanted to get in touch with me, they stood on the sidewalk under my second-floor window and shouted up.

My apartment was a picturesque hovel with a nonworking fireplace; its primary charm was proximity to everything I liked to eat. Zito & Sons Bakery was just around the corner and I was addicted to their crusty loaves of wheat bread. The summer of ‘77, a loaf cost 55 cents. Zito’s closed in 2004 after 80 years in business, but back in the day, it was definitely the status bread. Also nearby, Murray’s cheese shop, Faicco’s pork store, two fish stores, an Italian greengrocer, and John’s Pizzeria. People stood in line for John’s famous brick-oven pies. You had to buy the whole pie and not just a slice. There were a handful of fancy restaurants: Le Gigot, Sabor and Restaurant Leslie, owned and operated by Manhattan’s first celebrated female chef, Leslie Revsin, known for her Roquefort beignets. The main draw for me was the Cornelia Street Cafe which had just opened. I immediately began waitressing, thinking it would be both fun and a supplement to my meager salary in publishing. I was already developing a taste for better things. The real perk of the job was it meant I could hit up the cafe whenever I wanted for a free cup of coffee. I’d just discovered espresso.

I made friends on Cornelia Street. “Friends” is probably pushing it. More like a shared camaraderie with other people living on the street. There was Josh, a brilliant stringer for the Village Voice rumored to be a user of heroin. He did steal a tv from a friend’s apartment but not mine. And Peter who spent his weekends working on his motorcycle parked out front on the street. Every now and then, he worked as an actor in adult films under a fake name. Eloise, always dressed to the nines, sold cosmetics at a counter in Bloomingdales. She once told me a woman wasn’t fully dressed until she spritzed on perfume. My favorite person was Christina, a mother of two young boys. She lived in what must have been a private house at one time owned by the Ottomanelli family. Their butcher shop was around the corner. Chris’s apartment was the basement and parlor floor. One of the things I loved about her was she could curse like a sailor. I never did learn the name of her kids’ dad since she only referred to him as Fuckface.

My most interesting relationship was with Bill, a man in his 70’s who worked for decades as a Pullman porter. Bill was diabetic and was always trying to show me where some of his toes were cut off. He had a small, filthy apartment in the building directly across from me. I know it was filthy because one day out of the goodness of my heart and feeling sorry for him, I offered to clean it. I was on my hands and knees scrubbing behind his toilet while he sat in a chair in the bathroom doorway, looking on. He offered me a sum of money to lick my vagina and I stood up and hollered at him. How dare you, I said.

Bill had a side job a few afternoons a week sitting on an old metal and vinyl kitchen chair on the sidewalk in front of the social club down the street. The club was a storefront and the club members were a handful of Italian guys from around the neighborhood. I was very curious about what happened at the club. Bill said they sat around and played cards. I liked talking to him when he sat outside keeping an eye out. I saw him once feeding quarters in parking meters on the street so club members who drove up to the club wouldn’t get ticketed. There was a mounted police officer who also sometimes fed the meters. One year for Christmas, Bill gave me a bottle of Chanel Number 5. He said he gave it to all his girlfriends. I thought it hilarious Bill thought I was his girlfriend.

Photo of author.

While I was working at the Cornelia Street Cafe my then-boyfriend often left his dog, Walter, at my apartment across the street. He was about 90 lbs and not terribly friendly which made him an ideal bodyguard. It was Easter Sunday and Walter was at my place as usual. He’d had the runs in the morning and I’d fed him boiled rice in an attempt to plug him up. It was a beautiful afternoon and my shift was just winding down. The cafe had sidewalk tables and I was bringing someone a coffee and a cheese plate when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Walter creep out on my fire escape which faced the street. I’d left the window open so he could get some air. A group of tourists dressed in their Easter finery were making their way down the street. Just as they passed under my window, I saw Walter go into a crouch. The result struck a lady on the head and then cascaded in rivulets down her body. She immediately started screaming. One of her party declared they would find a police officer.

Charles, one of the cafe owners, immediately grabbed my arm.

“Get inside,” he commanded. “Don’t come out. Do not say a word.” From inside the cafe I watched as a policeman was flagged and brought around. I saw him looking up at the fire escape. He saw the dog. He rang some apartment bells but no one responded. He tried talking to Lucy, the old Italian lady who was my neighbor, who spent her afternoons sitting on the stoop where she held court in a wing chair carried from her apartment by her grandson, who, like his father, was a member of the social club. When the cop asked Lucy if she knew who owned the dog, she shrugged and said something in Italian. I heard the officer tell the woman who’d been crapped on there was nothing he could do. I heard him say, “Lady, I can’t arrest a dog.”

Later, much later, when the scene was cleared, I stepped across the street to speak to Lucy, whose grandson was about to carry her chair back up to her apartment.

“Thank you so much for not telling the police that’s my dog,” I said. I didn’t talk to Lucy much but I often petted Sammy, her old Pekingese.

“Sconosciute,” she said. I had to look it up later, but that means“stranger” in Italian. “You live-a here, they don’t,” she said. Then she made a spitting sound.

Eve is a journalist and author currently scraping out a tiny living crafting police reports for newspapers in New York and Oregon. She is the author of What’s Your Sexual IQ?, The Goddess Orgasm, 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex and other titles bearing some relation to her stint editing Penthouse Forum and other ribald publications. She makes her home in a rural seaside community near Portland, OR with her husband, R.J. Marx, a jazz saxophonist, and Lucy, their dog child. Follow Eve on Twitter here.