The Routine.

I worked at my computer till it was ten to two last night, having been out earlier. A letter going over again for another correspondent the scenes and sensations of Park Avenue Fest that began to month of August had to be finished; the beginnings of a piece called "Ten To One," I had long had in mind and had been revived in my imagination while sitting on the terrace at Starbucks on that earlier trip down to the street.

Returning to the street for the Two A.M., seemed almost a drag though you can never expect the usual to happen on Monroe.

All the same it ws the usual gang out of Oxford's Pub Ifound gathered on the street; Sonny's Catering Cart was set up across the way in front of the body piercing salon and the tattoo parlor. The catering crew of two were lounging waiting for the After Two in the Morning crowd to jam about their cart yammering among themselves and crying out dog and patty orders.

I was on or about the stoop at 640 Monroe for most of the hour between two and three. A girl did a saucy little bump and grind close up to the plate glass window beside Oxford's front door. She was putting on a show for friends who had remained inside after last call. Two luscious chocolate girls pulled up and parked to walk to Gitsis' and had to ignore the wordless zombie stare of a tall party who was meandering stupid drunk down the block and thought he might approach them. The crowd that lingered along the street in front of Oxford's until almost a quarter of three was otherwise remarkable only for its good humor and its subdued tone.

Yes, beginning the Labor Day weekend, the traffic into the area was a little heavier earlier than most Friday nights. The jam at Gitsis' door, judged from the block above, seemed to swell out chaotically and a little drive-by socializing down there began to interfere with the orderly passage of traffic on the Avenue.

Still , the cops didn't put in much of any appearance.

No blue-and-white sat down and guard dogged-it at the Exxon and Gitsis gatherers began to park and abondon their cars at the darkened pumps. That which isn't expressly and actively forbidden is assumed to be permitted, to be, at least, something you can get away with.

When the last of the Oxford crowd moved off it was to wander down in the direction of Gitsis'. A gang of six or seven moved off in a lingering playful way all at once. Crossing Wilmer they were holding hands and waltzing around with one another, laughing and carrying on conversations more than they were hurrying on to the next station in Night Town.

I didn't so much follow them as decided that I didn't want to climb the stairs and was tired of standing about in one spot looking at nothing happening.

Crossing to the west side of the avenue seemed preferable to trying to thread my way through the knot of folks gathered at Gitsis'. The crush in the diner's parking lot on Cornell didn't, from across the street, seem so bad as it had been on many other anonymous summer nights. Further down, passed Show World and Enright's Thirst Parlor and Liquor Store, I saw further evidence of the effect of a lack of police presence. Without cruisers parked at Goodman closing lanes of the Avenue to traffic and without flares across its entrance, the Chase Bank's parking lot had gathered something of a crowd as in bad times past. Passing Goodman I checked to see and Mr. V's cart was dark and about to be hauled off.

Below Goodman, however, in front of Advance Auto Parts, a dog cart was doing boomtown business and had hired two bruisers in black tee-shirts as 'SECURITY.' The late night meat and grease eager crowd there numbered over a dozen - perhaps even over two dozen. They were noisily, excitedly, gleefully spilled all over the wide sidewalk just beyond the entrance of the parking lot between Blockbuster and the auto parts store. They sent me back over the Avenue to the east side once more.

Blue-and-White RPD cruisers were pulled up in the parking in front of the 7/11, Meigs and Monroe.

John, behind the counter, sold me a soda while reporting to one of the cops. He told how the young man they had in the rear of one of their cars, had tried to walk out with a burrito he hadn't paid for.

"He t'ro's it the bushes 'n' sez, 'Now, I ain't got nuthin' on me!'"

The officers had John out to id the guy and sign the report and I got to mention to John, during a break, that I'd seen his clerk-partner, Dave, out of uniform early in the day.

"He don' work here no more; they fired him," John offered.

"He was telling me. Seems a shame."

A guy with hair as gray as mine came out of the Convenience with smokes and, passing, smirked back at the prisoner,

"Some kinda big deal!"

He seemed to want to know, after all, and wouldn't ask so I got to be wise.

"Grand theft burrito!" I told him it was. I explained, "That's the Burrito Bandito!"

The news drew a snort of protest at cops wasting big resources on small matters.

"I woke up and - no smokes!" the guy felt the need to explain. "That sucked, so, I come out here!"

It was three a.m., at least.

Some of the same officers who had been in and out of 7/11 had moved up the Avenue and were paying attention to the crowd gathered around the dog car at Advance Auto. It wasn't that there seemed to be anything going on there; it seemed instead that there was just too much crowd and it was too spread over the whole block from O'Cal's up to Goodman and Blockbuster for their liking.

As I was coming up to Bruegger's and the Goodman Street corner, an officer in the Blockbuster lot across the way called over and addressed the young men in front of the bagel shop.

"Are you young men getting food?" he inquired in a big voice. "If not, you need to be movin' along."

It was all of three a.m. and time the cops moved in to shut things down on the Avenue and I felt that, maybe that was what was happening, now. I crossed Goodman to make my way back home. Ahead of me there were people all over the next block. I was thinking I'd cross Monroe, too, to the Show World side and avoid Gitsis' again where the tangle was sure to be thickest. I was thinking, too, that the dark knot of humanity just ahead, below Gitsis' on the sidewalk out in front of Enright's was looking formidable and, suddenly, agitated and angry, too.

There was alarmed shouting. There was running.

The Enright crowd beneath the shamrock tree before the darkened bar roiled. Figures in the crowd turned against the rest, arms, fists were lifted in the air and, beneath them, other figures pushed the flailing ones back, restraining them. Some woman or women were shouting in anger and insult.

"Some one always gotta show a knife!" I heard.

I heard, "What's the madder with everybody?"

I saw three, perhaps, four tall young men run across Monroe toward a car just below the Show World marquee. One ran with his right leg stiff.

I heard,

"Yeah, he clip me!"

That is what I saw up Monroe toward Gitsis'; that is what I heard.

Looking back, crossing toward Show World, I noticed that the gathering of officers below Goodman were there in the entrance to Blockbuster a moment more and, then, they were moving for their cruisers. Other blue-and-whites were already on their way, coming in up the Avenue and going by the cruisers still parked for the moment below the dog cart. They were the first sirens, the first of the flashing lights to come on the scene.

All the cops on Monroe came to Gitsis' then.

The cars streak by between me and the still agitated crowd struggling within itself out in front of the shamrock decorated whitewashed bar and iron-grill guarded liquor store. They sped passed one after another after another after another. The call was to a fight that had broken out at Gitsis' and the cars flashed up in front of the diner pulling in to park with spinning combative lights flashing. They formed in minutes a blue-and-white wall all up and down in front of the lot and diner above Cornell. I heard someone up the street count them, "That's ten of them." I had counted thirteen.

The shadowy crowd of folks surging about within itself on the block the other side of Cornell was still flailing fists and angry charging individuals were being held back and repelled when the police, gathered out of their cars, at last, came down in a blue body and crossed Cornell.

Guns were draw, then, and guns were drawn down as suddenly on the car at the curb on the corner.

The crowd was ordered back. Individuals in the car were ordered out and, one by one, were put up against the white wall of the liquor store to be cuff and set down on the pavement. In the middle of this an individual in the street behind the cops was told, incredulously by an officer with his gun drawn,

"You can't walk through here; go 'round!"

Even before all that was finished, an officer crossed Monroe to shoo those of us who had gathered on the other side of the street.

"No reason to be standing here!"

The car with the three or four men who had fled from the crowd had just pulled away and I mentioned them over my shoulder as I was moving along. I mentioned that one had run favoring his one leg. It seemed irrelevant and was taken by the officer with a light smile suggesting its irrelevance.



THE NEWS is that a fight broke out at a Monroe diner overnight. When 'members of the staff,' at Gitsis' diner moved in to end the fight one of those involved pulled a gun and shot another man in the lower leg. The gun man, described only as a black man dressed in black shirt and ball cab with an unknown logo, was thought to have fled up Cornell Street.

Coming out of the Exxon convenience store some time around eleven-fifteen, I came around the bush at the entrance to the station on Amherst Street and nearly walked into a Channel Ten camera man's set up. He was filming the front of Gitsis' across the street as it looked in the bright light of noonday with a family arriving for lunch bearing a child's car seat. After I had stood around watching him for a minute or two, he packed up his camera and fled the scene in a station decal decorated mini-something-or-other called a Tucson. A white car was just then parking in front of the copy store next to Gitsis' and, seconds after the Tucson stole away, the young man in it got out and took a video camera and tripod from the car trunk. He was Channel Thirteen and he set up for his first shot in front of the hedge and trees near the corner of Amherst and Monroe.

By eleven-thirty, Fox News was setting up directly across from Gitsis'. I walked over and told him he was third on the scene. He didn't seem surprised but said he didn't much care for being third. They were only getting background shots of the diner. They only needed something to run while the anchor read the news about what had gone down the night before.

I asked if the story would get much play on the evening news. He didn't think it would; nobody really cares, he thought.

I had to agree.

After all,

"Nobody got killed. If Mark's taught us nothing it taught us that, even when somebody does get killed, people don't care all that much!"

Last night, with the cop lights spinning into one another, I came inside the blue-and-white wall that had gone up on in front of Gitsis. One of the diner's overnight staff, a narrow dark man with a sharp face and black hair, was smoking a cigarette at the diner door. He looked moody, morose.

A maroon sedan was pulled up to the curb trapped between a police cruiser in front and a parked van behind while anoyher cruiser blocked him in on the street. The car was full, front and back, and several of the men sitting inside had pizza boxes on their laps. Their windows were down.

"You fellas are sort of hung up here."

"Yeah," the passenger in front agreed. "We are hung up!"

The passenger behind him sounded somewhat bitterer and his words suggested social commentary. He said, half spitting it out,

"Yeah, we got no way out!"

Some of Gitsis' departing diners stopped to tell officers what they had seen and heard of the fight and the shooting. Others just came out and went away with their white plastic sacks of food. Stray middle of the night strollers wandered through the scene of flashing lights without seeming to see any of it. A girl in gray sweat pants and a sweater looked to be in a mood; her eyes were searching, looking for something or some one but what was there clearly was of no interest to her. Occasionally some late arrivals would thread their way through the chaos to come up to the diner door and be surprised to find Gitsis' closed.

Then, again, some well known regular would come along and the door would swing open.

As easily as that the routine resumed and I decided to go home to bed.

August 30, 2008.

565

The eye adjusts; the landscape, after all, is only that which is there to be seen.

The day after the whole of 565 Monroe had gone save a hole in the earth and some rubble of brick and stone, I looked up Monroe and saw - only the Avenue, only that morning's Monroe waiting to be walked, talked and lived upon.

The landscape was what it was - and seeing all of Blockbuster and the Rite Aid at the rear of the lot north of Goodman seemed natural enough though it hadn't been possible only days before.

The Past is found in photo files or conjured with an effort in the mind's eye of the imagination but the landscape of today is what the eye really does see.

A building had been there, I had to remind myself. The north end of the block between Amherst and Goodman still occupied at its southern end by the remnant Monroe Theatre had, formerly, been anchored by a three story sprawl of dark brown, fudge brown brick. Its bulk hid all but the front quarter of Blockbuster and, from some angles, all of Rite Aid. 565 Monroe, the south-west corner of the Avenue and Goodman St., a principal Rochester intersection; one of those points like Twelve Corners or Clinton and Goodman around which people can orient themselves.

"Ah, yah! Now I know where yeh talkin' 'bout!"

As its unoccupied space is, today, ignored by the street traffic and joggers that pass it by, 565 standing had ever been a largely unremarked Monroe landmark. Another one-shade-or-other-of-brown brick structure of two or three stories; another of that odd assortment of low, ugly buidlings channeling traffic from the high-rise, skyscraping Magic Mountain of midtown, downtown Rochester out toward green Cobb's Hill, flat, tree obscured Brighton and on to canal town Pittsford.

As 565 was in process of going down, the after-midnight counter clerk at Rite Aid bagged my purchases and expressed her pleasure, grinning near giddiness,

"Now they jus' godda gid'on and do that Show World next, that Theater - that eye sore!"

A Caterpillar shovel had earlier that day begun the demolition, the third floor, southwest corner of 565 stood clawed away. Still discernible 'rooms' were exposed to moonlight, displayed by their missing outer walls and with roof beams shattered and left hanging out in mid-air shoved slightly out of line.

On the street, a slightly swaying and bleary if steady eyed local woman expressed her sour pleasure when she caught me contemplating the ruin.

"Nuthin' but bad drugs," she recalled 565. "Good they're gittin' rid of it!"

At one time, too, I had heard it rumored that the phone bank on the corner in front of 565 was a stand or stroll for young male prostitutes. 565 had long been in bad repute. But, of late and for the most part, tghe repute had been less raffish or evil than simply seedy and, finally, pathetic. It had been a place, at the end, that had gathered the halt and the hazy, injured and directionless folk with few other places to go.

With the wreckers about to move in, a Monroe bum took up residence in the abandoned building's recessed entry sleeping soundly amid the trash that had drifted in there even as the Avenue reveled and rioted through weekend afterhours and cop overheads flashed endlessly over his boot soles.

No one exactly was going to miss 565 Monroe as it waited to be further demolished and it went down attended by few mourners. Some stood along the streets opposite its corner on the Monday morning the Caterpillars crawled about and groped and grappled its walls down to the ground - but even some of those who watched were only waiting for buses, after all.

No one was going to miss 565 and, when it ws gone, the eye adjusted to the its absence.

Nevertheless.

Two blocks further along Goodman, just this side of the Expressway overpass, there is, on the south side of the street, a space along the top of the off ramp up from 490. It is a shady spot that is neither sidewalk, though there is pavement, nor someone's lawn, thought here is grass and embedded flowers. Monroe bums, overcome with a rare case of ambition, will go there to lounge between importuning drivrs caught up on the ramp by the red light for change. The space is unnamed, undedicated and undefinable but in it there is a sign board that does explain some things. On its street side it bares the logo of the Lock 66 neighborhood - a canal barge and Jenny of the Towpath Era for when the 490 expressway was the old Erie Canal and a lock here abouts lifted barges on their way downtown. The logo is surrounded by the names of the streets and places that are the Lock 66. For any one who bothers to stop and walk around to view the other side of the board, the local association has written a legend there defining the neighborhood and giving something of its history and with it something of the history of Monroe Avenue.

"Though still resembling the Monroe Avenue of 50 or 75 years ago, it has passed through several incarnations, from a street of small mom and pop shops - tailors, shoe stores, groceries (including the first Wegmans) - toan eclectic and lively mix of boutiques, bookstores, antique shops, hair salons, craft shops, ethnic restaurants, and bistros."

The heart of that bourgeois, Mom and Pop Monroe may well have been the block between Amherst and Goodman when Show World was the bijou Monroe Threater with its marquee of colored lights glittering beneath of towering leaves of the summer trees down at the end of Cornell Street and inviting people to gather out of their living rooms and off their porches to indulge themselves in Hollywood and air conditioning. 565, then, had been a good address with its high stoop and second and third floor hall ending balcony porches. Urban living had other tempos and tastes then than it has now and has had since.

Today's Monroe may in some way resemble the avenue of five or, perhaps, it was, ten years ago but already it has passed through still mre incarnations than the legend would have it. The book stores are all but gone and our bistros, with exceptions, are more kid bars than they are that. Here and there, more than in the past, too, the 'modern' stamp of chain enfranchisement in a sleekness and neon of familiar corporate logos becomes more and more the character of the neighborhood. Rite Aid, they say, will move to the Avenue in 565's place - one more building of a banal business world modernity purposely bland and preternaturally facelifted and botoxed to be forever ageless before its has begun.

So, perhaps, it is worth noting the passing of 565 - now nothing more than a hole in the ground and some piled up rubble waiting to be removed.

There may, after all, come a tipping point when the eye will no longer adjust so easily and the landscape one sees will no longer be Monroe.

Posted August 13, 2008.