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.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Monday, July 7, 2008
OLD WHITE GUY.
There was this old white guy and he was standing out one night under the marquee of the one-time Monroe Theater - now and for moment still known as Show World, an adult entertainment center.
He had the gray stubble of a beard, the startled staring eyes and expression of a drunk even if he was affecting a casual attitude. His shirt hung open and his pale gut protruded out over his pants. On his head he wore one of those flat caps that old men wear.
"Now...," he was asking repeatedly, "...how do you like that?"
His voice croaked in a beery baritone and he made a short throwing down gesture of presentation with his one hand each time. He was asking it of anyone and no one. Maybe for him there were ghosts gathered for the show.
A lot of people talk to themselves in the city.
As it happens - it is after two in the morning and a weekend and most of the crowd that really is there passing on the street and not paying the old man attention is neither old nor white.
On Monroe, with all that happens and with all the people who crowd on to the street at that hour, the minutes double after Last Call and, though a good many of the young and largely white crowd from the bars linger on, the street's complexion distinctly darkens and the nature of the fun grows bolder and brasher.
With only an hour left in the night, the whole out-all-night city rushes onto Monroe for that final after-hour.
The new people have had to travel across town in cars and vans and limos and there is never, not even at rush hour, more traffic out there than there is as two-ten becomes a quarter after on a Saturday or Sunday morning. It becomes carnival. Parking lots glut and gather gangs of kids standing about while all the streets become banked with parked steel and chrome and late arriving drivers cruise in vain for a space that ain't.
Competing sound systems, in passing and parked, crank dueling screeds and sermons, speeches on subjects from niggers to bitches in a counterpoint of metronomic rhythms and rhymes so loud that, at times, it drown the traffic rumble and roar. At last a chrome-blue SUV with silver spinning hub-caps sits and gleams in the street light and bests all othes with a bass tone output that alters the molecules of the air and approximates an altered conscious state for even those rare few on the block still sober.
Ball cap boys looking all of thirteen do the drive-by real slow in car seats set so far back that they ride in them slung low. Cap bills cut straight across at their brows and their baby faces bobble just above the car windows' lower frames as they give the scene such stone-eyed stares.
What do the young men think?
Traffic jams and sits whether the light at Goodman is green or not. Foot traffic ventures and reels out into the stalled lanes and socializes with vans and sedans of girls they find to talk to there. On Cornell, alongside Gitsis' parking lot, traffic leaving to the Avenue sits and waits at the corner to turn right into avenue traffic that's not moving and avenue traffic arriving waits to turn onto Cornell where traffic is backed up waiting for a turn into Gitsis'.
Above the scene a chorus line of young men, sitting up on a parked car roof, simulates a shuffling dance and laughter screams.
Time lapse - it takes ten minutes or more for a cream brown pick-up to make its way out of Gitsis' lot and down Cornell to the Avenue, driver and passenger ride above the scene sitting outside the cab in the open windows. Something like twenty minutes on and they do it all in reverse returning for another go at Cornell Street.
The line that forms for booths and stools in Gitsis', across from Show World, forms to the right of the diner's door and the bruisers who handle the crowd are the tallest and widest guys on the street. One wedges himself in the narrow door to hold it open and arches a large arm over the crowd that pushes forward to cram inside. in time, too, a straggling line up forms across the front of the building to the left of the door, there and in front of the corner of the lot. They aren't there waiting for admittance. They only want to be on the scene. Sometimes it can be a line waiting, too, to make a scene.
Along side Show World, off Amherst, there is a parking lot, too, one obscured from the Avenue by a six-foot untrimmed hedge. Between hed and sidewalk lays a thin strip of unswept grass littered with trash under a rank of young, leafy trees. The lot gathers a hidden crowd that partys unseen but, at times, not unheard from. Some park there and cross to Gitsis' - girls with spectacular legs wearing slave-girl dresses from Italian films of the fifties, my! Guys decked out in fire engine red outfits and gold, lotsa gold and silver, rings and chains. Some wear shades while the sun don't shine.
Some few just come come out around the hedge and gather to stand along the sidewalk or lean over the parks that park along the curb. They only want to watch what's over there or what's arriving for Gitsis'.
"Oh! Gahdam! I like a big woman!"
When I came along from the corner of Goodman, the old man was tossing down his opinion for the backs of the young men lined there along the cars on the curb in front of the old theater.
"Now..." he was croaking, "how do you like that? How do you like that?"
And, when no one answered, he took it right back up himself.
"I..." he told any and all, magnanimously, "like it jus' fine!"
"Jus' fine," he assured nobody in particular and everyone in general. "I like it jus' fine!"
As I passed him by beneath the pie-wedge shape of the darkened marquee, I sensed his slow arousing interest, his arthritic attention to my passage and kept moving.
"Now..." I hear him saying, "...how do you like that?"
And I keep walking to the dark other side beyond the corner of Show World, beyond the lads gathered about the archway to the party in the parking lot who are happily going off on the girls going over to be dazzling standing on line at Gitsis'. I only stop to look back when I'm half way along the green hedge, beneath the low poplar leaves, half way to the corner of Amherst Street.
The old white guy, my sorry doppelganger, stood staring focusing after me afar with his hand down.
Just fine, I assume his hand and shoulder rising again imply.
I'm not so sure I agree.
Should anyone ever ask me, I might recall approaching Gitsis' on the sidewalk across the way one recent three a.m. with cruisers pulled up in the light where the crowd gathers on the sidewalk at the diner's door. They were doubled parked there with overheads flashing, spinning off red and white and blue light. Some plush and party clad girls were fleeing in a gaggle up the street both distressed and angry. One was saying how there had been a slashing, something with a knife.
"Why do some folks godda ruin it for ever'body?" another complained. "Why do some folks godda ruin ever'thing?"
And, now, out there before me, traffic jams once more on Monroe as a car pulls up to converse with the line up at Gitsis' door. Cars trying to turn out of Amherst back up and one, half out on the Avenue, blocks the lanes traveling south. Horns begin to blare and there are profane shouts.
On the corner across Amherst, the Exxon is dark. The station used to be open all night but clerks can't be found, now, who'll work when the crowds gather after hours and hang out blasting their music and parking at the pumps. Mr. V's hot dog cart that sets up behind the bank at Goodman and Monroe no longer serves the public after two in the morning and hasn't since a gun was fired in the air in front of their location along about three one morning.
"Wha's up, my man?" a young passer-by greets me in the shadows. With a sly and snide grin, his advice to me is, "No more snitchin' - hear!"
As three approaches, the cops who have gathered in their cars at the darkened Exxon, cross the Avenue in a line and purposefully replace the crowd that had gathered at the corner of the diner and its parking lot. They begin to send cars on their way and pay visits to the corner of Cornell to direct traffic and to the back of the lot where the gangs gather.
They turn faces sullen and recentful where ever they go, but the scene begins to quiet and the crowds begin to depart, flee back out into the city.
Eventually an officer strolls over to the corner of Amherst and Monroe. To the slender and suddenly sullen young men there, he suggests, quiet but firm,
"The line for eatin's over there. Y're in it or y're movin' - you decide!"
The young men don't cross to the diner and they don't hurry away but they do turn and go.
In maybe a minute more there is only an old white guy left standing on that corner.
He had the gray stubble of a beard, the startled staring eyes and expression of a drunk even if he was affecting a casual attitude. His shirt hung open and his pale gut protruded out over his pants. On his head he wore one of those flat caps that old men wear.
"Now...," he was asking repeatedly, "...how do you like that?"
His voice croaked in a beery baritone and he made a short throwing down gesture of presentation with his one hand each time. He was asking it of anyone and no one. Maybe for him there were ghosts gathered for the show.
A lot of people talk to themselves in the city.
As it happens - it is after two in the morning and a weekend and most of the crowd that really is there passing on the street and not paying the old man attention is neither old nor white.
On Monroe, with all that happens and with all the people who crowd on to the street at that hour, the minutes double after Last Call and, though a good many of the young and largely white crowd from the bars linger on, the street's complexion distinctly darkens and the nature of the fun grows bolder and brasher.
With only an hour left in the night, the whole out-all-night city rushes onto Monroe for that final after-hour.
The new people have had to travel across town in cars and vans and limos and there is never, not even at rush hour, more traffic out there than there is as two-ten becomes a quarter after on a Saturday or Sunday morning. It becomes carnival. Parking lots glut and gather gangs of kids standing about while all the streets become banked with parked steel and chrome and late arriving drivers cruise in vain for a space that ain't.
Competing sound systems, in passing and parked, crank dueling screeds and sermons, speeches on subjects from niggers to bitches in a counterpoint of metronomic rhythms and rhymes so loud that, at times, it drown the traffic rumble and roar. At last a chrome-blue SUV with silver spinning hub-caps sits and gleams in the street light and bests all othes with a bass tone output that alters the molecules of the air and approximates an altered conscious state for even those rare few on the block still sober.
Ball cap boys looking all of thirteen do the drive-by real slow in car seats set so far back that they ride in them slung low. Cap bills cut straight across at their brows and their baby faces bobble just above the car windows' lower frames as they give the scene such stone-eyed stares.
What do the young men think?
Traffic jams and sits whether the light at Goodman is green or not. Foot traffic ventures and reels out into the stalled lanes and socializes with vans and sedans of girls they find to talk to there. On Cornell, alongside Gitsis' parking lot, traffic leaving to the Avenue sits and waits at the corner to turn right into avenue traffic that's not moving and avenue traffic arriving waits to turn onto Cornell where traffic is backed up waiting for a turn into Gitsis'.
Above the scene a chorus line of young men, sitting up on a parked car roof, simulates a shuffling dance and laughter screams.
Time lapse - it takes ten minutes or more for a cream brown pick-up to make its way out of Gitsis' lot and down Cornell to the Avenue, driver and passenger ride above the scene sitting outside the cab in the open windows. Something like twenty minutes on and they do it all in reverse returning for another go at Cornell Street.
The line that forms for booths and stools in Gitsis', across from Show World, forms to the right of the diner's door and the bruisers who handle the crowd are the tallest and widest guys on the street. One wedges himself in the narrow door to hold it open and arches a large arm over the crowd that pushes forward to cram inside. in time, too, a straggling line up forms across the front of the building to the left of the door, there and in front of the corner of the lot. They aren't there waiting for admittance. They only want to be on the scene. Sometimes it can be a line waiting, too, to make a scene.
Along side Show World, off Amherst, there is a parking lot, too, one obscured from the Avenue by a six-foot untrimmed hedge. Between hed and sidewalk lays a thin strip of unswept grass littered with trash under a rank of young, leafy trees. The lot gathers a hidden crowd that partys unseen but, at times, not unheard from. Some park there and cross to Gitsis' - girls with spectacular legs wearing slave-girl dresses from Italian films of the fifties, my! Guys decked out in fire engine red outfits and gold, lotsa gold and silver, rings and chains. Some wear shades while the sun don't shine.
Some few just come come out around the hedge and gather to stand along the sidewalk or lean over the parks that park along the curb. They only want to watch what's over there or what's arriving for Gitsis'.
"Oh! Gahdam! I like a big woman!"
When I came along from the corner of Goodman, the old man was tossing down his opinion for the backs of the young men lined there along the cars on the curb in front of the old theater.
"Now..." he was croaking, "how do you like that? How do you like that?"
And, when no one answered, he took it right back up himself.
"I..." he told any and all, magnanimously, "like it jus' fine!"
"Jus' fine," he assured nobody in particular and everyone in general. "I like it jus' fine!"
As I passed him by beneath the pie-wedge shape of the darkened marquee, I sensed his slow arousing interest, his arthritic attention to my passage and kept moving.
"Now..." I hear him saying, "...how do you like that?"
And I keep walking to the dark other side beyond the corner of Show World, beyond the lads gathered about the archway to the party in the parking lot who are happily going off on the girls going over to be dazzling standing on line at Gitsis'. I only stop to look back when I'm half way along the green hedge, beneath the low poplar leaves, half way to the corner of Amherst Street.
The old white guy, my sorry doppelganger, stood staring focusing after me afar with his hand down.
Just fine, I assume his hand and shoulder rising again imply.
I'm not so sure I agree.
Should anyone ever ask me, I might recall approaching Gitsis' on the sidewalk across the way one recent three a.m. with cruisers pulled up in the light where the crowd gathers on the sidewalk at the diner's door. They were doubled parked there with overheads flashing, spinning off red and white and blue light. Some plush and party clad girls were fleeing in a gaggle up the street both distressed and angry. One was saying how there had been a slashing, something with a knife.
"Why do some folks godda ruin it for ever'body?" another complained. "Why do some folks godda ruin ever'thing?"
And, now, out there before me, traffic jams once more on Monroe as a car pulls up to converse with the line up at Gitsis' door. Cars trying to turn out of Amherst back up and one, half out on the Avenue, blocks the lanes traveling south. Horns begin to blare and there are profane shouts.
On the corner across Amherst, the Exxon is dark. The station used to be open all night but clerks can't be found, now, who'll work when the crowds gather after hours and hang out blasting their music and parking at the pumps. Mr. V's hot dog cart that sets up behind the bank at Goodman and Monroe no longer serves the public after two in the morning and hasn't since a gun was fired in the air in front of their location along about three one morning.
"Wha's up, my man?" a young passer-by greets me in the shadows. With a sly and snide grin, his advice to me is, "No more snitchin' - hear!"
As three approaches, the cops who have gathered in their cars at the darkened Exxon, cross the Avenue in a line and purposefully replace the crowd that had gathered at the corner of the diner and its parking lot. They begin to send cars on their way and pay visits to the corner of Cornell to direct traffic and to the back of the lot where the gangs gather.
They turn faces sullen and recentful where ever they go, but the scene begins to quiet and the crowds begin to depart, flee back out into the city.
Eventually an officer strolls over to the corner of Amherst and Monroe. To the slender and suddenly sullen young men there, he suggests, quiet but firm,
"The line for eatin's over there. Y're in it or y're movin' - you decide!"
The young men don't cross to the diner and they don't hurry away but they do turn and go.
In maybe a minute more there is only an old white guy left standing on that corner.
Saturday, June 7, 2008
That's What I Heard.
I heard there was trouble overnight on Goodman - trouble near Goodman and Monroe.
It was nothing too bad; nothing that would rate mention on the news or in the paper, though, maybe - it should be mentioned.
After hours on weekends, as everybody knows, the place most of Rochester goes is Monroe. Everyone's out for Gitsis' and for Mark's Texas Hots, for Country Sweet and for Mr. V's catering cart alongside the back of the Chase Bank.
Everyone comes to eat after the bars close but they come, too, and maybe even more, to be part of the crowd, the show that goes on.
Any party night, the Avenue after two a.m. has an audible pulse from the bass reverb. Monroe's thousand faces wear a grin that shouts with laughter and the street sings with the growl of low-ride and high polish street machines. Its riptorn through from time to time by the passage of gangs of motorcycles.
Man, it gets crowded, too! Traffic jams at Goodman sometimes so that the avenue is more a parking lot that people walk around in and visit from car to car. The Exxon at Amherst would be parking, too, if a cop didn't pull up and sit there like a pit bull in the yard.
And, then, the parking lot at the Chase Bank - that becomes a fairground. Picnics on fenders and impromptu dances that break out; people take rides at times on the hoods of cars departing and arriving.
These hot summer nights, there can be light in the sky before all the restless folk go home from the Avenue on a party night.
But...
I heard, last night -someone brought a gun to a good time. Shots were fired into the air in front of Mr. V's - and, then, that was all the good time there was for the night.
That's what I heard.
June 7, 2008.
It was nothing too bad; nothing that would rate mention on the news or in the paper, though, maybe - it should be mentioned.
After hours on weekends, as everybody knows, the place most of Rochester goes is Monroe. Everyone's out for Gitsis' and for Mark's Texas Hots, for Country Sweet and for Mr. V's catering cart alongside the back of the Chase Bank.
Everyone comes to eat after the bars close but they come, too, and maybe even more, to be part of the crowd, the show that goes on.
Any party night, the Avenue after two a.m. has an audible pulse from the bass reverb. Monroe's thousand faces wear a grin that shouts with laughter and the street sings with the growl of low-ride and high polish street machines. Its riptorn through from time to time by the passage of gangs of motorcycles.
Man, it gets crowded, too! Traffic jams at Goodman sometimes so that the avenue is more a parking lot that people walk around in and visit from car to car. The Exxon at Amherst would be parking, too, if a cop didn't pull up and sit there like a pit bull in the yard.
And, then, the parking lot at the Chase Bank - that becomes a fairground. Picnics on fenders and impromptu dances that break out; people take rides at times on the hoods of cars departing and arriving.
These hot summer nights, there can be light in the sky before all the restless folk go home from the Avenue on a party night.
But...
I heard, last night -someone brought a gun to a good time. Shots were fired into the air in front of Mr. V's - and, then, that was all the good time there was for the night.
That's what I heard.
June 7, 2008.
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