Rosenworld

Life is Cheap on Canal Street

Can one mourn the loss of an ordinary hardware store? One can. The other day I went over to C. K. & L. Hardware on Canal Street for some electrical tape and was stunned to see it had turned into yet another Fake Prada Pashmina Name-Buckle Sunglass Watch hovel. C.K. and L had been in business since 1952. I do not want a jade elephant, or rhinestone flip-flops. Give me a glue gun. Give me spackle!

I live in a trendy new neighborhood. I have given it a trendy new name. TuCan. What does it mean? Too Close to Canal Street. Canal Street used to be a rank, fetid canal which was paved over in the nineteenth century because of the many rats and mosquitoes which plagued the area, causing a threat to the public health. The rats and mosquitoes that plague the area now are entirely different. Canal Street retains a unique, putrid aroma as well as its colorful native fauna. This is particularly true in summer, when local restaurants release their pungent efflvium onto the bustling, impassable sidewalks of my exotic kingdom, where thousands of desperate street vendors, hawk worthless trinkets to an indescriminate public. I must walk in the actual street, or “highway.”

Perhaps that same aroma thrilled Peter Stuyvesant as he wended his way to the Tombs for a public lynching, as my neighborhood has been a place of criminal punishment and correction since the 1700’s. It’s comforting to know that the prison next door isn’t maximum security or anything; it’s just a temporary home for the dregs of our urban society, a brief stopover on the way to Riker’s.

Though my windows are over Canal Street, my street is named “Lispenard.” Have you heard of it? Neither has any cab driver in New York City. Every day, I attempt to direct them to it. They invariably take offense and say “just tell me the address.” A hostile silence always follows my reply, and a gender war generally ensues. Monsieur Lispenard was an eighteenth century New York landowner, and a Hugenot, which is no excuse for mail addressed to Liz Bernard Street, Lithpen Arch Street, and Lesbianard Street.

A whiff of duck feet boiling in ancient lard blends seamlessly with rotten bok choy, merging with noxious exhaust fumes. With the Holland Tunnel at one end, and the Manhattan Bridge at the other, Canal Street offers not only an unparalleled assortment of five dollar Rolexes, really old perfume, bootleg Usher CD’s, and illegal Prada bags, but a unique opportunity to be mowed down in one’s prime by an unliscensed crackhead speeding a twenty-one ton eighteen wheeler from Miami to Maine. Traffic lights are not even a suggestion in this wild and carefree environment. If one is foolhardy enough to attempt a crossing, you’ll find yourself in Soho, a suburbanite Hell if ever there was one.

On the weekends, countless footsore families throng the sidewalks of my bustling milieu, splurging on fast food and blowing their last paychecks on blinking, beeping, digital trinkets that their clever offspring generally break before they hit the Tunnel. These gewgaws are made by tiny infants slaving in sweltering hovels somewhere in China, who earn twelve cents a year for their trouble. If these poor children only came to TuCan, to work in the nearby sweatshops, they could earn up to ten cents more! I noticed a man selling brand new sweaters for one dollar. One dollar! Who, I wonder, is making these sweaters? Certainly, there are phenomenal bargains to be had in my Kingdom. These people are hungry for life. That is why they like to festoon Canal Street with the greasy leftovers of their overpackaged repasts. These they freely distributed from the windows of their gridlocked vehicles, while their powerful mobile sound systems regale us with competing hip-hop salsa, and r&b. Crank up that Megabass! It’s a fight to the finish as each pulsating speaker strives to assert its owner’s superior musical taste. Apparently, if my Justin Timberlake wipes out your Christina Aguilera, that’s definitive proof of my sexual prowess. This fun-loving festival of refuse, wailing, honking and shouting lasts from Friday afternoon until Monday morning, when the road rage and deadly exhaust emissions of bewildered foreign tourists and families of angry shoppers is replaced by the road rage and deadly exhaust emissions of angry interstate truckers and angry commuting wage slaves.

When I moved here in ’77, it was famous for hardware, which is notoriously silent, but Canal Street is now both the car alarm and store alarm capital of the world. Here every conceivable, hyper-deafening variation of shreik, scream, beep, ring, screech, gong and roar is installed and doggedly tested. The five-alarm combination blast is le specialité de la quartiér. Along with this, we have frequent robberies of these hi-tech emporiums, with their eardrum-puncturing store alarms. An impressive demonstration of state-of-the-art noisemaking is performed on a nightly basis. I used to wonder, “why is their stuff worth more than my peace of mind?” and call the first precinct, but that was before I knew better. In December of ’96, I experienced a rare period of silence, during a freak snowstorm. I will never forget that magical seven minutes.

My trendy new neighborhood offers many sensual diversions. The aroma of skewered and burned meat of questionable provenance is offset by the sickly sweet incense and revolting oils hawked on every corner. In the morning I awake to enjoy a nautical whiff from “Sea World”; it’s just like the one in Orlando, except for the frying in recycled animal fat. As if that’s not enough, I can sit in my living room and be serenaded by a man shouting “onedollaonedollaonedollaonedolla”, with weekend performances round the clock. Perhaps he is selling mink coats! If I get hungry, I might order a coupla slices from “Pizza Plus Plus”. What’s the extra “plus” for? I don’t know, but I’m glad it’s there, and I’m lucky if I can get it. TuCan is the only neighborhood in New York with no deli, no Korean grocery and no supermarket. No grocery store whatsoever. The Food Emporium is thirteen blocks away, in “Tribeca.” If I get a bizarre hankering for, say, shrimp congee, pork buns, or blood soup, hey, no problem! If I get a bizarre hankering for milk, however, I can hike up to Soho to Gourmet Garage or Bean and Beluga, and pay double for the privelege. When they close at nine, I’m stranded. I’ve begged Pizza Plus Plus to stock two percent milk, and orange juice, but the closest they get is Fanta. Perhaps I could learn to like it on corn flakes. About six months ago an enormous store renovation project on Broadway raised my hopes for a Gristede’s or a d’Agostino, but no, it was a Duane Reade. I was thrilled, because they carried not only Fanta but Slim Fast. Almost food. Now even the Duane Reade has gone out of business.

Every other Manhattan neighborhood is getting posher and prettier. Not mine! I beg for gentrification. I heard Starbucks is coming to Canal Street and I am thrilled. Thrilled!

June 23, 1983 is a day I’ll never forget; the day I learned the truth about TuCan. It was also my wedding day, and we were very late getting to the U.N. chapel. I was dressing, looking for something blue. It turned out in the end to be my bra straps, both of which are plainly visible in the wedding pictures. The doorbell rang unexpectedly. The groom inquired the caller’s name. “I’m from the E.P.A.”, said an official voice, and I rushed to the buzzer. A mere seventeen months into my initial inquiry, the city had seen fit to investigate the horrible smell.

It came from somewhere on Canal Street, but where? A sickly-sweet mixture of rotten meat, rancid oil and bad human hygeine might begin to describe it; it hadn’t been there, and then one day it was there. I let the inspector in over the protests of my anxious future ex and my hysterical maid of honor. “Let them all wait!” I cried, “Don’t you see this is the chance of a lifetime?” I knew that this special moment might never come again. The inspector placed mysterious gadgets in the windows, scribbled on a pad, and glanced up at me in my wedding dress. “Tell me!” I begged. “Tell me the truth!”

I will forever be haunted by the few well-chosen words with which he summed up the situation. “Nuthin’ I can do, ma’am, dis just ain’t a residential neighborhood.”