Locals who wanted non-bar entertainment left the area but there was one place that was in easy walking distance. Trinity church down by Wall Street had a movie program. Once a week in the basement they would show old movies free of charge and even hand out cups of coffee. They had good 16mm prints of movies from the 30's and 40's, rare classics like 'A Letter to Three Wives', and it was my introduction to many of them, especially the flamboyant brilliance of Preston Sturges. For weeks they ran his repertoire of fast-paced, literate comedies to an odd assortment of locals, nuns, bag ladies and street people perched on metal folding chairs.

Movies were made in the area then as now. Where Yaffa's is now, at the corner of
Harrison and Greenwich, was an old market bar called Scotts that would serve lunch around three in the morning. Some time in nineteen seventy – seventy-one they started to make a film there staring Sophia Loren. It is called Mortadella and I'm sure she would love to forget it, but occasionally it turns up on the late show and you can catch glimpses of what the old neighborhood was like. It was wonderful to see the glamorous young Sophia Loren there on Greenwich Street, of course, but in some ways watching Clare Silber was better. Clare was a southern gentlewoman with a melody all her own. Every day she would set up her deck chair in the middle of the road and settle in for the day's filming. In that colony of youth Clare was the exception, to us she looked quite old but she was probably only in her forties. She lives in a small village in France now.

In her unique way Clare was a scavenger and a collector of all things, the detritus of city life. She would scour the neighborhood for anything useable and to her almost anything was … old string, crates, a broken typewriter, she even had boxes of old toast. Her loft on Greenwich Street was stuffed with street finds, and not entirely restricted to the street. She was known to have crawled between rooftops on wooden planks to enter abandoned buildings. She would 'retrieve' all kinds of old office furniture which she would sell at the uptown flea markets.

Clare was not alone, streets finds were a way of life then. Almost any loft you went intowas furnished from the sidewalk. Beautiful oak desks, chairs and files cabinets were unceremoniously thrown out. My own desk, pulled in from the street, was a museum in itself; it's drawers still held aged calendars, old broken fountain pens and a couple of stock and silver certificates from the pre-twenty-nine crash. One of the curious things about many of the businesses that failed was how they just walked out the door and left everything behind. The City itself was the most profligate chucker - outer; large dumpsters outside different agencies and departments would be filled with old chairs or desks that now sell for hundreds in specialty stores. The appearance of a dumpster on the street made the heart beat quicken. A good find was telegraphed almost by osmosis and within minutes half the neighborhood would be in the dumpster with you.

Cheese and cheese boxes were local treasure too. By law all cheese had to be thrown out on its expiration date, but that doesn't mean it's gone bad. Frequently the cheese companies in the area would leave stacks of cheese wheels out on the sidewalks on theirexpiration day. Bries and Camebert, St. Andre and Mascarpone. They were gone in a blink and for days after there were invitations to cheese and wine. The best boxes were from some Scandinavian cheese company I've forgotten the name of now, but they were beautifully made of a fine grade of plywood. Today they would be the perfect size for storing CD's and about two feet in length. A stack of them nailed together gave you elegant and sturdy kitchen shelves, They were so popular for paints, tools, toys, you nameit, that they became the modular unit of many a loft.

The abandoned piers along the Hudson were another great resource. One pier used by a failed marble importer was strewn with large slabs that people with strong friends took for tabletops. Those tables were wonderful in summer—the coolest thing in the loft. Inwinter, though, they held the cold and a meal would lose its heat in seconds. Personally Ipreferred a slate top that came out of a disused Electrician's Local, where it had been used as a blackboard. Unfortunately it too would stay cool, and the cold was bad enough in those drafty lofts. My first winter there I had no heat to speak of and survived by wearing an electric blanket with a very long extension cord. The wind coming off the Hudson can be brutal at times, and the windows in those old lofts chattered incessantly. When white caps stood up on the river even windows covered with plastic were useless against a wind that could reach in and blow out a candle on the table.

Fires fanned by those winds were spectacular. One after another the old piers burned in conflagrations that lit up the river. As flames shot into the night loaded with fiery debris we watched from our roofs waiting to ready to douse the red hot cinders that blew our way. What caused the fires was a mystery. Vagrants was the official version, yet they happened with such calendar regularity that conspiracy theories rattled about for days after each burning. It seemed the area was sinking into ever greater disuse, A lot of places moved or faded out of business: the home-made donut shop on West Broadway, the beautiful old Norman Rockwell Soda Fountain at the corner of Chambers and West

Broadway, the Imported Coffee man on Duane Street. At first the changes were small and it didn't matter. The wind-chilled buildings and homemade plumbing didn't matter. The lack of doctors and schools and groceries were hardly calamities. We had chosen to live there for the large spaces at good rents and inconvenience was part of the deal. The attitude was a mixture of pioneering bravado and a Sixties disdain for middle class values.

My neighbor, artist Poppy Johnson, recalls the hardest part of raising her twins was
bringing home the groceries. To get them all up to the fourth floor she had to run a
nervous relay between landings - grocery bags - child - grocery bags - child - grocery bags. Then start over again with the next flight. The McCamy family on Leonard Street had four kids, and their mother, sculptor Arden Scott, worked for years as a plumber. She would arrive on the job with her bag of tools and four small assistants. The kids seemed to thrive, growing up embracing chaos with a guileless ease. After the workday when the streets were a wide-open playground, free of strangers and only occasional cars, they would indulge their natural instincts for anarchy. One of their favorite games was to take the big discarded fabric boxes get inside, and stay quiet, waiting for a car or pedestrian to come by. Then on cue they would charge about inside the box, giving a fearful start to the unsuspecting adult.

The sign of real change was the sound of the jack-hammers on Greenwich Street. It was not considered a residential area so there was no restriction on when they could pound. And pound they did. Twenty-four hours a day for months on end they hammered shaking everything in the vicinity. Furniture would waddle across the floor, a cup of coffee set on the table would take off like a wind-up toy and ear-plugs were a night and day necessity.

The odd moments of silence, sudden and unexpected, were shocking. For about a year the dirt they dug out for the Independence Plaza foundations grew into mountains on the surrounding lots. The barren soil and rubble that had originally been brought there as landfill was headed for the Hudson as more landfill. In the meantime the peaks and valleys provided great sport for the neighborhood kids and their dogs. Choreographer Joan Jonas used them as a setting for a performance. The audience stood on sculptor Richard Serra's roof looking down as the performers moved between the mounds. As they appeared and disappeared the dancers clapped pieces of wood together and the time delay between seeing the strike and hearing the sound was the poetry at the heart of the work – waiting for the inevitable.

Soon we began to hear another sound of the inevitable: “Tribeca.” Where's that? we asked one another. It was a given, living in the neighborhood, that you would have to explain to every cab driver where the area was, and that it was okay to go below Canal street after dark. The long anticipated change seemed complete the day I got into a cab at midtown and told the driver Greenwich and Duane. After a pause he turned to me and grinned -

Independence Plaza, right?

This memoir of the early days in Tribeca, in the shadows of the World Trade Center Towers was originally published in the Tribeca Trib September 2000.

The first time I saw the Washington Market the Vietnam war was still escalating, Hippies were the new counter-culture and John Vliet Lindsay was the debonair mayor of New York, as elegant as his own middle name. A friend and I had taken the afternoon to stroll south from Greenwich Village through the emptying bays of the old market. Their day winding down, the workers were closing shutters, stacking the baskets and pallets on the loading docks and corralling fugitive vegetables that rolled about on the cobblestones. Fading hand-painted signs weathered on every building, claims for fruit and vegetables, butter and cheese. Even in closing the busy market was so distracting we were surprised when our way was blocked by a blue construction fence that seemed to go on for ever. Circling it we stopped frequently to peer through those diamond shaped cutouts for curious and found ourselves gaping at the most enormous hole we'd ever seen. It looked like open-faced mining or a gold dig so vast was the size of the cavity. The hardhats working the site appeared minute at the bottom of the pit, their machinery too, the bulldozers and backhoes seemed little bigger than toys. Running across the huge chasm was a pipe propped up on wooden staging. My friend and I wondered whether it was sewage or steam lines, so when a hardhat came out of the gate we asked him. Oh, that? He looked back at the pipe. That's the Seventh Avenue subway. The hole, he told us, was for the foundations of the World Trade Center.

I moved to Greenwich Street just as they were opening the Twin Towers. In the meantime much of the Washington Market had been moved up to Hunt's Point in the Bronx. Large stretches of urban renewal had razed the market leaving a ghost town of vacant lofts, wind blown shutters and empty brick strewn lots. There was a sprinkling of stragglers left on the fringes, mostly egg and cheese men. Men in long white aprons loading and unloading trucks through the early morning hours until noon. After that the streets were deserted and eerily quiet. On a warm day you could hear the whir of traffic on the West Side Highway yet it remained unobtrusive and as distant as the great Colgate clock overlooking the river. Few cars ever came through after the workday and less people. Weeds prospered along the sidewalks and the bums built shanties on the open lots and huddled around their campfires. Ironic that the heart of a vibrant city should be so desolate, that in the shadow of the Trade Towers, the new emblem of power and success the area lay abandoned and forgotten.

When I moved in I was the only person in my building. Feta cheese and olives were stored on every other floor in rows of dank barrels that sat in a chilled gloom and dripped. At night the only sound was of those heavy metal shutters creaking and banging in the wind. The sense of isolation was extraordinary. Then gradually, in the evenings, I began to notice a lighted window here and there, never more than two or three on a block. Only a handful of us were living there then, and everyone I met was young, and in the arts: painters, sculptors, dancers and musicians. Long haired young men and women, almost interchangeable in our blue jeans and work boots – the dress code of the time. Who else would live there? No supermarket, no laundry, no bank, no cabs, no dry cleaner, no restaurants - the lack of authority, the almost outlaw nature of the place was very appealing to our youth.

One of the first neighborhood people I met was Joe DiGiorgio, sitting on the stoop of his apartment building. His fight with City Hall had postponed its demolition and the building stood alone in a wasteland of rubble. It was an old style New York railroad apartment building of deep red brick with a heavy molded front door and narrow passageways like those still standing in Little Italy. From his kitchen Joe had an unobstructed view of the Colgate clock across the river, which at the time sat up higher atop the old Colgate building, and it pleased Joe to keep the clock running on time. He had the phone number of the clock man, and he'd call him as soon as he noticed the time was incorrect. In a year or so Joe lost his fight and the City tore down the building.

For groceries our one stop source was the only source - Morgan's Grocery at the corner of Reade and Hudson. Much smaller than it is now it was made smaller still by the size of the owners. The Morgans were the local 'Bonanza' Cartwrights. Earl senior and his four strapping sons, each one of them as big as 'Hoss' and a poster boy for a high protein diet. They sold a few vegetables, a lot of meat and frozen foods. But like other vendors in the neighborhood Morgan's catered to the city employees, the office people and the telephone workers, it hadn't registered yet that anyone was living in the area.

The best breakfast deal was the Towers Cafeteria where the Odeon is now at Thomas and West Broadway. The name was a natural – if you stood at the entrance the Trade Towers loomed above the skyline casting long shadows over the neighborhood like a huge sundial. Any meal at Towers Cafeteria always began with an old department store 'ding' of a bell as the yellow price ticket shot out of the dispenser at the doorway. From there you joined the people from Western Union or Department of Motor Vehicles on line for the row of steam tables where you loaded your tray with breakfast, oatmeal, eggs, bacon, coffee - whatever. As each thing went on to your tray your ticket was punched according to its price. The place was big but for the locals the best seats were over by Joan and Artie, the owners, where you could get a free read of the newspapers. Artie, always sharp in a fresh pressed shirt and bowtie, kept the books. Joan, the lively talkative one, sat at the till toting tickets, taking the cash, and keeping gleeful tabs on the neighborhood gossip.
"Did you see who was in here with Sam for breakfast? The tall blonde, uh huh. She's obviously not with Pete anymore. Unless, of course ….."
If you were dating someone new it was best to eat breakfast at the diner for a while.

The diner - still there at Varick and Leonard - was a less congenial breakfast. The countermen weren't used to a bunch of long-haired kids hanging around reading the New York Times taking up the few seats that they had. Open 24 hours the diner was used to the market trade, the truckers and the night shifts. With most of that traffic fading or gone the place took a Hopperesque bleakness into the night with one or two coffee drinkers blowing smoke across the counter, stubbing out cigarettes in the remains of their goulash. The diner itself was beautiful, a silver bullet structure with old wooden booths and pressed metal trim, a real classic of its kind. In time it tried to adjust to the changing neighborhood and some one talked them into a facelift. Like a lot of things it was better before they fixed it.

Across the triangle, on the other side of the Franklin Street station was a local entertainment spot that locals didn't go to. Teddy's was a nightclub, a nightclub in the middle of nowhere. Rumors persisted that it was a Mafia joint, a gangster hangout, and they were probably true. I was passing there late one night when a tipsy patron was leading his party along the red carpet to the limousine. He stumbled a little, righting himself against the awning, but not before his gun went skittering across the pavement. I didn't see anything, of course, head down, I kept on walking.

There were plenty of old market bars scattered throughout the neighborhood, workmen’s bars with sawdust on the floor and full of smoke. The police favored one, the truckers another, the firefighters yet another. Some had an Italian flavor but most were very Irish. McGovern’s, across from Morgan’s Deli, kept its flavor the longest as others were transformed in the evolution of the neighborhood. Mickey’s, at the corner of Greenwich and Warren, now demolished, was apparently bought by John Belushi in the mid-seventies as a place to hang out. Barnabus Rex, a tiny bar on Duane Street near West Broadway, was the draw for the local artists. It was a place to play pool, dance and get crazy, as opposed to McGovern’s which was always about serious drinking. Barnabus Rex was the place to go if you’d had a hard day, McGovern’s was the place if you were having a hard life. When Barnabus closed, Puffy’s, still at Harrison and Hudson, took up the mantle of most fun neighborhood bar.