![]() ![]() In the fifties, Jackson Pollock was tearing the door off the men’s room in the Cedar Bar on University Place (“You couldn’t see into it anyway,” wrote the poet Frank O’ Hara, “and besides there was then a sense of genius”). In the forties, Arshile Gorky and Phillip Pavia were drinking five-cent coffees at the Waldorf Cafeteria on Sixth Avenue off 8th Street. In the nineties, it will be Williamsburg.”įor the past 50 years, the shifting neighborhoods of lower Manhattan have always been home to a Bohemia of one sort or another. “In the seventies, it was Soho,” he says. With their Road Warrior jackboots and earrings in every pierceable orifice, they’re what de Vyse dubs “Williamsburg cowboys.” Along a row of tidy three-story red, brown, pink, and tan brick houses, the man and woman are toting a bicycle wheel and other detritus - no doubt taking it all home so they can weld it into a sculpture. Later, through the window, de Vyse points out a couple strolling in the angular light that illuminates Berry Street. I know a high-school kid who wants to have his graduation party there,” he explains. “People started dancing on the tables, and I got married to my girlfriend.”Īfter Airaldi blows back out, an older man with janitors’ keys dangling from his belt asks de Vyse for the phone number of “that guy who runs Refrigerator. “You should’ve stayed,” Airaldi tells de Vyse, referring to a dinner party he threw the week before. They’re props meant for the Game Room, his latest club - featuring roulette tables, chess, and board games every Saturday night in a funky cocktail lounge with mellow music on North 8th Street. A pair of translucent dice keeps falling from his pockets. His hair is disheveled, almost burned-looking. He’s wearing a green sport jacket, no shirt, and a speckled scarf tied around his neck. In blows Mariano Airaldi, a 25-year-old Argentine who was recently one of the hosts at Keep Refrigerated, a Berlin-style underground club where the temperatures hovered around freezing. He’s a member of the Northside Merchants Association and hopes to serve on Community Board 1. ![]() After all, he’s constantly up and down the streets soliciting advertising for Waterfront Week, the newspaper he publishes for artists and businessmen alike. De Vyse is wearing a pillbox hat, an unbuttoned gray work shirt, a green Saint Patrick’s Day blouse, black tights, a Navy pea coat, and dull lipstick. Medea de Vyse, 30, a cross-dressing performance artist, is quietly sipping a Bloody Mary at a corner table in front of one of the bar’s tall stained-glass windows. A few gray-haired electricians argue in a corner. Two swaggering young guys in stonewashed jeans stretch their legs across a couple of stools while singing along to Sinatra’s “New York, New York” on the jukebox. Beneath American flags crisscrossed over an intricately carved oak bar, a woman bartender keeps one eye on a soap opera playing on the overhead TV as she advises an Eastern European couple just in from Florida about where to find a good apartment. It’s a late afternoon in March at Teddy’s, a typical workingman’s tavern in the Polish section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. ![]()
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