A farewell to Pike Street

From lower Manhattan to Virginia

I recently moved from Manhattan to Charlottesville, Virginia to take a job as associate editor at the Hedgehog Review, which is based here, affiliated with the University of Virginia. That is why I have been less productive on this channel for the past few months, occupied by the process of interviewing for and accepting the job; wrapping up loose ends at America Quarterly, my former employer; saying my goodbyes to friends in town—though I will be back and forth between the cities frequently, visiting my girlfriend—and packing up my apartment in Chinatown.

This apartment, the fourth place I lived in over the course of four and a half years in New York City, sits above an active Buddhist temple in a 120-year-old AIA-listed building that was originally a synagogue. The history of the neighborhood—first Jewish, then Chinese, now gentrifying—finds a capsule summary in the building, still inhabited mostly by Cantonese speakers but with a growing cohort of transplants like me.

My apartment was numbered as the third floor, but as my chagrined friends who helped me move in a year ago quickly discovered, it was really more like the fourth of fifth floor, because the numbering started, European-style, above a ground floor, high-ceilinged, where the temple held its services. I shared the place with my roommate, an amiable Gen X trust-fund artist type from New England who had been there for fifteen years and had close ties to the pre-Dimes Square era early gentrifier cohort in Fujianese Chinatown: he did the design for the menus at Forget Me Not. He lived upstairs in a small studio with a skylight and no window; I lived downstairs, in a narrow shotgun-type corridor divided by a strange, plexiglas and wood-frame partition (curtains added for privacy) into a kitchen and a bedroom, this latter with a towering, 20-foot ceiling and what my roommate called the “cathedral window” (could it be called that if it was a synagogue?). When my Orthodox Jewish-raised friend came by for a drink one evening he told me that these twin ten-foot-tall tombstone-shaped windows represented the tablets of Moses.

“You’re living inside the commandments!” he said, snapping photos.

I told him I hoped that I was following whichever two these were meant to represent.

***

The whole time I lived in New York I always seemed to end up living in places where I had previously sworn I would never live. When I first arrived, during the tail end of the pandemic lockdown, I lived in Manhattan, and on an occasion visiting outer Williamsburg found it impossibly far removed and pitied those who lived at such Siberian distances from the center of things. My next apartment was, of course, down the street from the very block that occasioned that reflection.

The part of lower Manhattan where my final apartment was located—at the intersection of Chinatown, the Lower East Side, and what is called Two Bridges—is a bit of a no-man’s-land. On the other side of Pike Street was Chinatown proper: fish and vegetable markets, kiosks selling $5 packs of contraband Chinese cigarettes out of shoeboxes. Two blocks away was Dimes Square, becoming more West Village-ified by the day. But what was this, exactly?

When I lived downtown previously and was getting priced out of my apartment (the landlord doubled the rent after the pandemic lockdowns ended and two Australian girls took over our place) friends told me to try Two Bridges and I said no way, thinking of this exact couple blocks—sterile hotels, the bouleversement of the bridges and their clattering elevated trains, the projects further down, a neighborhood whose character derived exclusively from the screeching contrast between disparate and incompatible things. But that’s where I ended up living, years later. And just like before, I not only made my peace with it, I liked it very much.

There aren’t many businesses on Pike Street, which is the continuation of Allen Street as it runs down toward the East River. It’s a wide street of the sort that might be called a boulevard in a European city. There’s even a paved median that in Europe would probably have nice trees planted on it and so on. And in fact they have planted trees and placed benches and crafted bike lanes on other parts of Allen and Pike, though that hasn’t removed its grittiness. But on the stretch near my place on Pike Street, it was just an open field of desolate, cracked and comically uneven concrete that looked like a lesson in plate tectonics. Riding a Citi bike down that stretch was reminiscent of some kind of dystopian BMX course, the bike flung into the air by foot-tall gaps between an uplifted slab and the subducted adjacent one. In places the city had filled in large mounds of black asphalt to try to transform the broken landscape into a kind of smoother roller-coaster ride. In other places it had not. Sometimes Chinese people stopped outside on the shattered pavement to pray in front of the temple. Otherwise it was empty out there, except for the pigeons, on that Champs-Élysées of the Lower East Side.

And it was nice. It felt like the end of the world down there, my girlfriend would say, smoking a cigarette on the rooftop of the temple with the pigeons, watching the trains run across the Manhattan Bridge. A few blocks down was the East River and you could sit in metal chairs bolted to the ground by the river and smoke a cigarette and watch the river flow in or out. The cold lights of Brooklyn in the winter night, the lights of the bridges. In the summer during the day the jetskis and the ferries and the play of the sun on the waters of the bay further out. Up on Pike Street there wasn’t much foot traffic, just trucks headed down to FDR Drive or up from FDR Drive and the guys who ran the temple packing great mounds of fake plastic flowers into U-Hauls or hauling great mounds of fake plastic flowers out of U-Hauls and sometimes the groups of art people who spilled onto the sidewalk from the art galleries that were springing up all around here like the first tendrils of kudzu vine. Testing the ground for the big money. Like parasitic wasps, the art gallery right next door had left up the sign of the bus company that it had replaced, just like how Kiki’s restaurant had left up the sign of the Chinese printing company it had replaced.

But everything is sort of like that here, unconsciously, in the way that the city is just a stage that different groups come in to put on different plays for a while, until they’re over, each set of players repurposing parts of the set left behind by the last group or just leaving them there, more out of laziness than a desire for preservation. The effort it takes to stake your claim here exhausts the capacity to do much else and requires the destruction of any aesthetic pickiness. Look at this building, a Buddhist temple inside an old synagogue. A ten-foot statue of the Buddha peeking over the stone balustrade of this old grey-green Rundbogenstil synagogue. Even since I moved in a year ago another couple apartments have gone over to girls who dress in black tatters and wear long narrow yellow sunglasses. My roommate told me the guy in the adjacent apartment killed himself there years ago and the fire department had to break down the door to find his body, that his ghost visited this apartment once and never again. Romantics might like to imagine there’s something cumulative there, something learned from each arriving group out of the inheritance that the last group gave to them, but there’s not.

There are pretty moments. In Seward Park, where Chinese locals and scene transplants circulate freely, there is a running locals-versus-transplants ping-pong game where tensions between these objectively opposed social forces can be alleviated through simulated combat.

I made a friend of the Chinese guy next door, who spoke no English at all. Mandarin-speaking friends of mine had no luck understanding him either, nor even a friend of mine who speaks Cantonese—maybe he speaks Toisanese, she said, or some other dialect. He seemed to think I was funny, though, and always seemed to catch me doing something he found amusing—carrying too many things, wearing something unusual, dripping after being soaked by a sudden rainstorm, etc. He was a little older than middle-age, with thin, high cheekbones, a little gaunt, with something of the dandy about him. He seemed to live alone, though he was close with the elderly Chinese couple who lived next door, maybe a son or relative.

One time I ran into him on the street and he made a little joke. I was eating noodles outside at the grimy little table outside a lunch buffet-type place of a sort you can find around Chinatown and I saw my friend the dandy coming down the street. I waved to him and he smiled in the almost Vaudeville, over-the-top way he always smiled at me. Just as he did so a rather large man crossed the sidewalk and got into his car, which sank several inches as he did so. Chinatown residents are generally pretty thin, so this guy stood out. As he crossed the sidewalk, my friend—standing behind the back of the large man, who was facing me—grinned and pointed at him, then making a gesture by putting his hands at his sides and then grimacing as he moved them outwards, mimicking the man’s bulk.

This placed me in a somewhat awkward position, not wanting to laugh at what seemed to me a somewhat cruel joke—especially not in direct view of its target—but not wanting to ignore it, coming from this friend of mine from across the hall. Cruel might have been putting it strongly, or too much through the prism of the social etiquette of weight in the American middle-class mainstream: really this man was simply an extreme outlier in this neighborhood and my friend was pointing this out to me in the only language we could both understand. I compromised by giving him a sort of gesture of mock grudging concession, tipping my head sideways and frowning and raising my eyebrows, as if to say, yes, I suppose.

Sometimes when I’d be typing my address into Uber I’d write “Puke Street” by accident and then be glad I didn’t live there.

When I was moving out my friend across the hall saw me hauling boxes into the U-Haul and asked, via gestures, whether I was leaving. I told him yes, I was. He waved goodbye with a glint in his eye, and bowed. Behind the mannered exaggeration he seemed genuinely sad. He gave me a hug and a water bottle for the road.

I’d always considered it a better homage to an utterly unromantic city not to try to romanticize it, to treat leaving it with the same ruthless pragmatism that it taught me to treat living in it. But I’ll tell you the truth: I was choked up walking down East Broadway to get one last pack of contraband cigarettes for the road, I was choked up smoking one outside my empty apartment, and I was choked up all the way to the Holland Tunnel which swallowed me up and spat me out onto the green wilderness of the American mainland.