Romeo Had Juliette— Lou Reed
#365Songs: September 9th
One, two, three, four
Caught between the twisted stars
The plotted lines, the faulty map
That brought Columbus to New York
Betwixt, between the east and west
I’m not the sort of guy who references ad campaigns — even though I’ve spent a bit too much time in and around marketing departments — but there’s one in particular that I think about every time I’m in New York City.
In 2013, the New Museum’s featured exhibit “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” celebrated the 20-year gap by turning 5,000 pay phones into time capsules. All you had to do was pick up a phone, dial 1–855-FOR-1993, and a famous — or infamous — local personality from that era painted the picture of that block during a far grittier era. We’re talking drug dealers, hookers, punk rockers, club kids, and of course the universally-despised gentrifier (the worst of the bunch).
He calls on her wearing a leather vest
The earth squeals and shudders to a halt
A diamond crucifix in his ear is used to help ward off the fear
That he has left his soul in someone’s rented car
Inside his pants he hides a mop
To clean the mess that he has dropped
I came to New York a lot during the mid ’90s. A few of my college friends were NYC street rats who knew their way around, knew where to find the best trouble. We bought nickel bags in Washington Square Park, got dosed at the infamous Limelight, walked the streets with 40-ounce bottles of Crazy Horse and Olde English wrapped in paper bags. A kid from Ohio, the city cracked me open: one part fear, another part guilt, and a whole lot of awe. Trouble was everywhere, in dark parks and well-lit streets. The only New York I knew was Lou Reed’s New York: gritty and dangerous, but diverse and fucking interesting. I logged every detail from every direction, my writer brain alive with an infinite supply of stories.
In an interview with the WashPost, exhibit curator Gary Carrion-Murayari said, “There was a presence of a kind of downtown underground scene which you really don’t experience in New York anymore.”
And Juliette wanted Romeo
And Romeo wanted Juliette
And Juliette wanted Romeo
Romeo Rodriguez squares his shoulders and curses Jesus
Runs a comb through his black pony-tail
He’s thinking of his lonely room
The sink that by his bed gives off a stink
Then smells her perfume in his eyes
And her voice was like a bell
Outside the streets were steaming
The crack dealers were dreaming
Of using someone that just scored
Prior to his Four Seasons Landscaping rebrand, Rudy Guiliani promoted himself as the guy who cleaned up the city and lowered crime, which roughly translates to the Disneyfication of Manhattan: paving the way for affluent, predominantly white families to not just usher their suburban families safely up and down town, but also to displace everyone who made the city interesting.
I’ve come back to the city a lot over the past decade, and each time I’ve walked miles a day, up and down Manhattan, often through those neighborhoods I once knew not just for the grit and energy, but for the art and culture. I felt perpetual disappointment, ill at ease over how disinteresting it’d become, wondering what happened to the New York that once captivated me.
I came back in 2021, 2022, and then again in 2023, each time feeling like the city hadn’t quite recovered from the pandemic: the streets were sleepier, quieter, eerie almost its sudden late night San Francisco-y-ness, as if all the alarms across town were set for a sunrise yoga class.
Into the life of lithesome Juliette Bel
And Romeo wanted Juliette
“I betcha I can hit that light”
“With my one good arm behind my back”
Says little Joey Diaz
Brother give me another tote
Those downtown hoods are no damn good
Those Italians need a lesson to be taught
This cop who died in Harlem, you think they’d get the warnin’
I was dancing when I saw his brains ran out on the street
The media alongside non-urban Americans paint cities in our modern moment as crime-ridden death traps, where rogue waves of gangs rob every store and every tourist while tent cities block up every street. San Francisco is a war zone, they say. New York City’s a murderer’s playground, they say. As if America’s suburbs and rural towns are thriving with contentment and innovation, as if art and culture and innovation is happening in the quiet, unheard of parts of the country. My Cleveland family will tell me, a city dweller, how dangerous it is to live where I live, how dystopic (my word, not theirs) these liberal hellscapes have become.
I’ll take Manhattan in a garbage bag
With Latin written on it that says
“It’s hard to give a shit these days”
Manhattan’s sinking like a rock
Into the filthy Hudson, what a shock!
They wrote a book about it
They said it was like ancient Rome
The first Starbucks opened in New York City in 1994, and it didn’t take long for the rest to follow. One storied neighborhood at time, uprooting artists and transforming integrated blocks into homogenous suburbs. As the brilliant Sarah Schulman wrote in her book, The Gentrification of the Mind, “Gentrified thinking is like the bourgeois version of Christian fundamentalism, a huge, unconscious conspiracy of homogenous patterns with no awareness about its own freakishness. The gentrification mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free.”
It took a few decades to gentrify, tech-ify, suburban-ify our cities’ most storied neighborhoods, the blocks where art and culture and diversity collided to shape culture — the same culture those same middle of America families embrace years later, a beat too late.
Fortunately, the pandemic sent a lot of them fleeing to their McMansions and gated suburban communities. Back to where they belong. I arrived at my Lower East Side hotel late last night, and the streets were electric in a way I haven’t seen since the ’90s, that clash of culture alive and well. It felt a bit like Lou Reed’s neighborhood again: the fashion, the music, the street dancing, as if something fresh and funky and new — maybe even slightly dangerous — is about to happen at any moment in every direction. The way New York City was always meant to be.
The perfume burned his eyes
Holding tightly to her thighs
And something flickered for a minute
And then it vanished and was gone
~
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