Manhattan Neighbors Plan to ‘Rely on the Local Folks’

Lately, nobody has been immune to the sadness here. But last week, the boisterous New York was back--for one night at least.

About 500 people spilled out onto the streets around Daddy-O, a Greenwich Village bar, to benefit the neighborhood firehouse, which lost 11 firefighters when the towers of the World Trade Center disintegrated. Similar benefits are taking place at restaurants and bars all over the city.

“The neighborhood has been so down that it was great to see people out and partying,” said Tony Debok, the manager of Daddy-O, who organized the benefit with his wife, Jennifer.

They raised about $10,000 for the firefighters’ families. But the evening also gave people permission to raise their own spirits.

On balconies surrounding the bar, people came out to smoke cigarettes and enjoy the Indian summer while the mostly young crowd below roamed the cobble-stoned streets, drinking beer from plastic cups. “People were even throwing their cups in the garbage cans instead of on the streets,” Debok said.

The evening peaked about midnight, when the New York Fire Department’s Emerald Society Bagpipe Band unexpectedly showed up at Bedford and Leroy streets and played “Amazing Grace.” People sang along and cried. The mournful sounds of the bagpipes echoed amid old brick buildings more used to the vibrations of drainpipes and the smoke from marijuana pipes.

The evening brought together villagers who ordinarily wouldn’t be sharing a beer and a bar stool.

Anthony Varriale, a captain at the firehouse, chuckled over some of the people he encountered: “At one point I gave this girl a hug. She had blond spiked hair and she must have had, oh, easily 20 earrings on. Oh, it was really a crazy night--but fun.”

On Sept. 1, Anna Minahan took over the lease of a barbershop on Mott Street, in the somewhat edgy area known as NoLita (which stands for North of Little Italy, although your grandmother probably called it the Lower East Side).

Her salon is small, with two swivel chairs, a wooden floor and a long horizontal mirror. A barber named Sal made a living there for more than 60 years, during which time the artist Louise Nevelson lived above it and Robert De Niro came in for a trim.

Minahan, 42, had not even taken down De Niro’s photograph or put up her own store sign before the Sept. 11 disaster turned this area into a ghost town. Barricades kept all but the residents out for about two weeks.

But then the police left and the air quality improved. Tourists once again drifted over from Soho to look at $450 pairs of designer shoes at Geraldine’s on Elizabeth Street. The subways were running, which meant uptown art students could get hold of some Capucine Red Deep at Vasari, a hole-in-the-wall shop on Prince Street that sells handmade oil paints for up to $80 a tube.

Then the anthrax scare overtook New York, and business fell off.

“I was so tripped out when I realized Sal opened this place just before Pearl Harbor, and I opened when I did,” Minahan said. “Now, like everyone around here, I’m going to have to rely on the local folks.” While she talked, she was swabbing a thick purple goop all over Sage Carter’s hair, which should turn it a deep, dark red. Carter, 31, grew up in the neighborhood. Although she lives in Brooklyn now, she still comes back to get her hair done.

Business has been so slow in NoLita that 48-year-old Gail Spiegel, a painter who started Vasari, is thinking about closing on Sundays, traditionally a big day for shoppers from the suburbs. Not that Spiegel relies on tourists. She mostly deals in mail orders but gets enough walk-in business from artists who come to New York to see the big museum shows and stumble across Vasari. They get hooked on Spiegel’s rich colors, and she gains new mail-order customers.

“The mood in the neighborhood is not good,” Spiegel said. “I don’t know what’s in store for all these new people paying so much rent. Can they make it?”

The only proprietor who seems relentlessly optimistic is Bethany Mayer, owner of two boutiques, Hedra Pru and Geraldine, just up Mott Street. It seems unimaginable to Mayer that her customers will not be back to buy hot pink, embossed, suede, high-heel spikes for $340. Or a black cashmere-wool blend sweater for $180. Or that fashion editors will not come hunting through the neighborhood for the latest trends. So while she did cancel the rest of her orders for fall-winter, she’s going ahead full-steam for spring.

“This is the edge right now, the place for the upcoming,” said Mayer, a 27-year-old who grew up in Detroit. “No matter what happens next--no matter how many places go under--there is always tomorrow and something will come back here. That’s what downtown is all about.”

Twice, sometimes three times a day, big sanitation trucks spewing water come thundering through the streets of the financial district next to the wreckage of the twin towers.

The city is trying to keep the area clean, trying to keep Wall Street sparkling, trying to keep things going for all the office workers, traders, lawyers and bankers who are trying to keep their jobs and the economy whizzing along for America.

And it’s working, sort of.

If you breathe through your mouth instead of your nose while walking along John Street, you might not notice anything out of the ordinary.

The dry cleaners and grocery stores are open; office workers are hanging out on the sidewalks; the sunshine still struggles to reach the streets in between the tall buildings.

But then you get to John Street and Broadway--the border crossing into the war zone.

All day and night, smoke spews from the trade center wreckage.

And all day long, tourists clog Broadway with their cameras and their stricken expressions, making passage impossible for the office workers, traders, lawyers and bankers trying to go about their business.

And if the tourists are a necessary annoyance, says 10 Toes Footwear owner David Cohen, his window display is a necessary reminder of what went on here Sept. 11.

For while every other storefront is spotless, Cohen has left his window display as a shrine. All the shoes from the “Hot Summer Sale” are covered in thick ash.

On Friday, several tourists were taking pictures of Cohen’s tiny Pompeii, but few stopped to shop. While he used to sell 40 pairs of shoes a day, mostly to office workers from the twin towers, Cohen now sells maybe five.

But every so often, family members of people who died in the towers come in to ask Cohen for some ash from his window display. He keeps five shoe boxes filled behind the cash register. And when asked, he dips in with a plastic bottle and offers them a sample, free of charge.