Weehawken

There used to be a magic store on 18th St. Or was it 19th St.?

Not the kind of magic store you're thinking of with fart pillows and vampire's teeth. Magick with a "k." The kind for real honest-to-goodness Crowleian occultists. It was, in its way, the Wal-Mart of magick stores. Whether you needed a robe, a dagger, a pentacle, or any manner of rues, candles, or incenses you could find them within 5 minutes of exiting the 9 train at 18th St. (as was).

Where did it go? The space was amazing- huge, in that way that Chelsea could be, that New York could be before it was divvied up for profit and exploitation of the poor or the trendy.

Well that all seems to be gone now. The way of Urban Archeology on Lafayette, or even Ernie's on Boradway. Any grand space in the city seems to have been appropriated by the big box monstrosities. They either supplant the old guard outright or price them out surreptitiously by turning the neighborhood into a suburban development retrofit. Sad, really.

It is the source of my prayer against the 2nd Avenue subway - and the possibility of there ever being a 9th Avenue one.

Remoteness is important. Conquering every inch of a territory is an affront against the Gods, and in a circumscribed space, like the island of Manhattan, a certain amount of self-restraint is required. Fortunately, when we push too hard, the Gods usually push back, and we have been spared from hosting Jets games on the vast, wild city-prairie along 11th Avenue. If it were me, I'd declare West-Central Manhattan as a national park, preserving its industrial heritage and wide open spaces. Perhaps we could even throw some buffalo on the land to give it that North Dakota feel.

It's why I was so happy with my discovery today: Weehawken Street.

But before we go into that, let me recount one of the happiest cab rides I've had in the City. I was staying at my friend Steve's house on Horatio St. and had a suitcase of stuff with me. I went down to the sidewalk to hail a cab to go back home. Across the street, a hot, meat-packing girl was stumbling onto the sidewalk trying to flag him down, but the guy passed her by and pulled up beside me and got out to help me with my suitcase.

"I'm sorry, man, I'm not going to the airport, only uptown." I told him.

He said, "It's ok, I saw you first, so that's how it goes."

This was off to a good start.

On the way uptown, the driver told me that this was his shift, the night shift, and that each night - for over 10 years - he always saw something that he'd never seen before. Some street, some building, some congregation of weirdos - something that surprised him.

Let me say that nothing warms a New Yorker's heart more than hearing this kind of thing. Our love for New York is something we wish everyone could feel- probably the way the Jesus people feel about, well, Jesus, in Kentucky. It's just awesome.

It turned out this guy was from New York himself, so it made his constant reacquaintance with the city that much more inspiring. We spent the whole ride chatting about how things had changed, where he goes to pick up late night fares - no longer in China town or the UWS but Chelsea, K-Town, and the Lower East. We talked about our favorite restaurants and about how all of the crazies had not been driven out by Giuliani - a point I had to take his word for outside of Zabar's.

It was one of those joyous experiences that I did not want to end. I remember being grateful for each red light to prolong the ride. One of the greatest trips I'd ever had- and the kind that I don't remember having had since I was a boy.

Well last week when I discovered Weehawken Street, I thought of the old cab driver and wondered if he knew about it. Weehawken Street- named, I imagined for the part of New Jersey that it was closer to than it was to Time Square - is nary a block long. An afterthought, or maybe a favor to a friend of a city planner. It is a street of no real consequence and one whose absence would never have been noticed if it had not been put there at all. And that, to me, is what makes art art- the luxury of superfluousness and unnecessariness. But that's for another post and another blog.

The most notable thing about Weehawken Street was the one house that was in the middle of it. It was an old, wood shingle house with a stairway running parallel to the street. It looked like somebody's random home out in Queens, only it was a total one-off, not part of a tract the way so many of the lower middle class places are out there. Maybe it was the only house on the block at one time. Or maybe just on that side of the block, since it faced a lovely older structure that had fantastic, peeling gold leaf letters atop the door that tastefully - but pridefully - proclaimed the address.

It was the house that struck me, though. Every neighborhood now has a hold-out from the 80s- some barber shop, diner, or supermarket that didn't get heaved up in the 90s to be replaced by banks and Starbucks. But this house on Weehawken looked like it had skipped that cycle and was a holdout from the one before. Or maybe even the one before that, so off the beaten trail was it that it seemed impervious, oblivious even, to the passage of time and the constant turning over that is the lifeblood of real estate in New York City.

Obviously I love obstinacy. And usually the obstinate ones who truly succeed are not the willful ones, fighting against progress, but the ones who simply refuse to progress themselves and live seemingly unawares that anything at all has changed since their own personal high period.


I didn't knock on the door. I half expected some old shotgun granny would be waiting on the other side in a rocking chair like they do in Carolina or New Mexico. Truth is, it would almost be worth getting shot for, just to see what was inside.

But I'll save that for next time.

I biked along Weehawken Street, doubled back to get a second look at the old house, and pedaled on.

And then it was done.

I had moved back into contemporariness and the West Village, and my journey outside of time had come to an end.


Still, I remembered Weehawken Street for the rest of that glorious day, as I biked past the old magick shop that hadn't been as fortunate (or perhaps as obstinate) as the Weehawkeners. If I was at the right place, it was now some martial arts center called Tiger Jewish-something. An appropriate use of the space, but definitely an affront to the spirit of the old magick shop.

The new tenants were well-meaning self-defense nerds, upstanding, teaching sportsmanship and self-esteem to neighborhood kids, fighting obesity, teaching character, and all that. And it could have been worse (Chase, Duane Reade), but it still stank to me of the sterilization the city underwent during the Giuliani era. These were not generally the wholesome, pasty, soulless midwesterners who flocked to the city during the Seinfeld years. But they were the ones teaching those people's kids karate.

So maybe this was the Chelsea version, slightly hipper, but still sanitary. The old-schooler in me knows that any of these kung fu Stuyvesant students is going to catch a bullet in the brain if he ever tries to use any of that stuff against a mugger or a street gang- if he ever encounters one, that is. Genuine fear, though harder on the self-esteem, is superior to blind confidence- particularly in the face of the arsenal employed by the kids that couldn't afford to go take karate lessons after school- or who just had better things to do with the money they made selling coke to the kids at Collegiate.

Anyway. . .we're getting off track here, but I somehow relate the tenants and customers of my old magick shop more to the scary hoodlums than to the skinless chicken breast babies that tenant the place now. There was an immediacy that has been lost as the stability and comfort that the Central timezone people have inflicted on our once tumultuous entropy settles in. And I still don't like it.

But on a beautiful day in October, I tasted a bit of the thrill of discovery my old cabbie inspired me with. And for that, I can certainly be grateful.