AMONG THE MANY THINGS of which gay men have been accused is one, at least, that is true: that we often move into and invade somewhat impoverished neighborhoods of major cities, and lend our “queer eye” sensibility to improving them, while increasing the property values and drawing in a new population of upscale residents, who in turn displace us, the early pioneers. A case in point is one of the most prominent neighborhoods in the world today: the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City, today a bastion of affluence and Democratic liberalism. The influx of gay men into the area in the mid-1960’s created one of the largest such communities in the world at this time. I inadvertently became part of this transformation by moving into my West Seventies apartment in 1966.
Fresh out of art school with an interior design diploma under my arm, I migrated west from my East Side men’s residence when it was sold after my first year in the City. We all had to find housing wherever we could afford it. For me, that was the “wild wild West,” as it was then jokingly called. “You’re taking your life into your own hands by going over there,” my friends admonished. But I paid them no mind: I was young and fearless, naïve, somewhat neurotic, and by no means secure with my sexual identity. I found the mandatory heterosexual roommate to support my still-closeted existence, moved into a large studio, and continued my self-imposed denial about who I was until my roommate left after seven months and I was completely on my own.
Soon after that, I began to wonder why so many young, handsome men were walking nightly against the stone wall on the park side of Central Park West between West 72nd and West 77th Streets, just a half-block from my apartment. The under-cover-of-darkness ritual baffled me, especially insofar there was nary a woman to be seen among the hundreds of men walking to and fro along—and into—the park from about eight or nine in the evening until way past midnight. It wasn’t long, of course, before I figured out what was going on, and I wanted to become part of it. I was 23; my sexual experiences to that point had been somewhat limited, and I wanted to learn more.
At first I ventured out onto the strip slowly, but before long I was following men into the Park at the West 72nd and 77th Street entrances—and even further into the section called the Ramble, a 36-acre, thickly-wooded area just north of the Lake, that had become as legendary for gay cruising as it had for bird-watching. Some came from afar, but most came from the Upper West Side—hundreds of gay men who could be found there on a hot and sultry summer’s night, silently and seductively moving in the shadows of bushes and trees, having their way with others in pairs and in groups. I was thrilled by my discovery; nonetheless, it was quite a while before I even thought of bringing someone home with me.
Clad in what would become the “gay uniform” of the 70’s, the men I encountered would be wearing a pair of Levi 501 button-fly jeans, plus a workmen’s handkerchief whose color and positioning in the left or right back pocket was meant to communicate a sexual specialty. The look was usually capped off by an alligator-embellished Izod LaCoste shirt of any color in summer—another gay emblem of the time—as it was with a plaid flannel shirt, a hooded, zipper-front sweat jacket, and a leather bomber in winter.
Meanwhile, back in the neighborhood, brownstone after brownstone was being snapped up at bargain prices, not only by gay men, but also by young, heterosexual professionals. Apartments were then renovated and rented out to people in entertainment, mostly—starving singers, dancers, actors, gay and straight—who, like myself, had flocked to the neighborhood to live with others of their kind. Little did I know that some sort of imperceptible energy had led me to one of the few places on earth where I could find myself surrounded by a critical mass of men who, like me, had just begun to develop a gay consciousness.
In June of 1969, the Stonewall riots had sparked a gay rights movement to join the women’s movement and the sexual revolution already in full swing. From these social movements there emerged new lifestyles, a greater acceptance of pleasure, both sexual and chemical, and an almost religious devotion for disco. It wasn’t long before the mix of gay and straight residents in my neighborhood had formed block associations, planted trees and flowers, fought against dog owners for the right to a clean sidewalk, raised money for high-intensity street lights—and established a community of gay and straight people that was ethnically diverse and artistically cutting-edge. We were young and talented, single and idealistic, sustaining our lives on start-up salaries and reveling in the joy of living in a city like New York.
Changes came swiftly to our immediate neighborhood. Before long Uncle Hugo’s pimp bar on the corner of West 74th and Columbus was gone, along with the countless ladies of the night who once sat on the many stoops of West 73rd between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues. Always seen in their micro-minis, their fishnet stockings and their stiletto heels, even the below-freezing temperatures of winter hadn’t deterred these young, desperate women from soliciting the patronage of male passers-by on foot or in cars. I had often joked to my family in Connecticut about Uncle Hugo’s, with its vast array of brightly painted, long and loud El Dorados, double-parked at the curb on Columbus—from which jumped sleazy, glitz-covered characters of every description.
What I recall most vividly about the pre-gentrified West Seventies was the small contingent of drag queens that congregated side by side on West 74th between Columbus and Amsterdam, along with a small community of elderly Irish-Catholic women—who hadn’t a clue that the young women to whom they’d rented their apartments and with whom they’d been gossiping daily on their stoops were in fact men. These same women were just as oblivious to how many gay men had actually infiltrated their neighborhood. In my building alone at the time, seven of fifteen apartments were gay-occupied.
One of these West 74th Street queens, a young and particularly outrageous and flouncy man-woman named Millie, became one of the neighborhood’s truly legendary personalities. Along with Rattlesnake George and Pegasus, a jester-clad man of middle age who regularly entertained the children with his puppets in Central Park, Millie provided her own brand of free and engaging performance art. The bearded, leather-clad Rattlesnake George, with his long, vicious walking stick carved with a forbidding snake, always stood on the corner of West 74th and Columbus making his drug connections while spewing invective at the many gay passers-by. He was particularly venomous toward a character going by the name of Rollerina, a young man who worked in a law firm by day and on weekends rolled down Columbus and elsewhere on roller skates, dressed in a pink tulle dress and topped with a tiara, bestowing magic upon her flock with a star-tipped wand.
It wasn’t long before these colorful characters of the Upper West Side, along with the once large and vibrant population of black and Hispanic people with their candy stores, their bodegas and small diners, were being pushed out of their shops and apartments. The many renovated brownstones from the Park to Broadway had been completed and rented out, bringing with them a more affluent class of white professionals, while the continued change of the area shifted from the streets to the avenues—Columbus, in particular.
UNAWARE THAT I was contributing to an irreversible change, I became one of the first to plant further roots in the area by opening a flower shop on Columbus Avenue. Working with a straight partner I had found in primal scream group therapy (of all places) and armed with my interior design education, I created a store between West 73rd and 74th that would become the first in a series of upscale shops to occupy a space that had previously been a seedy diner. It was 1974; we named our shop “The Cultured Seed,” and with that unique flair some would say only a gay man could possess, I began to do window displays so elaborate that we eventually added “Theatre of Flowers” to our name. This was as much an homage to the many theatre people living in the neighborhood as it was a reference to the theatrical nature of my displays. Others, many gay, followed our lead to open small businesses.
Everyone had concluded that my straight partner and I were lovers, when in fact we had merely established a closeness derived from having met in primal scream therapy, the therapy du jour for part of the 1970’s. We were “open” and “in touch” with our feelings to a fault, and we felt a real sense of community with our neighbors, most of whom came from small-town America. In fact, we were all still adjusting to life away from home, and our little piece of turf in the big city became a meeting place, a hangout, and a haven for the neighborhood. We hired mostly gay help, and often dedicated our window displays to the theatre productions in which our customers and neighbors were participating.
I tried to be fearless with the themes I chose for these displays, and never worried if some of them came off as being a little gay. For one Valentine’s Day display, I caused a furor among the older, less liberal residents when I hired a black bodybuilder, outfitted him in nothing more than a white Speedo with a red heart attached, and photographed him putting together a nosegay of red roses with babies breath and lace doily, flexing his muscles. The series of slides were rear-projected in my window and titled “Pumping Roses.”
From the Upper West Side in this period there emerged such stars as John Lithgow, Kevin Kline, Jerry Seinfeld, Christopher Reeve, and Mandy Patinkin, for whose wedding I would later supply flowers in 1980. Lithgow, Kline, and Patinkin were already respected New York stage actors, Seinfeld was doing stand-up around the city, and Reeve was a cast member in the now-gone soap “Love of Life,” the story lines of which he often discussed with my partner and me, who were regular viewers. They were young, unknown, and starving like us all—and navigating their lives along an avenue lined with antique shops, vintage clothing stores, a sex toy emporium, restaurants and bars, and even a bathhouse.
The legendary Continental Baths, the spot where Bette Midler and piano accompanist Barry Manilow got their start by playing nightly to men clad in nothing more than towels, was located in the basement of the celebrated Ansonia Hotel on Broadway at West 74th. The hotel itself was legendary as the place where such notables as Enrico Caruso, Babe Ruth, Igor Stravinsky, Arturo Toscanini, and Florenz Ziegfeld had once lived. It was the most famous gay bathhouse in the city at the time, and the indoor venue where all gay men of the Upper West Side congregated for their prurient pleasures. I was a bashful and partially closeted no-show who went to bathhouses in the more anonymous East and West Village.
For lunches, we often gathered at the Argo, a Greek-owned diner on the corner of West 72nd in the same vein as SNL’s John Belushi’s cheeseburger-cheeseburger skit, and we often found it just as humorous. The fare was good, the prices were right and the help colorful for the way they engaged us by name in broken English that only seemed to add to their charm. The experience was just as easily replicated, however, at the Cherry, a Chinese-owned diner of the same ilk as the Argo, but three blocks north on Columbus, between West 75th and 76th. For dinner, the fare was a bit more elegant and pretentious, as many of us congregated at Ruskay’s, a gay-owned, candle-lit, mirror-table-topped restaurant with a prix fixe menu that sat just north of West 75th on Columbus. Open 24 hours a day to accommodate the theatre crowd, Ruskay’s was another center for Upper West Side gay life and a place where especially outrageous private parties and holiday gatherings flourished.
Over the ten years that the Cultured Seed, Theatre of Flowers thrived on Columbus Avenue, we watched the changes in the neighborhood accelerate into something no one could stop. We reveled in being part of a small enclave where theatre people flourished and gay and straight people lived side-by-side, but were aware that things were changing at an alarming rate. For now, we were “the” opening night florist for such legendary productions as A Chorus Line (almost the entire original cast lived in the neighborhood)—a Broadway phenomenon that took the city by storm—and Evita, as well as for such notables as Dustin Hoffman, Diane Keaton, Linda Ronstadt, Gilda Radner, Liv Ullmann, and Broadway producers McCann and Nugent—from whom, like Lithgow, we often got complimentary Broadway theatre tickets.
As a gay man, I took particular pleasure in the chance experience of once having to deliver flowers to Diane Keaton’s 21st-floor San Remo apartment on Central Park West, where Dustin Hoffman also lived, as I had no one to send and was forced to do it myself. Warren Beatty, who provided a true story I will never forget, answered Diane’s service entrance door wearing nothing but white shorts. My heart went still; he signed the delivery tag and smiled; and I gasped for air.
Another time, Gilda Radner, who had been regularly supplying us all at the Cultured Seed with tickets for Saturday Night Live, invited us to a Christmas party at her NBC office overlooking the skating rink of Rockefeller Center and the annual tree lighting. At still another time, Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann, originally known for her dark roles in Ingmar Bergman films, sent my partner and me complimentary house seats for her first musical I Remember Mama and then had us for drinks in her dressing room. The gesture was precipitated by the fact that I had done a window display to commemorate this production and had sent her an opening night gift like none other: a five-pound piece of Norwegian Gjetost cheese surrounded by several fresh gardenias in a basket. With the help of a friend, I wrote a note in Norwegian that began with the question, “Who the hell ever heard of sending a cheese for an opening night gift?” By the time the ensemble was opened, it seems the smell of the gardenias had permeated the Gjetost and had created an effect that caught Ms. Ullmann’s attention, and that she later insisted we should patent.
Events such as these attest to the uniqueness of this time and place in New York City history. Never before had personalities of entertainment—singers and dancers from the nearby Metropolitan Opera and New York City Ballet of Lincoln Center, actors and comedians, famous and otherwise—been so closely intertwined with the residents and the merchants of the neighborhood in which they lived. It says as much about the personalities and the people of their neighborhood as about the energy of the Upper West Side in the 70’s and the spirit of the times.
Perhaps no other personality represented that energy more than John Lennon, who, like Gilda Radner, lived in the legendary Dakota Apartments on the corner of West 72nd and Central Park West. John and Yoko were friends to everyone in the neighborhood and walked the streets freely, waving to store owners as they passed by and speaking to anyone wishing to engage them in a conversation. I had a memorable encounter with Lennon a year after he first came into our store one February 18th to buy yellow roses, Ono’s favorite, for her birthday. I had made a mental note of the date because of its proximity to Valentine’s Day, and made sure I had yellow roses the following February 18th. Sure enough, in walked Lennon the following year, and my first words to him were, “I know what you want.” He was astounded when I correctly stated his order, wondering if I had read his mind, and speechless when I told him I’d remembered his purchase from the year before.
Everyone in the neighborhood was devastated when he was gunned down—and many rushed to the site immediately after it happened. The already renowned Dakota Apartments, made famous by the fact that Rosemary’s Baby was filmed there and Boris Karloff, Judy Garland, and Judy Holiday all once lived there, is now a shrine of sorts to the memory of John Lennon, whose life came to an end in the archway of its entrance. That December I dedicated my window display to his memory. According to longstanding tradition, our Christmas window was always a tree hung upside down from our seventeen-foot ceiling. What began as something whimsical with gift-wrapped boxes stapled to the ceiling around the tree became something more. Eventually the tree would revolve on a motor with candy canes reaching upward and revolving around a disco ball on the floor. That December of 1980, our upside-down Christmas tree at the Seed stood motionless to mark a holiday season devoid of joy.
BY THE EARLY 1980’s, many people in the city, including landlords, had taken notice of Columbus Avenue as “a place to be seen.” It was also around that time that a mysterious virus came out of nowhere and began destroying the lives of many gay men. If the Avenue was suddenly a hot real estate market, we had no one to blame but ourselves. Our leases began to expire; and in the absence of commercial guidelines to dictate what sort of increases our landlords could inflict, many of us, the Cultured Seed, the Argo, the Cherry and Ruskay’s included, were pushed from our locations by rent hikes as high as 800 percent.
By the time we had to vacate our store in 1984, the gentrification of the Upper West Side was almost complete; my partner and I had split over irreconcilable differences; many of my gay friends had already died, and others had migrated south to Chelsea to repeat the phenomenon they had set in motion a decade before. And the neighborhood continued to change at a furious pace that has yet to be duplicated in any other part of New York.
No longer were starving singers, dancers, actors—or individually owned businesses—able to afford the rents. Instead, an influx of chains began to descend into the storefronts and brought with them their mall-like sensibility. And the artistic edge the areas had once thrived upon disappeared amid an invasion of commercialism and likeminded people.
Fickle New Yorkers now wanted to be “seen” somewhere else. Lithgow, Keaton, and Seinfeld eventually moved to California; Patinkin married and moved further north on the Upper West Side; and Hoffmann recently put his San Remo apartment on the market for 25 million dollars. Ullmann and Kline are still here, Ronstadt and Reeve are gone, Radner died, and Seinfeld eventually moved back to New York and can often be seen walking the neighborhood with other celebrities; but their presence somehow doesn’t generate the same energy in the context of what the neighborhood has become.
Following the typical pattern of urban gentrification, when rents began to soar gay men began moving away from the Upper West Side in search of new frontiers. The mass exodus that began in the early 80’s has now shifted, or at least branched out, to include Harlem and other less affluent neighborhoods; and the cycle of gay men moving into less desirable districts and lending their “touch” to fixing them up continues.
Today, the cruising on Central Park West no longer exists, while a horticultural tribute to John Lennon in the Park called “Strawberry Fields” has been planted nearby, courtesy of his wife. Sex in the Ramble is not what it used to be, I’m told, and the only black or Hispanic faces ones sees on our streets belong to maids and nannies. And while some gay men like myself remain in rent-stabilized apartments too cheap to give up, we now live amid a class of Gap-wearing, Starbuck-sipping, stroller-pushing yuppies way beyond our financial stratum. In another ten to twenty years all of Manhattan will become what the Upper West Side is today: a place devoid of diversity, the less-fortunate, the young and the artistic, a place where only the very rich can afford to live.
John Elari is working on a piece of fiction to be titled “A House amid Flowers.”
