Greenwich Village 1984

Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village
(photo by Jean Christophe Benoist)

    I was thinking recently of my teenage years. It seems so long ago that it doesn’t even seem like it was my life. I was thinking specifically of a time when I had this idea that I didn’t need any more information about how to live. I felt like I was an adult even though in reality I didn’t have much of a clue of what being an adult meant. Did you have a time like that when you were a teenager? Well for me that time was in the summer of 1984 in Greenwich Village.
    In the Spring of ‘84 I was a junior at South Shore High School in Brooklyn. My friends and I started to smoke pot on a regular basis. The year before in 1983 we started to drink alcohol. The thing with that though was that all we did was drink and get drunk. I know that’s the point, but the reality was that it was boring. That fact that it was boring didn’t stop me from blacking out every weekend mind you. We just would meet on the baseball field in our Brooklyn neighborhood and drink a fifth of something and mix it with a two litre bottle of soda. Another night we’d hang out behind one of our buildings and drink a number of 40 oz beers. I liked drinking Private Stock Malt Liquor, it had the rebus puzzle on the cap. Other times we were at my house getting drunk and watching TV. My house was usually the hang-out house since my parents seemed to be gone more of the time than my friend's parents. In late fall of that year we scored some weed from some guy at Union Square Park in Manhattan. People had warned us not to buy weed from there because it would be crappy, skunk weed or maybe even oregano. Whatever we bought from there that day, we ending up getting high as a fucking kite later on that night. And that night set the stage for our weed exploits in 1984 and in the Village.

Union Square-our starting point

    Every teen wanted to go to the city to hangout, to Manhattan, to Greenwich Village. I remember all kinds of people going there, other groups of teenagers like us branching out from our outer borough neighborhoods and exploring new ground. After all Greenwich Village was bohemia. It was a place you could be totally different and totally yourself. I remember one of the first times I went there was when I was a kid in the 70’s with my family. We went to see The Muppet Movie at The Waverly Theater on 6th Avenue. After the movie we went to an Italian restaurant nearby and sat in their backyard patio. I was a paranoid 11 year old during our dinner because right around that time there had been a mob hit of crime boss Carmine Galante in the back patio of an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn. The photo of the deceased Galante, which was on the front page of The NY Daily News, was quite a macabre bird’s eye shot looking down on his lifeless body. So I was a little on edge thinking any moment some guys would bust through the patio doors and start shooting. But let’s get back to ‘84.

Yikes

    We had sort of developed a weekend routine of going to The Village. We took the L train from Brooklyn to Union Square and walked south on Broadway. We had some stores we would always check out while we were there like Unique on Broadway near Waverly place. That store had a couple of levels and sold surplus gear as well as vintage and brand new clothes. They had a device in their front window where you could paint and design your own jacket and shirts. The jacket would be laid out on some kind of mechanical lazy Susan that would spin around as you squeeze paint from squeezable bottles, the kind that would usually be full of ketchup and mustard. This place had a vibe, it’s one of the situations where they didn’t try to be cool or hip, they just were. Antique Boutique was close by. They were much smaller but also had some really cool vintage stuff, albeit a little more pricey. Also close by was Astor Place Barbers, a ridiculously huge space with a few floors where barber chairs were crammed into every possible space they could find. There were tons of barbers and hair stylists there from all over the world who could do anything from a buzz cut to a yellow mohawk. Faded photos of their work were taped up on their mirrors and any other free wall space available. These photos included the many celebrities who had been in their chairs over the years. I think that’s the first place where I saw them buzzing logos and words into the backs and sides of people's heads, like the “NY” of the New York Yankees. On the weekends it was guaranteed to be crowded. You had to put your name on the list and wait almost an hour before you were called. All of us at one time or another got haircuts there.
 

Unique-a favorite hang-out
(photo by Tricia McKeon)

    As we ventured south we ended up at Tower Records down on East 4th Street, which had opened there the year before. This was a destination that was always our list. That Tower Records was the biggest record store I had ever seen. This store took up the whole block all the way to Lafayette Street and had four floors. Before that I went to record stores like Sam Goody that you'd find in malls like Kings Plaza or Green Acres, two malls I had frequented often. We could easily spend hours here as Madonna, Duran Duran and Frankie Goes to Hollywood blasted from the speakers. Oh and of course there was Prince. Purple Rain had just been released in the beginning of the summer and 1984 turned out to be the year of Prince. To this day whenever I hear “When Doves Cry” it reminds me of smoking tons of weed through a power hitter. I think collectively we spent the most money here. Regardless of where we went in the village, it was inevitable we’d end up at Washington Square Park to smoke weed. That was the whole point of the trip really.

Tower Records on 4th & Broadway-just a block away from Washington Square Park
(photo by Hubert Steed)

  

Frankie says go to Washington Square Park and smoke weed

Did you have one of these?

    Washington Square Park, the iconic park of the Village seemed to be the perfect place to smoke a blunt. We usually staked out some benches on the east side of the fountain, close by to the statue of Italian patriot and soldier Giuseppe Garibaldi. This statue was also our meeting place. If we ever went our separate ways or one of us would be joining the crew later, we’d always say, “Let’s meet at the Statue of Gariboldi”. Smoking weed never seemed to be an issue here at this time. Others were doing it and people were selling it in and around the park. Over the years they had their crackdowns and decided to enforce policies. But during ‘84, I never saw any cops there. Of course we always kept an eye out. On the weekends the park was full with people engaged in all kinds of activities: eating lunch on benches, musicians jamming away with each other, lots of chess and chess hustling and many kids playing in the playground and center fountain. And there was also us smoking some weed. At Tower Records we would always pick up Pulse, their free music magazine. As we were getting high we’d always read the DID section, Desert Island Discs. One time at the park it was just my friend Robert and myself and we ended up talking to this bearded gentleman who was homeless. He told a story of his wife throwing him out of the house. We were about to smoke a blunt so we asked if he'd like to partake, which he did. He said he never smoked a blunt before and kept on commenting on the flavor of it. “The flavor, the flavor.” I wonder if his wife took him back. The park was so vibrant with all this activity going on. I definitely felt a connectedness there along with a sense of cockiness maybe even impetuousness where I felt like I had arrived.

The Statue of Garibaldi-our rallying point
(photo by Sarah Patt)

    After the park a lot of the times we ended up on 8th street. We used to frequent this rock and roll memorabilia store there. It was a really cool place to visit, especially if you were stoned with all these posters of iconic musicians on the walls and 60’s psychedelic merchandise everywhere. Once, after one of our weed sessions, we ended up there and were treated to a video of the 5th dimension singing their hit “Up, Up and Away” from some 60’s variety show. Oh my god it was mellow as hell. We all stood around the monitor entranced as we watched the video in all that rich 60’s color. Now of course you can watch practically any musical performance ever on YouTube but at that time, stores like these were the only places you could find these “rare” musical performances, usually sold on VHS tapes. There were also tons of stores that sold rock shirts and other kinds of tee-shirts that were worth checking out. One provocative shirt I remember seeing had the words, “Jesus Loves You” in a large font with a photo printed right underneath of some sort of guerilla type army marching. Under that it read, “Problems Remained:”

    Of course smoking weed meant munching out and there were no shortages of different types of food to eat. Gyros, Papaya King and Famous Ray’s were all delicious as hell. If we had a little more money we’d go to the Chinese restaurant in Union Square and have a sit down feast. They probably didn't like us that much because most of the time we were a bunch of giggling fools making fun of people. In fact we were probably like that a lot of times just having the time of our lives. But things change and all things must pass and so did this.
    I remember on my 17th birthday later that summer, just before school started, I had this ominous thought. I was at a diner with my friends celebrating my birthday eating CBDs(what we called cheeseburger deluxes) and the thought “this is the end” came across my mind. The end of the freewheelin’ summer? The end of this part of life? It was yes to both of those thoughts. I think the real fear was that it was time to look to the future. I was going to be a senior and still had no real idea of what I wanted to do with my life or who I really was for that matter. I was soon going to have to be an adult,  a real adult. Who wants that? I felt this doom and gloom come over me as I tried to keep a smile on my face as I wolfed down my cheeseburger. After that summer we never hung out like that again. Looking back, I guess that was inevitable. We all had to eventually move on and start our lives and figure out what we were going to do, just like everyone else. I think it took me a longer time to figure out stuff and I look back to those mid to late 80’s as a kind of black hole. Such is life; that was my path. But despite that I’ve never regretted the summer of ‘84. The village hangouts were just one part of our exploits and fun times that summer but it was during those weekend trips there that I felt most alive and free so I look back on those times with the most fondness.