Spring Street Natural

 Michael and I used to see them in our favorite late night supper place on Spring.  Lenny and Lisa. They were young and talented and famous. They were lost in love. They were gorgeous, and so was their baby.  Matthew Broderick and Helen Hunt rendezvoused in the next booth,  also young and famous and in love. An elderly couple sporting fanciful hairdos (we liked to call them the Jetsons) sat in boozy silence over their Manhattans and tofu.  It was a romantic time for some, I guess, the late-eighties in NYC.

​Michael and I were single.  "They're all watching us", Michael would say. "They want to BE us."  It was a running joke.

​We were making $300 a week before taxes in a popular Off-Broadway play, auditioning and doing odd jobs by day to pay the rent on our Mulberry Street walkups. 

​We'd met when I auditioned to replace an actress in the company. Michael was already in the show, and the director happened to be a guy I'd gone to college with in the Midwest.  Occasionally nepotism works in one's favor.

​After I got the job we discovered we walked home from Macdougal Street in the same direction, stopping in at the only place along the route to be open late at night, Spring Street Natural, on the corner of Spring and Lafayette. It was a big but cozy hippie holdover, with wooden booths,  organic food, and a mostly-neighborhood clientele. We became regulars, and fast friends. 

​Michael's building, unlike mine,  had been refurbished, one of the first in Little Italy to take aim at the exploding Soho rental market.  His apartment was thrillingly clean. The walls didn't crumble and the fixtures were brand new. Sure, it was a studio, and he shared it with a roommate, but he wasn't ashamed to have people over.  He cooked like a normal person with ingredients from glamorous nearby Dean and Deluca, and exhibited his collection of vintage eye cups in a rotating glass case. He hosted haircutting parties and Easter dinners and sleepovers to watch "Peewee's Playhouse" on Saturday mornings.  For the first time, living in my neighborhood didn't seem so shabby. 

​Turns out one of mafia don John Gotti's mistresses lived in Michael's building, too.  Michael's phone was tapped and all the tenants were being watched by the Feds. But we didn't know that yet. I don't think we would've cared.  It would've seemed par for the hood, as normal as the smell of mozzarella being smoked on a Monday.

​Over a quarter of a century later, Michael divides his time between residences, and I'm still in the old neighborhood, watching it change.  Spring Street Natural is no longer on Spring Street--they've moved to Kenmare and changed the name to "Spring".  Just "Spring".  I've been there twice since they moved. The food's not as good and the bar isn't as welcoming, now that the original owner, Robert the Buddhist, is gone.  Could be my imagination. Could be .

​Today my downstairs neighbor told me that Lenny Kravitz has bought the block up from my building and everything's being torn down and rebuilt so that other, younger, rich-and-or-famous people who'd rather die than be us can move right in. 

​I took a walk by to look at the block halfway between Michael's apartment and mine. Everything is gone. Even the public playground is being dug up and re-designed. (Does the city take into consideration it's the only place for local children to climb jungle gyms? Could they have waited till summer was over?)  Anyway, all the construction signs say "Kravitz Design".  Good for him. Better than another Trump Tower.

​The condos will be lovely, I'm sure. The prices will be high, and the new tenants will complain about the noise and inconvenience of the Feast of San Gennaro and how hard it is to park, that the open fish markets smell worse in summertime,  that Uber drivers don't want to get stuck on our crowded streets, that the patch of the Bowery nearest us isn't quite hip yet, that offkey marching bands playing corny Italian songs stop traffic on weekends, that our subway stations are the dirtiest in Manhattan, and that the old  Asian ladies wave their canes at you if you walk these sidewalks looking down at your phone.  In fact, they'll complain about all the remaining things that make this neighborhood my neighborhood.

​They won't get it.  I didn't get it either, in the old days, when everybody wanted to be us.