Philippe Theise

Brad Hargett, Andy Adler, and Kyle Forester of Crystal Stilts perform at Webster Hall in Manhattan in mid-September 2013.

This piece dates from fall 2013.

Issue an album called “Nature Noir” and you never know how nature might respond. Crystal Stilts, the veteran psych-pop band from Brooklyn, struck celestial gold: just before its record-release show at Other Music on Monday, Sept. 16, the sunset shimmered before a cool, moonlit night fell over the city.

Performing in front of simple, psychedelic projections, vocalist Brad Hargett led the five-piece through eight songs, starting with “Spirit in Front of Me,” a reverb-drenched leviathan that opens the new album. More than 75 listeners packed the space, nodding and clapping, and store staff sold vinyl and CD copies of the LP, the band’s third.

After the show, as Hargett and bassist Andy Adler walked towards a rendezvous on St. Mark’s Place, a fan approached the singer with a collection of vinyl for him to sign, including Crystal Stilts’ first release, a 2003 single featuring “Shattered Shine,” a rumbly, lo-fi ode to the nocturnal dynamism of New York.

Hargett autographed the records and told the fan, whom he recognized, that he would see him later that week at Webster Hall, where Crystal Stilts would open for indie luminaries Deerhunter on two consecutive nights.

“That doesn’t happen that often,” Hargett said, smiling, after the fan began to walk away.

The Webster concerts kick off the band’s 46-date tour in support of “Nature Noir.” The itinerary includes a stop at the Bowery Ballroom on Oct. 31, and European dates in Oslo, Hamburg, and London in November, and in Paris and Zurich in early December.

The new record features seven mid-tempo, guitar-based songs that mostly eschew wistful pop moments for stony, repetitive grooves, and three tracks in which acoustic instruments, including strings, fashion lightened contrasts to the steady churn.

Live, the songs had the “same air, but moving in a slightly different direction” as Crystal Stilts’ older material, said Hannah Pierce, 20, who attended the show at Other Music.

Pierce’s impression carries over to the studio versions. On “Spirit” and “Future Folklore,” the bright organ melodies that enliven some of the band’s signature songs, like the eponymous track from its debut long-player, 2009’s “Alight of Night,” are mostly absent.

“JB [Townsend, Crystal Stilts’ guitarist and tunesmith] was trying to write songs that aren’t based on guitar leads,” Hargett said.

Hargett’s lyrics, difficult to discern live, also reflect a shift. Intricate rhymes and stygian imagery characterize his writing on “Alight of Night,” and while the lines grow simpler on 2011’s “In Love With Oblivion,” the images stay dark. But gentler lines like “Forget about the afterlife / Multiply the laughter” grace the new release.

“I wanted to write in a simpler fashion,” the singer explained, heading up Bowery to St. Mark’s. “I wanted to try and be a little bit more off the cuff and do things that would have a more emotional response, as opposed to the first couple records that were a bit more cerebral.”

“Nature Noir” drops about five years after Crystal Stilts emerged as one of a budding group of Brooklyn bands that processed alt-rock influences through low-fi filters. Stilts tunes from the period combined the Velvet Underground’s guitar sound with the gothic haze of arty, ’80s English pop; label mates The Pains of Being Pure at Heart updated the nakedly romantic sensibilities of The Smiths and Belle and Sebastian; and Vivian Girls, whose original drummer, Frankie Rose, later joined the Stilts for a spell, blended the off-kilter jangle of The Raincoats into a sweet punk crush.

For Hargett, there was fun in numbers. Speaking over the jukebox at Grassroots Tavern, the divey basement bar on St. Mark’s, the singer recalled performing for about 1,000 people at Barcelona’s Primavera Festival in 2009. After Crystal Stilts’ set, he stood offstage and watched Vivian Girls and The Pains rock the crowd.

“You’re sort of like, ‘Wow, we came from playing these shows in Brooklyn in front of 30 people, and now we’re doing this,’” Hargett said.

More than four years later, the singer doesn’t often see his friends from the local scene of yore. Life in the band feels more self-contained.

“As the years have gone on, everybody sort of goes their own way, and that sort of fades,” he said, speaking of the social life of the scene. “Now it’s just writing with a band…and everybody has their individual lives.”

Hargett, 36, also mentioned that his parents’ expectations of him have shifted since 2003, when he and Townsend starting composing together in New York.

“Your parents want to be like, ‘Okay, he’s set with what he’s doing, I can stop being a parent and stop worrying about it,’” he said, a few weeks away from leaving his job at a student loan company in Union Square to go on tour. “But you’re in your mid-30s and that’s not necessarily going to happen.”

But “Nature Noir” offers evidence of an inner stability. In “Phases Forever,” the album’s closer, a gentle strum washes up against Hargett’s meditation on growing older. “The greater the gravity / the stronger the star / The more that we have to be / the more that we are,” he intones.

“The fact that I’ve taken it this far is still wild to me,” he said. “I feel blessed.“

Crystal Stilts’ upcoming 10-date tour concludes at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn on June 27.

Greenpoint gallerists Lia Post and Scott Chasse talk shop in Calico, the 370-square-foot space Chasse opened at 67 West Street in the fall of 2012. Paintings by Thomas Buildmore hang in the background. (Photo by Philippe Theise)

This piece was submitted for class in March 2013. Calico, one of the featured galleries in it, opens “Rare Forms,” the first show in its new space at 67 West Street, tonight. Fowler Arts Collective’s gallery has “Who’s Taylor Swift Anyway?” up through April 13, and Yes Gallery shows “On the Wall” through April 20.

Calico, a small art gallery on the second floor of a converted warehouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, buzzed with animated conversations during the opening of an exhibit called Color Corrupted on Friday, March 15, 2013. Almost 30 people filled the space between the bright acrylic and oil paintings, and the abstract and semi-readymade sculptures, priced between $500 and $3,800.

There weren’t any colored, circular stickers to indicate a sale beside the artwork, but Scott Chasse, Calico’s owner and director, looked happy. He can afford to work slowly toward his goal of making Calico a destination for “emerging buyers”: in a studio that’s adjacent to the gallery, Chasse does woodwork for artists, which earns him a living and pays the rent for his gallery.

“Sometimes artists who I meet through exhibitions [here] hire me,” he said.

Chasse’s strategy somewhat reflects the ways gallerists in Greenpoint manage to show art. In a neighborhood that has grown more expensive, but is still perceived as out-of-the-way, gallerists have found different ways to open and maintain spaces.

Down the hall from Calico, Lia Post runs Fowler Arts Collective. Within a 4,500-square-foot space, she rents semi-private studios to over 25 artists and also operates a gallery, Fowler Project Space. She rarely sells the pieces that are on display, but that isn’t her primary goal for the gallery.

“We’re still at this point where it’s serving as a hub for artists, rather than a salesroom or a showroom,” she said. “It makes for interesting, different shows that don’t have to be commercial.”

When she needs to generate more income, Post reconfigures Fowler, eliminating an underused photo studio here and sectioning off another personal studio there. And she also rents the gallery for film shoots and other events.

Post pays about $1.50 per square foot for the collective’s space, up from $1 in 2010, when she called a number on the side of the Greenpoint Terminal Market building at 67 West Street to inquire about renting space.  She and Chasse agree that the original $1 rate is all-but-impossible to find now.

Lesley Doukhowetsky is perhaps the best gallerist to speak about rent in Greenpoint. A native New Yorker, she also works as a real estate agent in the neighborhood. In 2006, a landlord hired her to rent a raw basement space on India Street by the G Train entrance.

“[I] saw the potential. [It] popped into my head,” she said. “I pretty much built a space that was dirt and tree trunks.”

Doukhowetsky made a deal with her client: in exchange for doing the construction herself, she would rent the basement for $1,500 and sign a five-year lease with an option to renew. Viewers packed the opening for her first show at Yes Gallery in 2008.

“I had been talking about it for a year and a half,” she explained.

Earlier this month, Doukhowetsky showed pieces at Fountain Art Fair at the Lexington Avenue Armory, where Chasse also rented a booth. At Yes, she’s now exhibiting Almost Priceless, a show featuring 12 artists. She’s sold two works for $1,500 and over: a painting by Nicole Handel and a piece by Colin Goldberg. The Goldberg work sold to a Greenpoint resident.

“A neighbor just bought the most expensive thing in here,” Doukhowetsky said.

Chasse and Post think that Greenpoint may be developing into a stronger market for art. Chasse envisions his future client base as “the younger couples, the 30-somethings, [who] maybe bought a piece of property for the first time.”

The gallerists are mindful of the plans, detailed in a front-page article in the New York Times’ Real Estate section last July, for developers to build hundreds and even thousands of residential units in the neighborhood.

And the city’s Department of Design and Construction plans to install a two-lane bike path on West Street. Even now, Chasse says, Calico gets walk-in traffic from new faces.

“When I put my little sandwich board out front, on Friday afternoons, you do have people coming down to West Street. I’ve sold to strangers [saying] ‘we love this place, here’s $300,’” he said.

Doukhowetsky warns that anyone who wants to open a new gallery in Greenpoint better do so now. She estimates that her landlord could now charge $2,500 for her space.

But she also feels that Yes contributes to the very culture that sustains it.

“I’m creating collectors in the neighborhood, [who] never even thought of collecting art.”

“I Am the Center,” a 3-album set of new age music recorded in the United States, sits between vinyl releases by Bob Dylan and Mick Turner at Academy Records in Brooklyn, NY. Cory Fierman, a store manager, estimated that Academy had sold at least ten copies, which he called an unusually high number for a box set. (Photo by Philippe Theise)

The story of “I Am the Center,” the 3-LP, 2-CD set spanning forty years of American new age music, started with a conversation between two independent label heads in Los Angeles.

At first, the idea did not effect a meeting of the minds.

“As he puts it, I might as well have said that we should do a polka compilation, because he just didn’t have any idea what I was talking about,” said Douglas Mcgowan of Yoga Records, who broached the idea to Matt Sullivan of Light in the Attic in 2009.

But Sullivan eventually came around. Listening to obscure cassettes of the soothing, instrumental music at Mcgowan’s apartment, he realized that new age had a lot in common with Brian Eno’s series of ambient records, which he already loved.

In early 2011, Mcgowan gave a paper entitled “Flogging a Dead Genre? Resuscitating New Age” at the Experience Music Project Pop Conference at the University of California at Los Angeles. Sullivan also spoke at the event, and a few months later, he encouraged Mcgowan to begin work on the set. Early last year, Mcgowan began assembling what would become a twenty-track compilation.

But Mcgowan, a dedicated record collector, had already started preparing for the task by building relationships with a bevy of new age artists.

In the liner notes to “I Am the Center,” he describes a 2005 road trip from California to Wyoming and Texas, when he found hundreds of unopened copies of albums by a musician named James Daniel Emmanuel in a Dallas discount store.

He bought fifty, sold them to influential music lovers in LA, and contacted Emmanuel. The artist eventually helped Mcgowan with the remastering of some of the first Yoga releases; Mcgowan, in turn, helped Emmanuel issue more of his material.

In the next few years, Mcgowan reached out to other new age artists whose records and cassettes he found, but he didn’t feel the timing was right to promise anything. He described his initial interaction with harpist Joel Andrews, whose skittering, reflective 1977 piece, “Seraphic Borealis,” anchors the middle of disc one of “I Am the Center,” as typical.

“I said the same thing I said to a lot of the musicians I talked to … in 2007 and 2008, which is ‘I want to work with you on something someday, but the world’s not ready for it yet,’” he said.

In the meantime, music writers and record collectors continued to turn on to new age. In his EMP talk, Mcgowan cited the formation of Waxidermy, a blog devoted to rare vinyl records, as an engine for dialogue about the genre.

Once Sullivan—whose label has a five-person staff in LA and recently opened a retail store in Seattle—gave him the go-ahead, Mcgowan informed the artists he already knew and initiated contact with several more.

Altogether, they included Constance Demby, whose hypnotic piece, “Om Mani Padme Hum,” comes from a 1978 cassette called “Skies above Skies”; Don Slepian, who used a synthesizer at Bell Telephone Labs to create the twinkling soundscape on “Awakening,” a track on his 1980 cassette “Open Spaces”; and Judith Tripp, whose sober flute tones on “Li Sun” form part of a 1983 cassette called “Windscape.”

On the phone or over email, Mcgowan tried to convey his knowledge and appreciation of the artists’ work.

“I try to follow the campsite rule. Leave everything better than you found it,” he said. “So, never call somebody up and stress them out or make them wish you hadn’t contacted them. Always try to tell them that you have a genuine love for their music and go from there.”

Several musicians said they appreciated Mcgowan’s approach. Slepian, who still records in his home studio in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains, was happy to hear Mcgowan’s interest in a thirty-three year old release.

“I was impressed because he actually knew the music,” Slepian said.

Tripp, a practicing psychotherapist in Marin County, California, felt similarly.

“Doug was very clear in his commitment and I could sense his enthusiasm for this kind of music,” she said.

Once the musicians agreed to work with Mcgowan, Light in the Attic handled licensing their material. According to Sullivan, who opted not to share particular stories from the project, it was a sensitive step.

“Most of the time with reissues, [the records were] financial failures back in the day,” he said. “We come in the picture, we’re up against thirty or forty years of ghosts.”

Alongside compiling the music, Mcgowan found art for the outer and inner packaging of the set. The CD gatefold opens to reveal Gilbert Williams’s shimmering bird of paradise rising above a sea of light-emitting volcanoes, and the sleeves feature Janaia Donaldson’s silver spirals, stars, and eyes.

“It’s very important [that] the packaging flows with the sound,” Sullivan said.

Mcgowan also wrote liner notes intended to introduce the musicians without giving too much away. Slepian praised Mcgowan’s edit of a long description of his work with the Bell synthesizer; Tripp, who plays flute in workshops she leads called Dream Quests, expressed disappointment that more of her story didn’t make it in.

Since its release last October 29, “I Am the Center” has spent eight weeks in the top ten of Billboard Magazine’s new age chart, peaking at number eight. Pitchfork awarded it best new reissue status, and even Rolling Stone gave it three and a half stars.

Meanwhile, Mcgowan and Sullivan have already discussed future releases covering new age music from abroad. Slepian hinted at the volume of material that may await.

“If you go outside this country, it’s called spa music,” he said.

628 and 626 Cole Street, San Francisco, in Aug. 2013. My roommates and I lived in the first-floor apartment, through the door on the right. (Photo by Philippe Theise)

It was late 2013, and San Francisco was having a media moment. In the New Yorker, Nathan Heller wrote about tech investors and app designers engaged in a wealth-conscious party. On the front page of the New York Times, Erica Goode and Claire Cain Miller described a city where middle and working class tenants faced great difficulty holding onto their apartments, let alone competing for new ones. The boom culture comes about thirteen years after the dot-com bubble burst, when I was living with college friends in a single occupancy hotel in Hayes Valley. One of us moved into the first floor of a house at 626 Cole Street, just two blocks from Golden Gate Park, and when a room opened up in May 2001, I followed him.

The apartment had five rooms off a long hallway that led to the kitchen, a small back room, and outdoor stairs to the backyard and a second-floor unit. Paul often slept in the spacious front room with the bay window, unless he was visiting his parents in Philadelphia or housesitting for a friend. He earned an English degree from Penn after serving his tour, and he liked Camus. Emily lived in the next room and waited tables at Martin Mack’s, an Irish bar down Haight. Someone drew her portrait, and our upstairs neighbor, a recovering heroin addict also named Paul, printed it on tie-dye shirts he sold at the Haight Street Fair. Sam and Paul shared the smaller, mid-hallway room. Sam left college a few credits short of a Spanish degree and loved The Clash, and Sol sometimes brought his Stevie Ray Vaughn model Fender out of the case to jam. Along with Paul, the ex-ranger, Sam and Sol worked for Tonka, the moving company that gave me occasional shifts that summer.

I still don’t know much about Katie. In one of her Facebook photos, she’s looking down impassively at the camera like a mid-seventies rock god, and in another, the Jeepster tattoo beneath her neck extends above the top of an Ozzy Osbourne tank. She lived in the large room that overlooked the yard, where she had a rack full of punky shoes, and she worked as a dispatcher at a messenger company. She told us that Lars Frederiksen, the lead guitarist in SF punk heroes Rancid, had attended her birthday dinner. She was nineteen.

All the rooms were bedrooms, even the back one. It fit a compact couch and, at one point, three people.

Except for Emily, we didn’t wear our hair long. We didn’t attend drum circles in the park or volunteer to cook for Food Not Bombs. But we did talk. Sam slept on a foam camping pad, and one day, when Sol encroached on that slim rectangular space, Sam lectured him on “the one capitalist” thing he wanted for himself. Standing in his kitchen upstairs, Paul said that sobriety was a stonier trip than any of the junk he used to shoot. Our roommate Paul recalled a conversation with high school friends during the Reagan years about dialing out a suspected communist, and then discovering Howard Zinn years later. Elizabeth, a friend from Montana, cooked us a vegetable stew when we ran out of money. We pondered the obfuscating curves in the wrought-iron gate between our front steps and the street.

On the stoop, Sam said that something had happened to us when we were young, and that we had started to untangle it in the light of adulthood.

We had these moments and conversations in the Haight. Near the gutter punks who congregated by the McDonald’s at the corner of Stanyan. Amidst the other young people asking for food and change. Close to Mexican restaurants, record stores, head shops, and souvenir merchants selling rock history on colorful piles of heavy cotton tees. Close even to the basketball court on the Panhandle, the stretch of park that saw concerts in the sixties. The fog streamed down the street in the evenings, and the air felt damp in the house. I loved to borrow Sol’s red tweed Woolrich coat when he let me.

“Help an old hippie on Haight Street,” said a tall, cheerful man to passersby one night.

*

A distant view of the Golden Gate Bridge from near the top of Buena Vista Park, just a few blocks from the intersection of Haight and Ashbury Streets, in San Francisco. (Photo by Philippe Theise)

Before the hippies came the students. In the early 1960s, the Haight-Ashbury district’s declining Victorian homes provided low-budget housing for students at San Francisco State. Cafés numbered few, and restaurants numbered none, but public transportation ran through the neighborhood and it stood on the edge of the park. Some State students dressed in vintage clothing to match the period architecture. Histories of the era cite two September 6, 1965 articles in the San Francisco Examiner, “A New Paradise for the Beatniks” and “Hip New Hangout — The Blue Unicorn,” both with vivid leads describing mellow and sylphlike young people, as milestones in the growth of the area. The owner of the Unicorn, a coffee shop near the Panhandle, espoused “a striving for realization of one’s relationship to life and other people….”, a message he printed on leaflets.

That general goal comes up again and again in documentation of the period. Bob Weir, the rhythm guitarist for the Grateful Dead, claims that drugs did not create the efflorescence that followed the Examiner articles. “The bulk of what was happening in the summer of love was the exchange of ideas and attitudes and feelings,” he writes in his introduction to journalist Charles Perry’s “The Haight-Ashbury: A History,” and he identifies San Francisco’s arts- and lefty-friendly milieu as the movement’s true soil. But in the PBS Documentary “Summer of Love,” which focuses on the festivity and apprehension of 1967 and the gross letdown of 1968, San Francisco Chronicle music journalist Joel Selvin claims that LSD was “a fundamental building block in a new way of thinking,” and another subject admits that “we really thought that drugs were going to change the world.”

Media attention transformed the district as much as any chemical. Ralph Gleason, a jazz writer for the San Francisco Examiner, started covering the rock concerts in the city and eventually co-founded Rolling Stone. National magazines published stories and networks aired segments. In the PBS documentary, a woman from Boston talks about seeing pictures of hippies in her hometown newspaper and feeling the pull of San Francisco. Thousands of well-intentioned young adults arrived in 1967, and so did unabashed psychedelics and teen runaways. Didion wrote a little about the first group and plenty about the others. Painting the scene as a symptom of societal nonadhesion, she spoke with acid trippers, social activists, inexpressive children, a drug dealer, a cop, a psychiatrist, and she observed a five-year old whose mother gave her LSD. Where some saw promise, Didion saw intellectual blight. By the end of the sixties, heroin use in the Haight-Ashbury area increased, and businesses failed as people left. The bloom went bust.

Over thirty years later, as another local summer approached fall, Katie told me that she had spent the rent money we had given her in bars. I immediately empathized. Excessive drinking or drug use didn’t appeal to me, but excessive sugar intake did: devouring vegan cookies helped me smother important questions in the equivalent of gastrointestinal cement. Some of us smoked pot, acid made at least one appearance that summer, and sometimes our upstairs neighbor had guests who were also attempting to stay clean. This was still San Francisco: drug use and addiction ran in the streets like sluicing water in Paris.

At the house meeting, we sat in Katie’s room while she told us that it wouldn’t happen again and that she couldn’t sell her new bike to make up for the spent funds. I was already planning to move home, and Katie said she knew a couple that desperately needed a bed. “I’m interested in doing the right thing,” Sam said.

Years later, his ex-girlfriend told me about the fire.

*

My first slice of vegan cake came at a restaurant on Market Street devoted to the Indian spiritual entrepreneur, Sri Chinmoy. An alternative grocery store in Hayes Valley sold soy-based ice cream and dairy-free pumpkin pies, and the bodega nearest the hotel stocked sweetened corn puff cereal with no preservatives.

Having known various living arrangements, I can vouch that nothing compares to a single occupancy hotel for immoderate ingestion and private recovery.

After watching Neil Young and Crazy Horse stomp through “Cinnamon Girl” at the Warfield, I told Sam about my problem. But I never brought it up with him again.

Once I moved to Cole Street, the markets of Upper Haight served my needs. The Cala supermarket on Stanyan Street had a bulk bin of crystallized ginger in a corner, away from supervision. After I bought several rich desserts from a smaller grocer on Haight, the woman at the register took notice.

“You’re really going for it,” she said.

Orion, a Texan who worked at Tonka, brought me home a desk, but I don’t remember writing more than a letter on it. Writing required sitting, and if I sat, I would notice that I wanted something sweet to eat. So I biked up hills and ran to the ocean and moved furniture and wrote almost nothing.

Sol thought it was all in the way I looked at it. Emily put her arm around me when I told her.

On the morning of September 11, I woke up in my dark room with a digestive system full of fig cookies. I called my Dad for something, and he told me what had happened. I walked into the front room and found Paul sitting in front of a small TV. On one of our moves, he thanked our client, a Vietnam veteran, for his service, and said that America had been off its rocker.

“I thought the world was better than this,” he said.

I think he also said it changed everything.

*

Most of us had come from the northeast. I learned about the progressive activism in Northern California while volunteering in Boston for Ralph Nader’s presidential campaign. Paul’s friends founded Tonka’s first incarnation in Philadelphia. And Sol was born on the Farm, the Tennessee commune that emerged from the cross-country bus trip of a group of Bay Area hippies. He spent his teenage years in southern New Hampshire, where the response to his countercultural origin got him thinking about moving west.

“I was always this freak of nature hippie,” he said over the phone in late November, back in New Hampshire, with his eight-month old daughter, Rosie, burbling in the background. “I wanted to go somewhere that was a little more liberal and cultural.”

We might have lived in the Mission, the neighborhood where white and Latino artists and activists lived amidst a working class Latino population, but we weren’t organized enough for sustained creative or political engagement. Our friend Tonian curated exhibitions at an art gallery and dated a local rock star. She lived in the Mission. We belonged on the orphan Haight. And we were lucky to find a place.

In her book of collected photographs, “San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury,” Katherine Powell Cohen writes that “young people” had a harder time finding affordable housing in the area in the 1990s. Cohen’s observation also applies to the Mission, where Heller visited a tech-friendly hangout called The Sub and Goode and Cain-Miller interviewed Latino residents protesting gentrification. The dot-com collapse tempered San Francisco’s rental prices—as one commenter on an SF blog characterized the mid-2000s, “rents dropped some, but the big deal was that you could actually FIND a place”—but the current tech boom has pushed prices past the prohibitive to the absurd: in December 2012, the median asking price for an apartment hit $3,100 per month. Working class families that cannot find homes have far greater problems than people drawn to and rebuffed by the residual magic of an imagined Aquarian age. But what happens when hippies can’t live on Haight Street?

In August, on my first walk up the street in twelve years, I met Teri Tencer-Cutler, and I thought she might know. A thin, spry woman whose frizzy gray hair ends in purple tips, she works as a case manager at the Haight Street Referral Center, where scruffy travelers and other homeless youth come for food, rest, medical care, and help finding jobs and places to live. On the day I visited, a young man lay awake on one couch, and a teen with short, spiky hair sat open-mouthed and asleep on another. An array of cardboard appeals covered part of a wall. “Begging sucks. Compassion is better”; “Broke, love sick and drifting”; “It burns when I pee.” Someone tended a pot on a stove.

A native Angeleno, Tencer-Cutler moved to a house in the Richmond district, just northwest of the Haight, in 1975. “I was one of the ones who came looking for the summer of love,” she said. She was also looking for an education: after failing out of college and following the Dead with a friend, she completed a year at City College of San Francisco—an institution that charges in-state students $46 per credit but could lose its accreditation next July—and earned a BA in developmental psychology at San Francisco State. Her mid-seventies migration coincided with a trend: Cohen writes that after hippie residents left a deteriorating neighborhood in the late sixties, their fondness for the spirit of ’66 and ’67 and the area’s still-standing Victorian houses effected a partial homecoming in that pre-bicentennial year.

Tencer-Cutler moved to Connecticut with her husband in 1982, where she eventually worked as a child and adolescent psychotherapist. When he developed Parkinson’s disease, the couple decided to move back to San Francisco, and found a two-bedroom apartment in the Haight for $3,500 a month in the fall of 2011.

She thinks that the residents who arrived in a different era disdain the latter-day travellers who show up today.

“A lot of people have forgotten [that] ‘I was the homeless, I was that person,’” she said.

But the original hippies don’t just dislike their unwashed descendants, some of whom are headed towards picking jobs in the marijuana fields up the coast. They also resent the cleaner-cut tech workers who have driven up local housing costs and tend not to participate in community initiatives, she later told me over the phone.

With a late summer breeze audible in the background, Tencer-Cutler described how easily she moved to the city in ’75, when she paid $85 or $90 for her room. The young people she works with today still want to find a place in the Haight—some of them follow the musical offshoots of the Dead, whose members once lived at 710 Ashbury near Waller Street—but she has yet to meet a group of them who succeed.

“Reality hits them. They can’t make it here anymore. The only ones who can make it are the ones working for the dotcom companies.”

Private commuter buses, including one for Google employees, pass by the corner of Haight and Cole Streets in Aug. 2013. Anti-gentrification protesters blocked passage of such buses in the Mission District and in Oakland in December. (Photo by Philippe Theise)

But something beyond prices and procedures—Tencer-Cutler and her husband faced requests for credit checks, references, and bank account information when they tried, and failed, to find a less expensive apartment in the neighborhood earlier this year—also thwarts the seekers, stoners, and other American beauties who make their way to the enchanted heights beside Golden Gate Park. If you came to San Francisco in the sixties or seventies, she said, you were likely to find a place to crash. But things shifted around 1981, when the AIDS crisis emerged.

“People are afraid of each other now. I don’t see the camaraderie that I saw when I was younger,” she said.

But sometimes, the old connections do matter. When she applied to be a case manager at Larkin Street Youth Services, the organization that administers the referral center, she noticed that the other applicants were into punk. Tencer-Cutler told her interviewer that she loved the Dead, and got an offer to work on Haight.

“Being an old deadhead finally paid off,” she said. “I always tell my mother that.”

After I met her in August, I kept walking up Haight Street towards the park. I turned left at Frank’s Haight & Cole Liquors, where I called my parents from the pay phone before getting a cell, and saw the house. Two stories, with a spotless sea foam façade. Its bay windows undulated along with its neighbors’, and its front entrance columns, steps, and tall iron gate also blended in. A guy in a black t-shirt answered the doorbell and said he didn’t have time to talk. A regular at the café across the street told me that the firefighters cut a hole in the floor on the morning of the blaze.

*

Over 100 firefighters arrived at the house in the early morning of February 21, 2002. The first floor inhabitants got out unharmed and received help from the Red Cross. The Chronicle reporter wrote that Anatole Geiche, the landlord I remember as nebbish and helpful, said that he “saw some anti-Russian graffiti” in the burned building, and that someone who didn’t like him had committed arson. He also admitted to doing maintenance in a vacant upstairs unit the night before the flames. The SF Fire Department redacted Geiche’s name and address from its incident report, but the investigator who wrote it concluded that “this fire was of an incendiary nature.”

Over the phone, Sol told me that work slowed down after Sept. 11, and that he, Sam, and Paul couldn’t earn enough to make the rent. He decided to move out, put his stuff into Tonka’s warehouse, and flew to New Hampshire for a visit on Feb. 20.

When he called Katie to ask about the cell phone he left behind, he said, her voice was shaking. She later described waking up to the ceiling threatening to cave in.

Sol said he returned to San Francisco and found Geiche selling undamaged items from the house in a kind of macabre sidewalk sale. Various neighbors recall that 626-628 Cole Street stood boarded up for years. Property records online show that it sold for $900,000 in 2008, up from $510,000 in 1990.

Sol left San Francisco for good in 2005, and decided to stay in New Hampshire after dealing with a mental illness. He married a woman with a black belt in Taekwondo whose parents operate a martial arts school in the next town over from Henniker, his teenage home. When we lived together on Cole, Sol trained at a dojo in the South of Market neighborhood, and he and Paul watched videos of Thai kickboxers. He sees finding a sensei and starting a family as part of his circuit out west and back.

“A lot of what I was trying to do was a spiritual journey, cause I’m pretty heavily into Buddhist meditation,” he told me on Thanksgiving weekend. “I feel like I did kind of place my trust in a higher power, [and] I got my dream in the martial arts, I figured out what was wrong with me.”

But he also dreams of San Francisco.

“Sometimes I’ll be trying to find the place I lived,” he said. “It’s like I’m transported there, I can feel the streets and the buildings. I have a lot of them.”

I asked him what we could have done differently on Cole Street. He mentioned having a communal living space, “something where we were all connected.”

“We weren’t working together,” he said. “It would have been nice if we all made dinners and did chores and volunteered our time.”

We met in the hallway, the kitchen, our rooms, and on the stoop. Rarely altogether. One time, Katie walked squinting into the front room, like a beetle with bedhead, after we had taken ecstasy.

“The love bug,” Sam uttered.

After the house burned, Sol lived in what he described as a superintendent’s room near Lower Haight. Our old roommates had mostly left. He said he “could never really nail anybody down to be a solid friend.”

“I think that’s the thing that I was really lacking in my life out there,” he said. “There are so many people that come and go in San Francisco.”

But for the tech workers, current reports describe more departures than arrivals.

*

The YMCA in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Above the cardio machines and weight-lifting stations, single- and double-occupancy rooms house travelers, tourists, and the needy. (Photo by Philippe Theise)

What makes a place home? Almost nine years after leaving San Francisco, I was trying to move back to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a former navvy of a riverfront neighborhood experiencing its own gentrification. The combination of the daylight on old brick apartment and factory buildings and the lack of a direct train to Manhattan still gives it a quiet, holy cast. A lumpy twin bed at the Greenpoint YMCA costs $50 a night, and for a few days at a time I would look for a permanent room before boarding the bus back to my parents’ condo in Boston.

After one fruitless stretch, I packed my bags and checked out. I was sitting on a bench in the lobby while members came in through the doors on Meserole Avenue, the afternoon sunlight behind them. The thought of the hump to Port Authority and the solitary ride home made me more tired than I already was. And then Sophia walked in, and asked if I could arrange a review of her fiancée’s film in the local paper. And then I saw Josh, my ornery former roommate, who had recently graduated from near-perennial status as a master’s candidate in library science.

“I know I wear a scowl like some people wear sweaters,” he once wrote to me.

Sitting with my bags, talking with my friends, I realized that I would surrender to the feeling of wanting to stay. It didn’t make a lot of sense to pay $50 for another night, but what, in the end, makes sense about being in the places we love? The woman at the desk gave me another room with a TV and a large bed with a shiny burgundy comforter. In the dim light, I sat down and realized that I wanted to die here, in Greenpoint, my neighborhood of light, friends and dreams.

Recently, while walking east on Commercial Street towards the Pulaski Bridge into Queens, I saw the cobblestoned sidewalk in front of No. 95, a three-story building that houses the offices of The Brooklyn Rail, a thick monthly devoted to art and politics. Discolored taupe brick covered the upper two floors of the building, but a whitish red paving ran around the tall windows on the first. The ruddy façade surrounded Glasserie, an upscale Middle Eastern restaurant that opened in June, as well as the local outpost of a popular ice cream shop.

A man wearing khakis and a tie walked toward an old Mercedes sedan parked in front of the entrance to the building’s courtyard. The car was taupe, too, and I commented on the automotive and architectural coincidence. The man introduced himself as the building manager, and we talked about the noise from recent construction in the area, and about developers’ plans to erect tall residential buildings on a lot at 77 Commercial, near a larger site where another group plans to erect ten towers along the water.

He told me that the new red bricks around Glasserie were selected to preserve the character of the Brooklyn industrial neighborhood. And that they came from Boston and Connecticut.

Red and bricks from Boston and Connecticut surround the windows of Glasserie, a Middle Eastern restaurant, and the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory on Commercial Street in Greenpoint. (Photo by Philippe Theise)

Naomi Greenwald and her band at the Mercury Lounge in New York City on April 4, 2013. The show celebrated the release of her new EP, “Composite.” (Philippe Theise)

Singer-songwriter Naomi Greenwald would prefer to be interviewed in the late evening or early morning, when some musicians might be out on the town or sleeping it off.

But Greenwald, who is also a fourth-year doctoral student in comparative literature, is in the midst of writing a dissertation on the figure of the neighbor in Gothic literature, and likes to have her days uninterrupted to write.

Coincidentally, her neighbor in Los Angeles is also writing a dissertation.

“It’s hysterical,” said Greenwald in a phone interview in mid-April. “We never see each other because we never leave the house.”

Greenwald, 32, tends to make any trips outside her apartment count. She teaches spinning classes at her local YMCA, and plays guitar as a volunteer for The Art of Elysium, an organization that provides arts programming for children with illnesses. The week before we spoke, she was belting out songs from her new EP, Composite, with a four-piece band at the Mercury Lounge in New York City.

The diverse yet disciplined EP comes two years after Greenwald’s debut, Darkbloom, and reflects an interweaving of her literary interests and musical sensibilities. And her cheerful, commanding stage presence shows that she’s come a long way from the days when her hands would shake before a gig.

Greenwald lived in New York for most of her twenties, surrounded by lots of opportunities to perform and, at New York University, enough successful indie rockers to exacerbate her stage fright. Though she wrote songs and eventually found a bandmate, she decided at 24 that she was too old to build a musical career and enrolled in a master’s program instead.

Ironically, the challenge of writing about European philosophy and modernist literature at the New School for Social Research, where I met Greenwald, altered her ethos in a way that eventually led her back to music.

“I think that it became part of my identity at that time to do precisely what I was afraid of,” she recalled. “And to do it as best I could.”

Darkbloom, a rich full-length whose musical palette ranges from The Shadows’ ominous twang through ‘90s alt-rock, came first in 2011. Composite features mostly quieter songs, with lyrics that reference a Frank O’Hara poem and the character of Caddy in William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury, a young woman who has the author’s affection, but not her own chapter.

“She never gets a voice,” Greenwald said, in the husky, carbonated alto that is her own.

“James Harris,” the last song on the EP, goes even further. It takes the figure of the “demon lover” from a 17^th-Century Scottish border ballad, since reimagined by the writer Shirley Jackson and Bob Dylan, and combines it with the story of one of Greenwald’s past relationships.

The particular musical styles on Composite range from haunting parlor pop to the anthemic, festival-ready blast of “Portraits,” in which Greenwald mentions O’Hara and “a porch made of words.” If you ever wanted to hear poetics and power pop in the same package, listen no further.

Greenwald said that she was listening to an abundance of sources while recording the new record, including indie favorites such as Neutral Milk Hotel and Black Heart Procession. She also cited more recent acts like Ariel Pink and Real Estate.

“[They were] referencing old stuff that I always wanted to reference, but they had their own twist on it,” she said.

Wearing a gray fedora, a sheer black top and tight black pants at the Mercury Lounge, Greenwald asked fans to come closer before ripping into “Cautionary Tale,” a Darkbloom track about an unappreciative long-distance lover. “My whole family’s here and I love it!” she later declared, a filial sentiment once uncommon in rock and roll.

Speaking after the show, her father, an oncologist in Kingston, Penn., praised his daughter’s songs but said he wants her to finish her doctorate—“because I’m realistic,” he said.

But who knows which is more realistic: an academic career in a difficult job market, or a musical career in an age when a determined artist can market herself? On the cover of Composite, an image of Greenwald, her hair cut pioneer-short, looks into the distance amidst groups of overlapping triangles in lavender and blue. This isn’t a hobby; it’s an imperative.

At the same time, her father needn’t worry: back in L.A., Greenwald is nearly done with the first chapter of her dissertation. Over the phone, she talked about Emmanuel Levinas, the French philosopher who believed that “subjectivity is formed in the face of the other,” as she explained. Considering Greenwald’s progressive development of her music and her scholarship, it seems that Levinas’s idea applies just as well to parts of her self.

James Smith unearths his copy of Evelyn King’s 1982 album, “Get Loose.” (Philippe Theise)

“Do you ever feel like you’re visiting in your own neighborhood?”

That, approximately, is what Randy Delgado, who worked at Myrtle Avenue’s Dope Jams, a record store that carried underground dance and nurtured a weird, collective flame for non-conformist lovers of the beat, asked James Smith as he shopped for club classics on a cold night in January.

Smith nodded. The exchange occurred about two weeks before Dope Jams closed its doors near the end of that month, victim of a rent increase.

The store brought Smith up the avenue from the apartment he shares with his mother and cousin in the Ingersoll Houses, past Connecticut Muffin at Clinton Avenue, past the Utrecht Art Supplies store in front of Pratt, and past the Emerson, one of the new bars near Dope Jams’ former location at 505 Myrtle.

But Smith, 45, had been making the walk since the early eighties, when he and his mother left the Williamsburg Houses on Bushwick Avenue to move into Ingersoll. And it was in a park near the old William Gaynor Intermediate School on Graham Avenue where Smith first saw DJs tapping electricity from light poles to spin records.

“I loved how they [played],” he said, while standing in the hallway of his apartment in February, going through the l’s and m’s in the long plastic crates of vinyl stacked against a wall.

Smith takes out Gwen McCrea’s slinky, mid-tempo fantasia, “Funky Sensation”; Linda Clifford’s brassy version of the affronted disco diva’s statement of independence, “Runaway Love”; and Melba Moore’s jaunty, lite celebration of new romance, “You Stepped into My Life.”

He keeps his 70s records in his bedroom, along with his playcrate—a DJ’s ready trove of essential cuts—and stores more crates of disco, hip-hop, and other genres like reggae and gospel in a spare room.

[I’ve got] “every Four Tops, Temptations, Jackson Five, Stevie Wonder, Supremes,” Smith said. That goes for Jay-Z, too: Smith’s got a brick of Hova releases that any young hip-hop collector would envy.

He’s been collecting since the mid-eighties, when he and a friend would take the F train to Coney Island on Sundays and hit the flea markets on Surf Avenue. But Catherine Smith, James’s mother, said that her son was picking up discarded records off the pavement and bringing them home as a child. Sitting in her kitchen, she recalls the day her five-year-old placed a 45 on the table and imitated a record player.

“He made his finger spin it,” she said, thinking that she had a drummer or a DJ on her hands.

“‘Look, don’t be bringing no records into the house,’” she recalls telling her son, with the hallway stack looming behind her.

Smith remembers Ms. Zaichik, his elementary school teacher at PS 84, bringing in records and other gifts for her students on Friday afternoons, and he said she kept a portable turntable in the classroom. He recalls that she gave him a seven-inch copy of Moore’s hit.

Smith attended PS 84 after his teachers determined that he read slowly. He had already attended two other elementary schools, and would graduate from William Gaynor, a school the city eventually closed in 2009 for inadequate academic performance. Smith then left Eastern District, a high school that suffered from overcrowding and violence before closing in 1995, without a diploma.

Throughout his years of schooling, Smith never took a music class, and said that Ms. Zaichik is the only teacher whose name he remembers.

In the late eighties, Smith started hanging out outside a used appliance shop near Gaynor on Graham Avenue, where he learned to fix washing machines, dryers, TVs and air conditioners. The owner paid him off the books, and he earned about $150 on a good week. James keeps a collection of photographs attached to worn cardboard backs in his bedroom, and one shot depicts him smiling in front of a workbench lined with TVs in the shop’s basement. In another image, he’s standing in front of a turntable and mixer, headphones around his neck.

Smith looks happy in both pictures, but in the one with the headphones, his smile is so thick and brilliant it appears edible.

The appliance shop closed about seven years ago, and an occasional deejay gig at Family Day at the Williamsburg Houses hasn’t come through in a few years. Smith last spun records at a baby shower in 2011, and said that neighbors sometimes ask him for help fixing machines. He’s approached business owners to inquire about maintenance work, and sometimes comes away with a card, but no applications. Last year, he started collecting aluminum cans and redeeming them for nickels.

But he moves with vigor while handling the heavy black crates in the hallway. He speaks with precise, hip diction—“Them motherfuckers are picky,” he says about the buyers at Williamsburg’s Academy Records—when talking about the tendrils of the record game that still reach into his life. The discs he’s scored for dollars sell for much more at premium shops like Academy; at Dope Jams, when Delgado wondered about the origin of a sample on a house track, Smith often knew the source.

He wants, more than anything, to spin again. “[I] love the atmosphere of the crowd,” he said. “[It] keeps me functioning.”

And Smith can prove that he knows how to blend and alter sound. In the opening minute of a mix he co-created last year under his DJ alias, Rock Masta Pat, electric guitar skitters over snare and hi-hat like diamonds over onyx, and then a steadier line evokes the smooth, sinister theme from Knight Rider. At about 1:45, the bass takes on the same post-punk cast as New Order’s in “Ceremony,” and then everything shifts into a cowbell-fueled party jam headlined by a flamboyant MC. Smith scratches, the vinyl sources pop, and flashes of Chic’s “Good Times” precede a crackling series of handclaps. Despite some glitches in the recording, most of the 14 tracks that follow, mini-mixes themselves, are equally eclectic and satisfying.

According to Casey Block, a DJ and used record dealer who works weekends at Williamsburg’s Artists and Fleas market, having a good mix cd is one way a DJ can convince people to give him a chance to spin. But there are other factors, too, that are as important as mixing skills and musical knowledge.

Surrounded by crates of collectible vinyl near the start of spring, Block laid it clean: bars and clubs are primarily looking for “people [who] bring out people, rather than people who play excellent music.”

“[If] none of your friends come out, a lot of times you won’t get rehired,” he said.

With turnout being essential, promotion is key. Speaking two weeks later, Block explained that some DJs send near-weekly emails to alert fans about upcoming events. Block likes to post on Facebook in advance, and then text “nine people at once—the most the iphone will let you”—on the day of the gig.

Smith doesn’t have a computer or a smart phone. More problematic, though, may be his small social circle: he speaks often with a friend, Angelo, with whom he made a 2011 mix, and stays in touch with two more friends who live in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Smith’s regular trips to 505 Myrtle, where fellow voyagers roamed the stacks, are over. He likes to spend time in his room, and said that he doesn’t talk to many people when’s he out of his apartment. He will need to make new connections to find opportunities to spin.

If he can, Smith might find an audience for his style. Block said that 90s r&b is having a moment, as late twenty- and early thirty-somethings want to hear the mainstream smashes of their youth. The era of Mary J. Blige and En Vogue isn’t too far from Smith’s sweet spot of 70s and 80s disco and r&b.

It’s clear from the thousands of records in his home, and from the speakers, mixer, and five turntables in his room, that sharing his love of music is what Smith wants most.

“[There’s] nothing better,” he said.

Dope Jams, a former record and music culture shop at 580 Myrtle Avenue, in mid-January. Co-owners Francis Englehardt and Paul Nickerson decided to close the store-front after a rent increase. (Philippe Theise)

Clinton Hill’s Dope Jams, a record store specializing in underground dance music, closed its storefront at 580 Myrtle Avenue in the wee hours of Sunday, Jan. 27 after a seven-year run and an epic party. In recent conversations, co-owner Francis Englehardt, employee Randy Delgado, and several customers and partygoers described the shop as a community-oriented space within a shifting neighborhood.

“It was this weird little area”

On a mid-January afternoon in his shop, Englehardt, 36, sat near a worn orange sofa and packed purchased records for shipment. A stack of vinyl covered part of the front counter — Rockwell’s 80s hit, “Somebody’s Watching Me,” was on top — and employees played tracks from the elevated deejay booth in the back of the store.

Nothing of the scene suggested what Englehardt and co-owner Paul Nickerson had already revealed online: due to a rent increase, Dope Jams would become an online-only shop after its closing fete. While handling the orders, Englehardt talked about the changes he has seen on the Clinton Hill and Bedford Stuyvesant border, as well as in the retail music world, since opening in January 2006.

“It was this weird little area. It wasn’t Park Slope, it wasn’t Williamsburg,” he said of the neighborhood near the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and Pratt Institute that attracted him back in 2005. “It hadn’t quite been gentrified yet. The neighbors still knew each other.”

The lack of what he described as Williamsburg’s “gloss” appealed to him. “We just wanted to go to a place where we could be ourselves.”

DVDs, Books, Musik, Magick: the vinyl-bathing devils of Dope Jams. (Philippe Theise)

Approaching 580 Myrtle from Pratt in 2013, it’s easy to see that the avenue has changed. Just across Classon Avenue, the 1-year-old Brooklyn Tap House has a large mural that depicts the borough’s eponymous bridge. Across Myrtle, Brooklyn Bird, which opened in December, serves chicken wings, fish tacos and sandwiches. Meanwhile, metal grates cover the old location of Wally’s Square Root Café, an eclectic restaurant that closed last fall.

Englehardt said that the economics of vinyl has changed, too. That afternoon, the Rockwell record sold for $3.99, and there were still bargain bins underneath the regular stacks in the shop. But in 2013, Dope Jams sold new vinyl for $15 to $30, compared to $8 to $12 in 2006. A record “has become a luxury item” for the consumer, Englehardt said.

While retail prices climbed, the business’s slim profit margin remained constant. Englehardt pays $11 or $12 for a record that sold in the shop for $15, about a 20% to 30% markup. Dope Jams, he said, never made sense financially as a storefront; staying open depended on income from events such as onsite dance parties.

“That’s the joke about this business,” he explained.

The co-owner described the store as “more like an art project,” a place that would lose its “energy” in relocation. More dimly lit than record shops like Academy in Williamsburg, Dope Jams’ dark wooden shelves, burning incense, and mystical objects — a sculpture of a phoenix-like bird was attached to one wall — conveyed a sense of ritual, which complemented the beat-heavy inventory.

Englehardt’s non-aggressive tone suggested an understanding of Dope Jams’ coming closure as a crossfade, not a lifted needle or a damaged groove. At the same time, something special was ending.

“Physically, we can move the shelves,” he said of his store. “But it will never be the same.”

Contradictions and Condos

On Tuesday, January 22^nd, Randy Delgado, 26, played Donato Dozzy’s remix of Tin Man’s “Nonneo” from Dope Jams’ deejay booth. James Smith, 45, a store regular who lives in the Ingersoll Houses in Fort Greene and has spun records since his teens, stood next to him.

Delgado grew up in Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst, and said that his high school friends stayed put and “got jobs at Con-Ed” after graduation. He talked about feeling frustrated with gentrification around Dope Jams, and about the futility of staying frustrated.

“All these new people are coming in, saying, ‘This is so cool. Oh, you’re closing?’ Well, you’re the reason,” Delgado said. “It’s not their fault, it’s not an intentional thing.”

Meanwhile, Chris Hickey, 22, drifted into the center of the store from the stacks against the wall. He had greasy blond hair and wore a black motorcycle jacket.

“I’m a newcomer,” Hickey said. “I just wanted to get out of Connecticut.”

Mr. Hickey moved to Bed-Stuy four months ago from Manchester with his band, Stamps the Goat. The band made a pilot for a show called “Silk City” about “having nothing to do” back home, he said.

He told Delgado that his record player is still in Connecticut.

“Get your record player here!” Delgado replied, smiling.

After Hickey left the shop, Delgado asked, “How can you be mad at someone like him, 22, chasing his dream? You can’t!”

“No one wants to contradict themselves, but that’s when you’re at your happiest.”

Smith, who had been hunting for classic hip-hop while Hickey and Delgado spoke, said he comes into Dope Jams every day and keeps 90 crates of records in his apartment. When I asked him how the surrounding area has changed, he mentioned new restaurants, bars, and condos.

“The rents [are] high. Everybody can’t afford it,” he said. “This place used to be a church.”

Mr. Smith also said he would attend Saturday night’s event.

“Can’t miss this last party.”

“A miracle has happened”

The interior of Dope Jams, just before midnight on Saturday, Jan. 26, during its closing party. (Philippe Theise)

By 11 pm on Saturday, Jan. 26, Dope Jams reverberated with house tracks and joyful whoops. A doorman estimated that 170 people had already bought $20 wristbands, and he expected to sell 230 more. Delgado got the crowd going early, with Englehardt and Nickerson set to spin later on.

In the line outside, partygoers shared their impressions and memories of the store.

Kev Cattrell said he attended multiple Halloween parties at Dope Jams, and cited the “unique deejays” at its events. Kelsey, a grad student living in New Jersey who gave only her first name, said she enjoys the store’s mix-cds.

Sasha Stoikov, 37, made a distinction both subtle and epochal.

“It feels like New York, as opposed to Brooklyn,” he said. “A miracle has happened here.”

Hannah Flor, 32, and Frantz Barosy, 30, met at a Dope Jams party in July 2009 for the first time. Standing in the freezing air, they recalled buying ice cream sandwiches from a nearby bodega to cool off.

The parties “bring out a really diverse group of people who are super-excited to be here,” Flor said.

“I’m gonna miss it,” Barosy said.

A little earlier, after his deejay set, Delgado, wearing a gray Orioles hat and white Nike high-tops, took a shift outside to work the door. “A friend is dying,” he said, during a quiet moment.

Behind him and inside, the music, smiles, and packed dance floor made for an ecstatic funeral, and as much of a passage as a passing. Englehardt plans to find new locations to host future events; Dope Jams will live on.

True to form, Delgado didn’t stay with the thought for long.

“I bought my first record here,” he said. “It’s awesome.”

1:42 am and still going strong: Dope Jams in its last few hours at 580 Myrtle Avenue. (Philippe Theise)

Submitted for class on Dec. 15, 2012

Hakim Abdurraheem, a board member of the Street Vendor Project, speaks alongside vendors and fellow board members Maria Leone, left, and Guadelupe Galicia, right, at a rally near the corner of 8th Avenue and 32nd Street on Thursday, Dec. 13. (Philippe Theise)

Over 30 street vendors rallied on Thursday, Dec. 13 at the corner of 8^th Avenue and 32^nd Street to urge City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to help pass legislation that would reduce fines for violations of city code.

“We are all small businesspeople,” said Hakim Abdurraheem, a board member of the Street Vendor Project, which organized the rally. “We cannot afford these fines and stay in business.”

The fines Abdurraheem referred to can reach $1,000. But Job Sarabia, a vendor who sold pastries, bagels, and coffee out of a silver cart just behind the rally, said that a city inspector charged him $1,200 earlier this year for displaying an expired license, even though the vendor had a new, valid license that he immediately produced when presented with the ticket.

Sarabia also said that he recently received a $300 fine for having a quarter-gallon of milk over 41 degrees, despite intending to pour out the liquid and close for the day.

The vendor said that he usually makes $300 a week after expenses, and $400 or $500 when business is good.

“We’re making a living, we’re not getting rich,” he said.

Board member Maria Leone, who sells scarves and hats in Soho, said that she can’t afford the fines, and later said that tourists who used to accept her $10 and $5 prices now try to bargain her down.

“It’s too high. The economy is worse.  We just work for tickets now!” she said.

Sarabia, Leone, and their fellow vendors want Quinn to allow a vote on Intro 434, a bill that would reduce the highest fine to $250, and Intro 435, which would insure that fines increase only if vendors repeatedly break the same provision, rule, or regulation. City Council Member Stephen Levin introduced the bills in 2010.

According to her office, the speaker is “reviewing the legislation.”

Daniel Biederman, a consultant and the co-founder and president of the 34^th Street Partnership, a Business Improvement District, called the food carts that dot the area around Madison Square Garden and Penn Station “a disgrace,” with “horrendous-looking neon signs” and generators that emit fumes.

He also objected to the placement and size of the carts, claiming that pedestrians walk in the street at rush hour for the lack of sidewalk space.

“We spent 50 million in capital improvements,” Biederman said. “[The carts] ruin everything we’ve accomplished.”

Biederman also said that the vendors themselves “are not unreasonable people,” and that he would not oppose the presence of fewer, smaller carts with “aesthetic standards.”

He said that the Street Vendor Project mischaracterizes its members as “the little guy.”

“These are not small businesses, these are big businesses,” Biederman said. “They’re not the owners, almost all these carts are run by entrepreneurs.”

But according to Sean Basinski, a former vendor who directs the Project, the issue is not who owns the carts, but who pays the fines.

“We would not be worrying about these issues if there was some big company paying these fines,” Basinski said.

Street vendor Job Sarabia waves to a departing customer from his cart near the corner of 32nd Street and 8th Avenue on Thursday, Dec. 13. Sarabia, who earns between $300 and $500 per week, said that city fines are disproportionate to vender income. (Philippe Theise)

Sarabia, who has been vending for about 10 years, said he always has to pay when he gets a ticket.

“I get the ticket. [I] pay. That’s the way it works.”

Biederman, who said that vendors have approached him after civic meetings to express favor for improved health standards for carts, criticized the complexity of current vendor regulations.

“Even a PhD couldn’t understand them,” he said.

In the months ahead, the Street Vendor Project aims to place 5,000 stickers featuring a smiling Quinn and an outline of its position on carts around the city, with an eye toward next year’s mayoral election.

“[Quinn is] running for mayor now, she needs to listen to the people,” Basinski said.

Submitted for class on Dec. 5, 2012

Bobby Jay, a DJ and singer, and John Runowicz, an ethnomusicologist, talk doo-wop after the memorial service for Earl “Speedo” Carroll at the Abyssian Baptist Church in Harlem on Wednesday, Dec. 5. (Philippe Theise)

Members of the New York City doo-wop community gathered at the Abyssian Baptist Church in Harlem yesterday to remember Earl “Speedo” Carroll, the lead singer of The Cadillacs who also sang in The Coasters and worked as a long-time custodian at PS87.

“I imagine there may be a few people in here who can sing,” said Reverend Dr. Calvin O. Butts, III, before asking for help with “Amazing Grace” near the start of the service.

Attendees praised Carroll, whose primary group sang the 50s hits “Gloria,” “Down the Road,” and “Speedoo,” for his sartorial style, onstage dancing, and constant cheer.

Every time we saw him, there was a smile on his face, smile in his voice,” said Bobby Jay, a DJ and singer who first saw The Cadillacs perform at the Apollo Theatre in 1956.

“All you can do is say ditto,” said Barbara Toomer, an original member of 60s girl group The Toys.

In front of the chapel stage, there was an enlarged photograph of Carroll smiling in a mint green tuxedo jacket. In a photo at the luncheon downstairs, same smile, different jacket: tangerine.

According to John Runowicz, who served as musical director of The Cadillacs from 1987 to 2010 and wrote “Forever Doo-Wop: Race, Nostalgia, and Vocal Group Harmony,” Carroll’s band was a force in their genre.

“They were known as the closer. Nobody wanted to follow them,” he said.

In his eulogy, Reverend Butts used the main lyric from “Speedoo”—“Well now they often call me Speedoo / But my name is Mr. Earl”—to propose that Carroll’s celebrity was just one part of a well-lived life, which included over four decades as a husband and over two decades as a custodian at PS 87 on West 78^th Street.

Butts also read lines from Langston Hughes’s 1940 poem about cultural theft and narrative reclamation, “Note on Commercial Theater,” to encourage young African-American audience members to research and tell the stories of African-American entertainers.

“Talk to the people who were there,” he said.

On this day, it was easy.

“This whole neighborhood is doo-wop,” said Donald Gatling, currently a member of Lisa and the Lovetones.

A few moments later, Gatling confirmed to a departing attendee that he would see him at rehearsal next Tuesday.