Since I arrived back in Newark - after a 7-day-driving-marathon from San Francisco, California to New York - on 26 May 1972, a hot & muggy Friday, with no money at all, I had to make ends meet in an erratic way. I remember the exact moment Carey & Paul dropped me off on Ferry Street and waved goodbye. For a few moments I felt like a child abandoned to its own devices. After a little while I collected started walking towards Wilson Avenue and went into the back kitchen of the go-go bar on the corner of Wilson Ave & Barbara St to see Rodrigo who had been working at Alberto's bar kitchen since late 1971. I asked him to mind my suitcase and guitar while I went around to Sing Sing to try and find some of the friends I had left behind.
I wrote my Father in Brazil asking him for US$ 300 - but it would take 3 to 4 weeks for the money-order to come through in the mail. So in the meantime I made do relying on other people's charity. I promptly started visiting the few friends I still had left in the Ironbound around dinner time to share their bounty. Off the top of my head I remember Kuwenderson Walk, a young man from Bahia I had met in early 1972, and Damazio Nazaré, from Guarulhos-SP who I had worked with at the record factory - two friends who helped me with some food and sympathy.
When I realized I couldn't find a job in San Francisco due to my lack of English I thought I'd solve this problem by going back East where factory work was a-plenty. Little did I know I was in for a rude awakening for when I arrived back in Newark in late May, I was told by my former employer they were not hiring at that moment due to their annual Collective Vacation in June - they'd shut down the whole factory for 4 weeks. I was mortified for I had no money to rent a room. I would stay over at friends' places and wander the streets of Newark until they came back from work and I could share a meal and a little corner in their flat for the night.
When Father's money-order finally arrived I rented me a room to have some privacy. I don't remember which place though. There's a fog in my mind when I try to recall details of those difficult days. It was June and it was stinking hot and muggy. Some days I waited for hours for Kuwenderson to knock off his cleaning job at Newark's Police Station so I could eat with him. He was a strange fellow. We had become friends in the bitter 71-72 winter. We were both into revolutionary politics. Kuwenderson was a Marxist-Leninist but conservative socially speaking. He could have easily lent me 50 or a 100 dollars to tide me over during that period but he was adamant in withholding cash. Like that song 'money's too tight to mention'... Brazilians in general buy you a meal but they never lend you money under any circumstances.
While I waited for my Father's money-order to come in the mail I wandered through every nook and cranny in the Ironbound. As the name suggests there were myriad railway tracks criss-crossing the area. There was a freight train railway coming from the north side of Penn Station which crossed Ferry Street overhead between Prospect St. and Congress St. It has since been demolished giving rise to Iberia restaurant & a parking lot at 80-84 Ferry St. I remember buying myself a copy of Brazilian weekly tabloid 'O Pasquim' at Tia Eugênia's news agency, entering the lot, climbing up to the overhead tracks, sitting myself down near the vegetation and reading the humorous paper for a couple of hours. It usually took me 2 hours to read the main interview, various cartoons and articles.
Reading 'O Pasquim' in such a situation was remarkably healing. It made me detach myself from my own plight and took me right back to Mum's place at Vila Madalena or Bela Vista where I had been happy-and-content but didn't know it until then. It revived me intelectually. It reminded me that after all I could speak, read and write at least one language properly. It made me feel whole again. I was not only a person who spoke 'broken English' and could not understand what was said on the radio or the plots of movies at 42nd Street cinemas.
Having been living the life of a foreign immigrant in the USA for 8 months had taken its toll on my self-esteem. Even though I was feeling much better after my trip to San Francisco in April when I had the supreme joy to re-establish a nurturing friendship with Nino I was still battered intelectually for having fallen down the social scale. Me & Nino had the chance to talk about all aspects of the life of a migrant and his difficulties in a new environment.
No matter how hard I try to recall those trying days it's all in a fog. I must have worked somehow during this period for I distinctly remember being inside a huge place like a food court in one of those brand-new buildings near Pennsylvania Station. Actually, it was on 2 Gateway Center, a brand-new 18-story black office building on the corner of Market St & McCarter Hwy that was linked with Penn Station by a series of foot-bridge-corridors.
The Getway commercial complex (in 1972 only 1 & 2) was self-contained, allowing tenants and visitors to remain within the interior. A pedestrian mall one level above the street connected all parts of the complex connected to Penn Station by a glass-enclosed skywalk that extended over Raymond Plaza.
Another skywalk extended across McCarter Highway to connect Gateway One and Gateway Two. The skywalks were intended to separate vehicular and pedestrian traffic and provided safety and security to wary commuters. These were completed by 1972.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_Center_(Newark)
I had been taken to this huge food court at 2 Gateway Center by a Brazilian fellow I don't remember anymore. It was after-hours for the place was deserted with no food service going on. He handed me a huge vacuum cleaner and told me I was to clean the whole floor filled with tables and chairs. I had to stack up big piles of black chairs and then reach for the vacuum cleaner to clean up the premises.
I started at 5 o'clock pm when the sun was still hot outside (it was summer) and the crowd had already left for New York City or other places in New Jersey. This part-time job didn't last long though. I remember I didn't like working there all that much. I was all by myself the whole time, in such a huge space; I felt dejected; it was like everyone else had gone home and I was left behind to clean after them. I probably worked one a couple of days and didn't even collect the pay. I must have been depressed for the job was not that bad after all.
Around this time, high summer of 1972, I remember working at a small factory which was actually a sort of workshop on Laffayette Street for nearly a week. Somehow when I got back to Newark I thought I might be elegible to collect Unemployment Benefit. I was told that in case I started working under a different name I could receive money from the Government with my true social security card and real wages on top working under a different name. I was given an SS card of someone called Dimas who'd left his card back when he went back to Brazil.
When I found this factory job on Laffayette St. I introduced myself as Dimas and was told I would work the night shift. It was not a real factory but an industrial lot with a few machines to manufacture plastic components of electrical grids. My mission was to operate a big machine 3 times de size of those record-making-machines I had worked with in the previous winter. I had to open and shut a big glass door while two horizontal sides pressed on each other with molten plastic injecting into a mould. I had to wait a moment to open the glass door again and withdraw the finished product. I repeated the same motion countless times from 10:00 pm till 8:00 am in the next morning. I remember there was a railway line just in the back of the lot and every now and then I could see a long freight train going by. This was the only distraction I had for the longest possible night. It was lonely but not as bad as the restaurant near Penn Station.
One night I had to miss work for some reson I can't recall. My boss then rang Dimas to know what happened and obviously didn't find anyone by that name. I assumed I had been sprung and fearing consequences I never went back there. Not even to collect the cheque for the days already worked. So I was back at square one, unemployed again.
When July finally came I was happy to go back to my former job at the record factory on Francis Street. This time I worked the afternoon shift. I guess I was more self-assured now, glad to hold a full-time job again after 5 months 'on the run'. I enjoyed immensely working side by side with a big Cuban girl who would talk 8 hours straight. Never a dull moment. Amazing I don't remember her name. She'd teach me how a real Cuban pronounces words. They drop Bs all together. Cuba becomes Cu_a. No B whatsoever.
We knocked off work at a quarter-to-twelve pm and a group of fellow employees walked all the way from Francis Street where our factory stood to Penn Station - always talking about anything that came to mind. I could finally use English for the first time even if everyone spoke broken English. Some of the Black Haitian boys stopped there to have something to eat before taking a train or bus elsewhere. I kept on walking past Penn Station on Market Street and would cross over bustling McCarter Highway to the other side.
The other side of the tracks was exactly that: the shadier side of Newark where large stretches of street blocks had been torched during the infamous 1967 riots. No more Portuguese, only Hispanics and Blacks. There was nothing open at this hour. In the morning you could have ham'n'eggs in a joint owned by a Puerto Rican fellow on Columbia Street past Green Street toward Laffayette Street. The area was 'rough'; half industrial, half-residential. Myriad of chards of broken glass bottles scattered on the pavement. Some of the streets were paved with red brick. Hamilton Street on the Ironbound side of McCarter Hwy which starts at New Jersey Road Avenue still is paved with red bricks if you check up at Google Maps (2020).
Nino & Pepe were in New York by mid June. A lot had happened to them (and myself too) since I had left them in San Francisco with Carey & Paul on 22nd May 1972. Pepe's US visa was about to expire and he needed an extension. He would have to travel to either Canada or Europe to renew his visa. He then decided to change his life completely. He gave up his flat on Larkin Street, probably transfering the lease to a friend of his; anyone would have taken that lovely apartment. He left his Best Western Motels job and flew Sabena Airlines to Brussels, Belgium with Nino. They had a stopover in Paris so Nino would climb up the Eiffel Tower. Both Pepe and Nino had a brand new US entry visa and could stay in the country (legally) for another 6 months.
I don't remember exactly the first time I brought Nino to Newark. I must have rung Pablo who told me the big news: Pepe & Neno had arrived in New York on a flight from Brussels and were staying at an apartament in Queens, N.Y. that had been rented for them. I took the Path train to 14th Street or 33rd Street, then caught a New York subway train to Times Square and Queens. On my first or second visit to their Queens apartment, I must have taken Nino by the arm and brought him across the Hudson River to feel what Newark, N.J.was like.
I showed Nino the neighbourhood around Ferry Street and Wilson Avenue, then I took him to wherever I was staying at the moment. Honestly, I'm lost on that point. Next thing I know me & Nino were doing what we used to do in downtown São Paulo in the old days. Walking about, sitting down any time we felt like to smoke cigarettes and talk our heads off the whole day.
I showed Nino the railroad that crossed Ferry Street overhead and we climbed up to the tracks. Nino must have liked the 'deserted feeling' of the place for we sat down by the tracks, lighted our cigarettes and talked about our latest adventures and what our plans were for the near future. After a while, Nino did something I've never forgot; he took a matchbox from his pocket, gathered some dry straw lying next to the rails and set it on fire. Then we climbed down the little hill and went onto the street again acting like nothing had happened. Just like that! I don't know whether the fire was big - probably not - but I knew it had been something 'wrong' and 'unusual'.
We wandered around Newark's Ironbound streets countless times. Nino didn't have qualms in asking any Brazilian fellow we'd meet whether he knew of rooms to let. Soon enough he found a room on the 2nd floor (which Americans call 3rd floor) of a house on 66 Columbia Street across the tracks. I would never consider living on the other side of McCarter Highway but Nino was more broad-minded than myself. The house was owned by an octogenarian widow from Galicia, Spain. The room was clean and spacious, it had 2 beds but I would be the only tenant. Three windows (with shades that rolled up) that gave out to the street. It was a pleasant place.
Enriqueta was the Galician lady's name. She must have been born before 1910, got married and migrated to the US with her husband in the 1920s. She probably had children but they must have all got married and moved somewhere else for she had no family with her in that ample house. She had white hair and wore a headkerchief that covered part of her head. She was very friendly and smiled easily. She spoke Gallego to us and we answered in Spanish. I liked her the first time I saw her bright face.
I remember asking Enriqueta whether she had ever visited the Statue of Liberty. She answered she'd never seen Miss Liberty! Not even from afar - which is hard to believe as one can spot it on a clear winter's day - from a distance - in that part of New Jersey. Liberty Island is actually under N.J. jurisdiction. She also said she'd never been to Manhattan. I don't know this could be possible. I wonder whether she never went to the harbour to greet relatives arriving from Spain in the 30s or 40s.
Enriqueta had a trelissed-vine full of ripe grapes in her backyard. She told us she'd soon make home-brewed wine out of it. We were both dazzled by the plucky little lady and she knew she'd made a positive impression on us and was happy. From now on, every time Nino visited me, we stayed at home at Columbia Street.
I tried to get Nino a position as a machine-operator at the record factory but he wouldn't hear of it. I can't recall whether I took him to the factory office to fill in an application for a job position. The fact is that Nino was on a mission from God: he'd stumbled into the New York gay scene and he would stop at nothing until he knew everything there was to be known.
Talking about Statue of Liberty, I remember the sunny day we boarded a ferry-boat to Ellis Island to have a peak at it. Since the 'old times' in Brazil, we used to talk about world heritage monuments and wondered how big and beautiful they would really be in person. We used to make fun of a quaint Brazilian habit of self-aggrandizement when it comes to landmarks and monuments. Brazilians always found something they were the 'best or the greatest of' in South America. Little did we know the USA considered itself the 'greatest' in the world. We probably never thought we would one day be talking about this subject in the USA. Nino bad-mouthed everything he saw in the US since he set foot in that country: from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Empire State building.
As we approached Ellis Island, Nino would not stop belittling the Statue. How small it was! It was green! I didn't know whether I'd laugh or be cranky with him for I wanted to enjoy such an eventful outing. Even when we were climbing up the narrow steps inside the statue he'd not stop depreciating it. We got to the head of Miss Liberty and watched the scenary outside... for Nino everything was small and ugly.
One day, Nino said he had met Brazilian singer-song-writer Erasmo Carlos on 42nd Street and had talked to him. Erasmo told him he had come to New York to see Elvis Presley at the Madison Square Garden. Elvis opened on Friday, 9 June 1972, at 8:30 pm. He then had two Saturday appearances: an afternoon show at 2:30 pm and another at 8:30 pm. Elvis had a final recital on Sunday afternoon, 11 June 1972, at 2:30 pm.
Supposing Nino met Erasmo on 42nd Street the week after Erasmo had seen Elvis at the Garden - he & Pepe must have arrived in New York earlier than I've so far asserted. They must have moved to NYC by mid June 1972. So I wouldn't have been back to work yet for the factory opened for business only in July. That explains the amount of wandering me & Nino did in the streets of the Ironbound. I was probably still waiting for the money my Father would send me when Nino arrived.
My daily routine was working 5 days a week from 3:45 pm to 11:45 pm. I worked evenings and part of the night. I'd be back home a little past midnight. I'd turn on my cassette-radio to listen to DJ sensation Alison Steele at WNEW-FM metro-media stereo as soon as I got into my room, took my work clothes off and prepared to go to bed. I'd get up next morning around 9:00 am, listen to the radio and was out for lunch at 12:00 am. There were different eating places around that area but I liked a Puerto Rican business on the left-hand side of Lafayette Street. I liked their rice-and-beans because it reminded me my own Mother's. A little more spicy only. It was cheap and good. Then I would go around and check the Brazilian 'scene' at Tia's newsagency on 112 Ferry Street.
I remember a particular hot day in July or August 1972 at the record factory. The boss bought a few huge watermellons, sliced them in dozens of pieces and every machine operator or vynil paste conveyor left his work place for a few minutes to partake of that deliciously sweet red fruit. It's moments like these one never forgets for the rest of one's life. I can still see the happy faces of Horace, a Blackman who worked at the long-play section and other Hispanics having a bit of fun in the summer time... just like that song by Sly & the Family Stone.
I also recollect a Sunday afternoon going to Queens, N.Y. with Damazio to visit a Brazilian friend of his. He was an older man with an adult daughter and a blonde grand-daughter of 10 who had been Damazio's neighbours back in Guarulhos-SP. They had migrated to the USA around the same time as him. The older man was born in Italy, migrated to Brazil in the late 1940s, got married and had children that now moved to the USA with him. The blonde girl was very fond of Damazio; she spoke Portuguese to him which was unusual for migrant kids. Kids usually forget their original tongue after entering the school system in the new country. We noticed though she could speak a lot o English already. Much more than the adults, including her mother, grandfather, myself and Damazio.
On Sundays I usually took the train to mid-town Manhattan to watch double-feature movies at some of those cinemas on 42 Street. One particular Sunday, Damazio came too and brought along Pardal (Wilson) and some other Brazuca friend of his. While we watched a western flick I started making wry comments about some characters in the plot who were mostly losers, comparing them with Brazilians. Damazio thought it was funny but Pardal wasn't very amused with my putting down our countrymen and said he would never come to the movies with me again.
OneSunday afternoon I went out with Kuwenderson to visit his younger brother who lived with an American woman in a flat, in the Greenwich Village. The woman in question was not in the premises when we were there. Before going up to the apartment we lingered on Washington Square which was crowded with jugglers, clowns and musicians. His brother had no shirt on and the place looked messy like a hippie's den. Kuwenderson tried to be casual about our visit but I think his brother wasn't too pleased to see him with somebody else. He barely gave his brother any attention. Apparently this Brazilian young man was supported by an older white woman. I don't know how much older. He spoke broken English even though I didn't have a chance to listen to his English. We hung around for a while and then got the fuck out of there. It was a useless visit. I only felt diminished when I compared my life with Kuwenderson's brother's adventurous life. He at least shared a place with someone who spoke English whereas I still spoke mostly Portuguese and some Spanish to boot.
Since I came back to Newark in June 1972, I changed my social habits and started hanging around Sing Sing more often. Brazilian fellows who worked hard during the day would hang out on the sidewalks of Lexington or Oxford Streets in small clusters to talk their heads off during the long summer evenings. Sometimes day light would last until 9:00 pm and the heat was a demon. That's when I met a lot of young and not-so-young Brazilian men who talked mostly about what they would do once they returned to Brazil. One hardly saw a Brazilian female. In the 60s and 70s the bulk of the Brazilian diaspora was made up of males.
I remember this particular fellow called Edson who must have been in his early 30s for he already sported grey hair. He shared a flat with Damazio and some other fellows, drove a truck during the day and enjoyed talking about his dreams when he had a chance. As he was a little older than the rest he felt he had the right to speak at length. He told us he would certainly become rich if he could make marketable his grandmother's pickled eggplant recipe. A concoction she had brought from Italy when she migrated to Brazil. As I have never seen Edson again I wonder whether he made his dream come true.
There was another young man with straight hair falling on his forehead named Cri-cri (I don't remember his real name) who was known to save every penny he made in 'America'. He had a dream of buying a few trucks and start a trucking business in Franco da Rocha-SP, a town in Sao Paulo metropolitan area. I wonder whether Cri-cri ever became a rich man after all. Guys would make fun of him and his stinginess. He never spent any money apart from paying rent and buying food. He never went out in the weekends; never drank a beer or a soft drink.
One summer evening we went to someone's flat at Sing Sing to listen to a young man called Alberto who played accoustic guitar dexterously. He played and sang mostly Beatles songs so we sat down to listen for a while. Before I listened to him play I was fool enough to say I knew how to play 'Black bird' (singin in the dead of night...) Alberto gave me his guitar and I made myself a jerk playing and singing Paul McCartney's ode to Martin Luther King. After I finished it, Alberto took back his guitar and played 'Black bird' the way McCartney would have done.
He had arrived from Sao Paulo recently and was still looking for a job. Differently from most of us, Alberto hailed from Brazilian middle-class and one could easily see he didn't like the lowly life of poor immigrants he had been thrust upon. Newark's Ironbound definitely wasn't his scene. Even though he was polite one could see he had been terribly disappointed with this lower class environment he was trapped into.
Alberto had actually been invited to join his childhood friend Guto, who had been living at Sing Sing since he arrived from São Paulo in February. Augusto Guidon was a different sort of person. Even though Guto had also hailed from a middle class family in Braz, he had a different approach to life. Guto was resourceful and sharing a room in a flat in a working-class tenement didn't break his spirit. On the contrary, it made him stronger.
Guto had a singular life story. His original dream was to become an architect so he applied himself to study as hard as he could. He finished high school at Braz, a São Paulo middle-class inner suburb and went into a preparatory course known as 'cursinho' for the college entrance examination. He wanted to enter Universidade de São Paulo's FAU (Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo) the best architecture school in the country. Guto took that examination in 1970 and 1971 but he failed both times. Even though he was top on the list of best achieving students in mathematics, chemistry, physics and biology - subjects considered the most difficult by everyone - when it came to testing of specific skills in which the candidate to enter Architeture School had to undergo - that is geometry, dimensional drawing plus bi- and tri-dimensional collage - Guto never managed to accrue enough points to enter the course.
Feeling he had been cheated by the FAU faculty panel that decided who was in and who was out Guto became bitter for a while. To soothe his bruised self esteem Guto turned to his old passion: music. He had been a serious fan of British rock, especially of The Who, and as 'a dedicated follower of fashion', he started playing electric guitar. After listening to The Who, Guto had an epyphany which made him look up to British culture as the crème de la crème. Now that he was down but not completely out he decided to leave Brazil as soon as possible. He took a plane and landed in New York,in February, in the middle of a snow storm - that made him shiver. I don't know how he ended up in Newark's Ironbound but that's where I met him in June 1972.
I guess Nino spent a lot of his time hanging around 42nd Street, the favourite place of hustlers, drug pushers and petty criminals. It probably reminded him of the corner of Avenida Ipiranda with Avenida São João in Sao Paulo. Once he told me he had seen something spetacular: a sizeable group of Black youths suddenly turned up from nowhere, entered movie theatres without paying, robbing box-offices, getting all sorts of products from nearby stores and getting away as fast as they had shown up. It would be until the late 1990s I would hear of such a mass behaviour in Brazil where it's known popularly as 'arrastão'. As you can see Americans are always ahead of us. At least 3 decades.
Pepe who had left a steady job in the West Coast - he'd worked as an all-night clerk at a Western Motel in San Francisco - to move to New York to join his best friend (and I suspect to appease Nino who wanted to know NYC badly) hit the big time when he was picked out to work as a waiter at the super-posh Four Seasons restaurant. Working in such a place meant big money for its patrons' tips were the best in town.
The Four Seasons was a New American cuisine restaurant established in 1959, it was located at 99 East 52nd Street, in the Seagram Building, a skyscraper at 375 Park Avenue, between East 52nd and 53rd Streets, in Midtown Manhattan, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson.
With seasonal fare and stunning surroundings, it attracted the city's movers and shakers, with its Midtown location making it convenient for power lunches. President Kennedy held a fundraiser there in 1962 and quickly became an institution. Anna Wintour, Henry Kissinger, Martha Stewart, Bill Clinton, George Lois, Bill Bernbach and Jackie Kennedy were regular customers. Philip Johnson had lunch there daily at a special table in the Grill Room.
As Pepe started working as a waiter, Nino found out all about container trucks - with their back door wide open - parked between Piers 40 & 51 in the New York harbour next to the Greenwich Village where sex among men was performed with no questions asked. San Francisco had blown Nino's mind. New York had taken him one step closer to the edge. What made his double-life work so well was that he knew exactly how to behave (sweetly) to his lover and to put on a face of well-behaved young man to their friends. But deep inside I think his real self was going into a transformation he could hardly handle.
Jack Nicholson at a fund-raising party for Democratic Party presidential candidate George McGovern at the Four Seasons on 14 June 1972.
The Four Seasons restaurant where Pepe worked in 1972.
By mid-October Nino showed up at Columbia Street and said he had left Pepe. As the 2nd bed in my room was still vacant, I told him to take hold of it. We were in the middle of the night when someone knocked on my door. It was Pepe. He had finished work a the posh restaurant, took a cab to Newark and spotted the house where his former lover was staying. He didn't have much trouble convincing Enriqueta to let him in. He was a Spanish national like herself. Besides, his blue eyes gave him an appearance of good breeding. I went back to sleep while Nino convinced Pepe to lie down with him in bed until the break of day. I don't remember how things turned out but some time later in that day Nino was back from New York where he had accompanied Pepe and said we would have to go into hiding immediately. He had already hired a room for two on 8th Avenue not too far from 42nd Street.
We stayed in the 8th Avenue room one week. Nino found us a room in a Portuguese household on South Ferry Street. The room with a double-bed was in the attic; full of cockroaches. Nino who was strict with cleanliness went out, bought a can of insectiside, sprayed the whole place and went out to avoid breathing the deadly fumes. When we came back a few hours later we found dozens of wobbly cockies sticking to the slanted walls and many more dead ones on the floor.
Billboard's Top 5 on 25 November 1972.
1. I can see clearly now - Johnny Nash
2. I'd love you to want me - Lobo
3. I'll be around - Spinners
4. I am woman - Helen Reddy
5. Papa was a rolling stone - The Temptations
The winter of 1972-1973 crept in without my realizing it. It would be the second winter I'd spend in the USA. Nino, who had been living with Pepe (Jose) in Queens-NY since mid-June, decided he'd had enough of living abroad and was going back to Brazil on 12 November 1972, a Sunday. He was terribly homesick and couldn't be apart from his family much longer. The idea of spending Christmas away from his parents and siblings was dreadful to him. I could not understand his plight for Xmas was only a holiday to me.
He could stay away from his family for months on end, without giving them a thought, but started missing them terribly when something went wrong. I think he was bored with his life and wanted some drastic change without much effort and decided to 'go back'. Going back is always easier than sorting oneself out.
As a matter of fact, too much had happened to Nino since he arrived in San Francisco in February 1972. He had lived too many exciting experiences in those 8 months and now he felt he had to go back to his family's bosom to sort himself out. He wasn't sure of himself anymore!
On the other hand, being a Taurean - Nino was born on 28 April 1949 - he knew exactly what he wanted and was very practical on how to get to the point without further ado. I learned a lot from Nino during the period we interacted in San Francisco, New York and Newark. One had to build up a secure place for oneself. One had to have his own privacy protected. This was the first lesson one learned when living by himself.
I had bungled up my living arrangements when I moved into the Wilson Avenue room by being too friendly to every young man who approached the place, as it stood on top of a go-go bar owned by a Brazilian businessman. As I had bought a record player - at Two Guys Dept. Store on Broad Street - young fellows started showing up in our (mine and Rodrigo's) room to listen to records. Rodrigo started working as a fac-totum in the bar's kitchen so some times I had 3 or 4 fellows hanging around - some I had never met before - listening to Grand Funk Railroad as Rod Stewart belted out 'Maggy Mae' in the juke-box downstairs. Unintentionally I had made my very bedroom a 'public space'. I'd been my worst enemy when I opened up my door to everyone.
The go-go girls who usually arrived at 9:00 pm - to dance at the bar - changed costumes in our toilet out in the corridor. This WC served six of us Brazilian fellows that shared 2 rooms in the 1st floor. Unbeknownst to myself I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
When I told Nino what had happened he thought I'd been a fool and was adamant to teach me Life's basic rules. I had to take better care of myself. I had to rent a room by myself and be more private. I shouldn't expose myself to the elements. I had lived with my parents my whole life - I was 23 years old then - so I didn't know the basic facts of life.
The fact is that soon after Me & Nino moved into the Portuguese lady's house he made up his mind about going back to Brazil almost immediately. At first I tried to dissuade him from leaving arguing he should stay a little longer; he had not even seen the North American winter with its glorious snow but Nino wouldn't hear of it. Actually, when still living in California, Pepe had taken him to Lake Tahoe, near the Nevada border, for a weekend in the snow.
I guess Nino was so intent in flying back to Brazil right then while he still had the means to do it; he had enough money to pay for a one-way ticket to Sao Paulo. He was afraid if he spent that money he would never have another chance to go back to South America. The funny bit is that instead of changing Nino's mind about staying in the USA he convinced me I should do the same.
Suddenly I started thinking in that same line: I convinced myself I had been living in the USA for far too long. Actually I had been there for only one year. I put my mind to work on going back to Brazil as soon as I could. First I had to save money though for I had only been back to work a few weeks back.
As I knew I'd soon be by myself again I started looking for new accomodation because I didn't like the house or the people in that house. Portuguese people then were really uncompromising; they lived in a materialistic world of their own. They were a brutalized people. Maybe they had lived too long under Salazar's dictatorship and lost their soul.
Back at the record factory I made friends with a happy-go-luck Brazilian young man from Arab extraction called Nagib Luiz. He had arrived in the US with his pregnant cousin Leila and her husband. They moved in with an aunt of theirs who had migrated in the late 1960s and was now married to an American citizen which made her a 'legal' migrant differently from most of us who did not own the universally coveted 'greeen card'. As Leila was expecting a baby, the aunt found them a flat at the Prudential Apartments which they could share with other migrants in order to save money.
Before Nino flew back to Brazil I had already talked to Nagib about the chance of my moving in with them. Nino flew out on a Sunday afternoon, 12 November 1972, and I moved into the Sing Sing flat on Monday morning, the 13th. I would share the lounge (living room) with Nagib and Guto, the guitar player whose best friend Alberto could not adapt to the harsh realities of a poor immigrant's life and had already flown back to Brazil (just like Nino did).
Guto was a different cup of tea as far as immigrants went. He had an education. He was a well informed young man who followed the British rock scene closely being a serious fan of The Who and progressive rock which was making great strides with Led Zeppelin and Yes. I knew about Yes from my San Francisco FM station period for they had a Top 10 hit called 'The roundabout' which I really liked. He told me about Monty Pyton's Flying Circus which was shown on TV then. He was the first person I ever met who knew who David Bowie was. He actually introduced me to Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders from Mars for he had the album. On Saturday or Sunday mornings Guto would go down and have breakfast at the nearby Down Neck diner and played Led Zeppelin's 'Black dog' on the juke-box.
Guto was an excellent musician and hung around progressive rock joints in West Orange and other New Jersey towns on Friday and Saturday night. A real gentleman among the rabble and desperados. Guto worked at a scissors' factory - I suppose it's J.Wiss & Sons factory on 33 Littleton Avenue - which one could reach driving Market Street all the way to the Court House where there is a bifurcation: Springfield Avenue to the left and West Market Street to the right. Go on straight W Market St for 8 blocks and then make a left turn to Littleton Ave and you're at the scissors' factory that only employed immigrants who showed them their Green Card. Guto was so good at maths that after taking a test at the factory office he started working at their metal lathe almost immediately and wasn't asked to show his Green Card.
Guto worked in the morning; me & Nagib in the evening so we hardly ever had a chance to interact during the week but we made up for on weekends. Guto had a Brazilian acquaintance who had migrated with his family from Pará while still a child so he could speak English fluently and had a big car. On a freezing early December Saturday morning we jumped into his big car and went on a day-trip to Philadelphia-PA. It could have been either the 3rd or 10th of December. I brought my camera along so I still have pictures taken during this car trip to Pennsylvania. We went to see the Liberty bell, visited the historical centre, saw a lot of Benjamin Franklin's countenances everywhere and almost froze to death for it was a cloudy, gloomy and freezing Saturday. Next time I saw Philly it would be 5 years later, in 1977, watching Sylvester Stallone's 'Rocky' on the wide screen.
On 23rd December, a Saturday, exactly two days before Christmas 1972, Guto, Nagib and I went to see Grand Funk Railroad in concert at the Madison Square Garden, a multi-purpose indoor arena in New York City, located in Midtown Manhattan between 7th and 8th Avenues from 31st to 33rd Streets, it is situated atop Pennsylvania Station.
Ever since the Concert for Bangladesh organized by George Harrison & Ravi Shankar with Bob Dylan, Leon Russell, Ringo Starr, Badfinger, Eric Clapton & Billy Preston which took place at the Garden on 1st August 1971, exactly 2 months before I arrived in the USA, I revered the place so I was really happy to be able to enter that arena even if it was to see Grand Frunk Railroad which was not exactly my cup of tea. I had first heard about this heavy-rock trio (sometimes a foursome) from Guinho, a Santo André-SP young man who started sharing our bedroom (mine and Rodrigo's) on top of that go-go bar on Wilson Avenue in late 1971. He was a great fan of the band and showed their album in which they covered the Rolling Stones' 'Gimme shelter'.
Guto, Nagib and I got grandstand seats. I was actually astounded when Grand Funk took to the stage and the whole arena seemed to take off due to the dazzling lighting applied to the stage that looked more like a boxing-match rink faraway in the distance. Their entrance was actually the hightlight of the show which was professionally perfect but not very moving. They played for less than an hour, did an encore and that's all she wrote. Suddenly we were at the 33rd Street Path station taking our train back to Newark, N.J. as if nothing had happened. Not any wiser or richer for the experience. I wonder what would have been like being at the Garden when the Concert for Bangladesh took place 16 months before. I would have chosen the afternoon session instead of the night performance.
Two or three weeks later would be Christmas 1972. I couldn't believe it would be my 2nd Christmas in the USA.
The next day being a Sunday and Christmas Eve, I spent it listening to the radio and taping the best selling songs of 1972. At night, Guto, Nagib and I went to the Midnight Mass at Saint Aloysius church on 66 Fleming Avenue, the next block from Sing Sing. The only thing I remember from that religious service is the singing of 'Stille Nacht' (Silent night) by the congregation.
We worked only 4 days in the last week of 1972. I stayed home on Saturday and Sunday listening to reviewing of the most popular songs of 1972 on WABC and Casey Kasem on WPIX. On New Year's Eve we took the Path train and waited for 1973 at Times Square. I don't remember whether I went by myself or Guto, Nagib or Damazio went along. I only remember that particular night because I witnessed a stabbing just in front of me. I didn't actually see the stabbing. I only saw a man wielding a knife running breathlessly after another man. And that was our goodbye to the wonderful year of 1972, the most exciting year of my whole life.
It's wierd, but that was the second stabbing I witnessed in less than 6 months. While I was still living on 66 Columbia Street, in the last days of summer, after midnight when I came from work, I heard Puertorican people shouting from a house in the opposite side of the street. I went to the window and noticed that a man had been stabbed. The police came afterwards.
66 Columbia Street is the 2-story house in the middle.
Enriqueta's house seen from a diffent angle. The building on the left used to be a warehouse. She had a trelissed-vine at the back of the house (where you see a parked car).
63 Columbia Street just opposite Enriqueta's house, where I boarded briefly in 1975.
Columbia Street as seen from the corner with Green Street. The apartament building on the left used to be a warehouse. Hispanic kids used to roam the area in the early 1970s smashing bottles on the ground and scattering rubbish everywhere. A pretty rough and ugly area.
34 Columbia St. - the last standing house on the street after the Council erased large chunks of the area for
the whole picture of the destruction of 30 & 32 Columbia St. 2 houses next to the corner of Lafayette Street.
the bulldozer that wrecked 2 whole houses to the ground leaving only the stoop next-door to 34 Columbia Street. Photo taken by Google in August 2019. CAT bulldozer stands alone in the lot from which it wrecked two houses; corner of Columbia and Lafayette.
here are the 2 houses before being demolished by the Council: 30 & 32 Columbia Street. the 3 story-house on the opposite side of Columbia St. next to Lafayette St. was also raised to the ground circa 2015. Columbia St. as seen from the corner with Lafayette St. circa 2015, before the great demolition. Lafayette St. corner with Columbia St. looking down to McCarter Highway and the railway tracks. Prudential Center on 25 Lafayette St. aka 165 Mulberry St. opened on 25 October 2007 with National Newark & Essex Banking Co. building and Raymond Commerce Bldg in the middle of the picture. Columbia Street past Lafayette St. looking towards newly-built Prudential Center (on the left) the 2 classical Newark skyscrapers (left background) plus the Gateway Complex (on the right) and Penn Station Hilton Hotel.
Tom Margittai, right, with his business partner Paul Kovi in the Four Seasons restaurant in an undated photograph. The restaurant was considered to be past its prime when the two bought it in 1973, but they rejuvenated it.
Tom Margittai, who revitalized the Four Seasons, dies at 90
By Sam Roberts
27 November 2018
Tom Margittai, who with a partner rejuvenated the Four Seasons restaurant from autumnal senescence into a majestic — and, for the first time, profitable — three-star magnet for Manhattan’s power brokers, died on Friday in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 90.
The cause was complications of heart surgery, Richard Tang, his spouse and only immediate survivor, said.
Mr. Margittai (pronounced mar-gih-TIE) arrived in New York in 1950, having been narrowly delivered from the grip of the Nazis during World War II. He and his parents had been among 1,600 Jews rescued by Rudolf Kastner, a Hungarian lawyer and journalist, who had bribed the Germans to smuggle them by train from Hungary to Switzerland instead of transporting them to the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland.
Mr. Margittai began his catering career as a dishwasher at the Waldorf Astoria. He joined the culinary conglomerate Restaurant Associates in 1962 and worked his way up to vice president for the company’s upscale outlets.
Joseph Baum of Restaurant Associates had created the Four Seasons on the ground floor of the Seagram Building, on Park Avenue and East 52nd Street, in 1959, but by 1973 it was considered to be past its prime. Restaurant Associates, by then overextended, was glad to unload the lease when Mr. Margittai and Paul Kovi offered to buy it.
In a campaign conceived by the advertising impresario George Lois, the partners promoted the restaurant with a personal stamp. They published an “Annual Love Letter to New Yorkers” and signed it, convivially, “From the-two-of-us.”
By 1977, Mr. Margittai and Mr. Kovi had so revolutionized the restaurant that the book publisher Michael Korda proclaimed in The New York Times that its formerly forsaken bar, later called the Grill Room, had become “the most powerful place to eat lunch in town,” a dominion that Lee Eisenberg of Esquire magazine later immortalized by calling the Four Seasons the home of the “power lunch.”
The new owners recruited Seppi Renggli, a versatile Swiss chef; Alex von Bidder, a young Swiss hotel manager; and Julian Niccolini, an experienced Tuscan hotelier.
“If it wasn’t for Tom Margittai,” Mr. Niccolini said in a phone interview, “the American cuisine the way we know it today would not exist.”
The partners modernized the menu, introducing healthful “spa cuisine” and other culinary innovations, like a baked potato served with its own bottle of Lungarotti olive oil. The Times restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton awarded the Four Seasons two stars in 1979; a later Times critic, Bryan Miller, added a third in 1985.
Mr. Margittai and Mr. Kovi viewed their mission as twofold. They were not merely pleasing palates; they were also feeding egos.
“Nobody pays $9.75 to have the world’s best baked potato,” Ruth Reichl wrote in The Times in 1995, referring to that off-menu favorite, which would cost about $16 in today’s dollars. “People pay for the privilege of eating it in the world’s most powerful company.”
The Pool Room of the Four Seasons in 1988. Mr. Margittai and Mr. Kovi successfully lobbied to have the restaurant’s interior, designed by Philip Johnson, declared a city landmark in 1989.
In the mid-1970s, when others saw a crime-ridden and fiscally unsound city on the brink, Mr. Margittai and Mr. Kovi saw an opportunity — to lure those they called New York’s “doers” to their establishment.
“We’re not a jet-set restaurant — and we never will be,” Mr. Margittai told The Times in 1984. “We don’t get semiretired chairmen of the board. They go to ‘21.’ We don’t get fashion people or the fast-lane crowd. Fashion designers come, but not the people who wear their clothes. We get hard workers, achievers — the editors, the publishers, the architects.”
The partners also cared about what they had created.
Defying the building’s owners, they successfully lobbied to have the restaurant’s original interior, designed by Philip Johnson, declared a city landmark in 1989.
In 1994 they passed the toque to their two junior partners, Mr. von Bidder and Mr. Niccolini, who continued to run the restaurant in the Seagram Building until their lease expired in 2016 and the building’s new owners replaced them. Three months ago, Mr. von Bidder and Mr. Niccolini opened a new Four Seasons at 42 East 49th Street.
Thomas George Margittai was born on 8 April 1928, in Sighet, Transylvania — its jurisdiction shifted over the years between Romania and Hungary — to Bela Margittai and Piroszca (Scheiner) Margittai. His father owned a lumber mill.
The family lived in Bucharest, Romania, until Tom was about 10, then moved to Budapest. In 1944, when the Germans invaded, the family seemed destined for extermination, but they escaped in late June on what became known as the Kastner Train, an exodus on 35 cattle cars that Adolf Eichmann of the SS had agreed to in exchange for gold, gems and cash.
The train was diverted by the German authorities to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where the refugees were held for several months before most of them were transported to Switzerland by December. The family emigrated to what would become Israel before Tom Margittai moved to New York.
There he would become banquet manager at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel. In 1956, Mr. Kovi, who was born in Hungary, was named his assistant.
After a hiatus at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco, Mr. Margittai returned to New York in 1962 and became a vice-president of Restaurant Associates; by then Mr. Kovi had been running several high-end establishments for the conglomerate. They became directors of the Four Seasons in 1968.
In 1972, Mr. Margittai was mulling an offer to run the Playboy Clubs, but the chef and cookbook author James Beard, a friend, suggested buying the Four Seasons instead. Restaurant Associates, which had overexpanded, demanded $230,000 and insisted that Mr. Margittai and Mr. Kovi also acquire the nearly defunct Forum of the Twelve Caesars, on West 48th Street.
The partners put $15,000 down, closed the Forum and resuscitated a restaurant that, John Mariani wrote in “The Four Seasons: A History of America’s Premier Restaurant” (1994), was “losing its soul, its personality and its allure.”
After the partners retired, Mr. Kovi divided his time between New York and Budapest; he died in 1998, at 74. Mr. Margittai, who won a James Beard Foundation Award in 1985, retired to Santa Fe with Mr. Tang, a jewelry designer and artist.
In 2017, new partners opened the Pool and the Grill at the original site of the Four Seasons. As the culinary axis was about to shift, Paul Freedman assessed the fate of the original space in his 2016 book, “Ten Restaurants That Changed America.”
“The scene of so many deals is now doomed by a transaction it can’t control and the insatiable appetite of the real-estate industry,” he wrote. “A restaurant that survived and even flourished in the dark years of New York City’s decline may be extinguished by prosperity.”
