Vince Passaro

New York Morningside Hts

The egg cream

The velvet rope

the battered Lincoln Town Car

empty crack vials and child-color caps

The egg cream: Leonard will explain it if you don't know it.

The velvet rope: a defining (literally and figuratively) object of the 1977-1990 period and perhaps even now.

The Lincoln: these are the gypsy cabs. There's a thriving market for them even now. There are several auto shops in Queens and uptown in Harlem and likely in the Bronx and Brooklyn too that service only the Lincoln Town Car for the gypsy drivers.

And every young person esp with artistic ambitions and not much money from the years 1985 to 2000 or so lived in a crack neighborhood and saw the little vials and caps littering the ground every day. It was a sign of an affordable neighborhood, as were the crowing of (fighting) cocks in the morning.