ODE TO RAY’S CANDY STORE, LOWER EAST SIDE, NEW YORK
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The 90-year-old owner of an old-school candy store in Manhattan's trendy and historic Lower East Side neighborhood was beaten on the street by a stranger in front of his own store Tuesday. He's got a nice shiner but otherwise appears OK.
“They had soda. They wanted to sell it to me. I said no," Ray Alvarez told the New York Post.
"One handed [the soda] to the other guy, ‘Hold this, I’m going to kill this guy,'” Alvarez told the tabloid.
The thug punched the elderly Alvarez in his head and chest, “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. Then his attacker “pulled something out from under his jacket, like a belt with a stone on one end, and he hit me with it.”
Alvarez went down bleeding. “I thought I’m never going to make it,” he added.
But he did, and he was back to work behind the counter of his candy shop the next morning, despite, he said, being “shaken up” and “badly hurt.”
Inside Ray’s Candy Store, Ray’s birthday, 2011. Photo credit: JB Nicholas
I wouldn't call Ray a friend, exactly, but I bought coffee in winter and ice cream in summer from him for almost 20 years. I also stood sentry in front of his store late at night more than a few late nights watching the late night life parade past.
It's hard to recall a dull moment. Danger was always in the mix. The later it got, the more drunk and high people got, the more dangerous it was. It's easy to forget after the high-living Sex-and-the-City years when champagne flowed in the gutters instead of blood, but the streets of New York can be merciless.
Alvarez opened his candy store in 1974. When it opened, the area was known for heroin and homicide instead of the boutiques and craft bars it's known for today. That means he and his candy store survived the first Great American heroin epidemic, the financial collapse of the 1970s, the Tompkins Square Park police riot, the Crack Wars, gentrification, the Great Recession, the Wuhan virus pandemic and, currently still, the second Great American heroin epidemic.
If you ever hung out or got high in Tompkins Square Park chances are you went to the candy store with the awning and walk-up window on the northwest corner of Avenue A and 7th Street. Ray's is catty-corner to Niagara, the bar with the giant Joe Strummer mural painted on its side. It's known for ice cream, cheap coffee, beignets and thick home-style french fries.
When I lived Downtown I made it to Ray's almost every weekend to buy something to sip on and sit on a bench in the park with friends who also lived in the neighborhood. A bunch of us like to hang out in the middle of the park under the Hare Krishna tree and talk shit for hours. Photographer Bob Arihood was one of us. When he wasn't sitting in the park he was standing in front of Ray's, capturing life on the street with a Leica camera for his blog, NeitherMoreNorLess.
Bob Arihood, Neither More Nor Less, with his Leica camera in Ray’s Candy Store, Ray Alvarez behind the counter, 2010: Photo Credit: JB Nicholas.
Colin Moynihan was another guy who hung out in the park with us. Moynihan profiled Arihood for the New York Times in 2010, On a Corner a Shutter Clicks as Poets and Punks Pass in Review. The photographer's work, he wrote, was "visceral and direct documentation that offered a window into sometimes seamy realities of East Village existence that might otherwise go unexamined."
Arihood captured "itinerant travelers, street drinkers, punks, poets and sidewalk sleepers," Moynihan wrote. They "once proliferated in the East Village but these days make up a vanishing tribe.”
Another guy who hung out in the park all the time or in front of Ray's was John Penley. Penley was a photographer and activist who lived with a singer I hadn't ever heard of before I met Penley but was supposed to be cool as fuck. She was named after a manufacturer of construction vehicles and diesel engines: Cat Power. NYU bought Penley's archive for its Tamiment Library collection.
Photographer and activist John Penley “protesting” in front of Ray’s Candy Store, 2010: Photo Credit: JB Nicholas.
There were many others. I don't mean to leave anyone out. These were the guys I was closest to. When Ray got behind on rent Penley organized a fake "protest" to encourage people to patronize Ray's. There was also a fundraiser in a theater that featured a protest performance artist named Reverend Billy.
Lincoln Anderson was editor of the local newspaper then, The Villager. After everyone saved Ray's, someone sent a stripper to help Ray celebrate his birthday. I photographed it, and Anderson published it. That's what working for a local newspaper in a small big city neighborhood was like.
And that's why even though technically Ray isn't a friend, it feels like he always will be. So when I found out he got hammered I was really pissed. I wanted some good ‘ole Lower East Side Cro-Mags style street justice for Ray. I wasn't the only one. Penley was that pissed too.
Once when I lost my keys in a snowstorm and got locked out of my apartment on E. 3rd. St. Ray let me sleep in his basement until the next morning. When I saw this sad news story ... that Ramones song Beat on the Brat with a baseball bat popped into my head. Those guys that beat Ray are very lucky I live in Vegas now.
It's tempting to think that each generation is worse than the last, each more vicious, more violent than the one that came before it, but that's not true. Elderly people are always being robbed. The street has always been the street. Life on it has always been "nasty, brutish and short," as Thomas Hobbes might have written in The Leviathan, if he was a social-scientist instead of a political philosopher.
The hard fact is Alvarez is lucky to have lived as long as he has, where he has. Arihood died in 2011. Penley lives in Las Vegas. I'm in exile in the mountains of northern New York. None of us managed to stay around as long as Ray. He’s still there “holding it down,” as the street corner saying goes. We ain’t.
Ray can wear that shining black eye of his with well-earned pride.
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