Island Bazaar - New York City street fairs - Brief Article

National Review, July 1, 2002 by Richard Brookhiser

It is the season of yard and tag sales, when you slam on the brakes to stop at the table set with rusty silverware, Darth Vader masks, assorted dinner plates (the only ones that were once costly all now chipped), and a cardboard box full of books, their back pages swollen and ruffled with water damage. That means that in New York it is the season of street fairs.

Street fairs last through the swelter of late summer, into the chill of fall. But now, while the air is dry and thick with pollen and the heat of the waxing sun is diminished by stiff breezes, is the time to sample them. Weather must provide an inducement to go, because their wares are as uninviting as they are predictable. Every weekend, the police close off ten to fifteen blocks of some Manhattan avenue. The merchants line the curbs, and the New Yorkers slowly perambulate up and down. What the former display and the latter inspect is always the same.

The sellers of Africana offer collections of clothing and artifacts that are the material equivalents of Alex Haley's Roots: cheap, kitschy, and fake. There are wooden sculptures of gazelles and antelopes, made in Indonesia; "tribal" drums with "animal skin" heads (street drummers in New York are more likely to tip over plastic buckets and bang them; drummers in Johannesburg probably do the same); collarless shirts with animal motifs, or pictures of African mothers breast-feeding (the lack of a collar is the guarantee of ethnicity and authenticity). What would a similarly flashy and incoherent collection of Europeana be? Dutch wooden shoes, Breton lace headdresses, and T- shirts with the duller sayings of famous Europeans like St. Francis, Napoleon, and Hitler. Sometimes it is better to be the orphan of identity politics than its heir.

If the Europeana stands sold food, they would sell the inedible Italian sausages of street fairs, whose vendors cluster two-to-four to a block. The stink of burning grease from their booths is overpowering. Does it come from the grills, or from the food? Are we only smelling it for free, or if we pay, can we eat it too? The wittier booths boast garish signs of pigs in crowns or chef's hats, gaily advertising their own slaughter. If you ever want to become a vegan, these booths are the places to do it.

Does your back hurt? Of course it does; there were no kitchen counters or personal computers on the savannahs where our bodies evolved. Look for the free-standing plastic spines, erect as a hypnotized cobra, or the massage chairs, with padded face rests shaped like toilet seats. Chiropractors, who display the spines, have been with us for many years (H. L. Mencken wrote one of his sprightliest hit jobs on them), but the back masseurs, who use the massage chairs, appeared all of a sudden ten or fifteen years ago. They all seem to be Asian, and they might be exiles or spies or even masseurs. No one will ever know, because they don't speak English. They solicit aggressively, just short of giving offense.

Carpet cleaners also solicit, but they are unthreatening since they manipulate only a mop and their demonstration square of piling. Look at this carpet; did you ever see such dirt? It looks like a Kleenex used by a city bus. But just plunge the mop in the sudsy bucket, and rub it back and forth, and the carpet is -- if not white as snow, then white as mushrooms. Who are you going to believe, your eyes, or your skepticism? But if you had a carpet that dirty, wouldn't it be easier to throw it away?

Musicians entertain the bemused shoppers. I have been a street musician myself, so my instinct is to be kind. But why can't sound systems ever work? Why are they either broken, or painful? The music is best enjoyed from five blocks away, and ten or twelve blocks up -- when, mixed with the lullaby of traffic and airplanes, it becomes a gentle Ivesian homage to street fairs past.

There are a few useful things available at New York street fairs. If you have not registered to vote, then there will be tables of Democratic and Republican good-doers, offering access to our mild alternative to al-Qaeda. If you need socks -- and pounding city streets wears out the heels as fast as anything -- then there are tables of socks, athletic and dress, plain and serviceable (for socks decorated with argyle, or Munch's "The Scream," you must go elsewhere). If you want spices, here are the jars of caraway seed and turmeric and lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon. But the New York street fair is mostly a bland thing, driven by dealers and specialty vendors. What you miss, that even the pokiest front-yard card table offers, is the element of human choice and a lifetime's accident that shapes the detritus of mass culture. I bought my copy of Witness at a country yard sale, and at another I had a conversation about whoever could have bought those playing cards with naked ladies on them -- Grampaw? I can't get those at a typical New York street fair, only an adjustment or food poisoning.

There is at least one exception, though. This street fair is not on an avenue, but on East 10th Street, and it is only a block long. The block begins inauspiciously, but it ends with the cemetery where the Stuyvesants are buried. The entertainment can be awful -- I have heard an old Eastern European poet bellowing about his sex life. But in among the dealers are residents of the street, putting out their junk -- the yogurt makers, the books by Henry Kissinger and Erica Jong. My wife got bunches of plastic grapes she made into a necklace; I got an album of belly-dance music by Eddie "The Sheik" Kochak. And there are many other things too ugly or forlorn to buy, but fascinating to look at. So New York is large enough to have even the pleasures of the country.