Patrick Picciarelli

Cops call it walking the grid. A systematic stroll through a crime scene, dividing the area into navigable, ordered squares, observing the minutia that makes up the setting of someone’s misconduct. Catalogue it mentally for future recall, photograph it for trial, store it for your nightmares. Get to know the territory that will play a significant part in your life.

That day I walked the grid through the confines of the Ninth Precinct. If I was going to work there, I wanted to get a feel for the streets. Knowledge is power, knowledge is survival. Know the streets before the streets know you.

July 1970. Finally, I was transferred to the Ninth. On a Friday night, two days before I was supposed to report, I stood across the street from the station house on East Fifth Street, wearing civilian clothes and watching the comings and goings of cops as they worked toward the safe completion of their tour.

I identified myself to no one. Blending in was the plan. Walk the streets like a ghost and observe the inhabitants. The cops I would get to know, the civilians were the ones that could kill me. Know the enemy.

The first NYPD cop to be killed in the line of duty was shot in the Ninth, blown off a fire escape while investigating a burglary in 1863, as the Civil War raged. He was followed by seven more, including two double-headers. The Ninth’s running out of wall space for plaques.

I started walking east toward Alphabet City. No white faces east of Avenue A. I’m dressed down, but still made for The Man. My elbow brushed my side and found my off-duty .38 Smith. Comforting to know it was there and I knew how to use it.

Squalor City. Broken down tenements, some dating back to the mid-1800s. I found out later that headquarters supervisors sent uptown to spy on the ground troops rarely ventured east of A. If the natives didn’t blitz them with debris from rooftops, the cops they were looking to catch wrong would elude them in the jungle of darkened alleys and bombed-out buildings.

Kids out of school for the summer, if in fact they ever went, were running through the water spray from illegally turned on hydrants. Some smiled as I passed. Most gave me hard looks.

Avenue D, the Lillian Wald/Jacob Riis housing project that ran for fourteen blocks. Nice view of the East River through the barred living room windows.

I turned north, then west to St. Marks Place. Hippy Heaven. Ground Zero for the anti-war, anti-establishment, anti-cleanliness movement. A one block stretch of glitzy clubs, drug dealers, shoeless fourteen-year-old prostitutes fresh from Iowa willing to suck a dick to foster greater love among human beings. They weren’t opposed to a few bucks, either.

St. Marks Place attracted runaways from all over the world. It was pumped twenty-four hours a day. Kids literally living in the street, parents from west of the Hudson River handing out eight-by-ten glossies. “Have you seen my daughter? Her name’s Marcia, she’s thirteen. Tell her, if you see her, that we love her and want her to come home.” Oh yeah? If you love her so much how come the latest picture you have of her is at least five years old?

A squad of Tactical Patrol Force cops help keep the peace. Sixteen foot cops on one block and still there was trouble. Uptown predators scoop up the trusting and unwary as soon as their tender soles hit the concrete. Those not willing to spread free love wound up raped, sometimes murdered, often dumped in the river, gobbled up by toxic waste or tangled in rusted cables. Parents of those kids carried around pictures until they faded.

Rock clubs and showcases. CBGB (Madonna waited tables there before she donned her bullet bra), the Electric Circus, walk through the doors into another world. On 14th Street, the Academy of Music, later to be called The Palladium. Bruce and Elton started out there. Let’s not forget the Fillmore East on 2nd Avenue, a ring of Hell’s Angels securing the perimeter against the mob who are there to see the show. I forgot who was there that night. Janis, Jimmy, Alice? Too long ago to remember.

South toward Houston Street (pronounced House-ton. The test of a true New Yorker, if they don’t say it our way, they were born in Kansas). The southern border and a different kind of plight: the Bowery, life’s last stop before the relative calm of hell. New York’s dregs: queers, transvestites, the lowest-rung prostitute. Home of the two-dollar blow job.

I swung west toward Tompkins Square Park, an oasis of garbage-littered grass, with dealers hawking nickel bags and the only block in the precinct that had trees. There were two radio cars, nose-to-nose so the partners could warn each other of approaching assassins. They sat inside drinking something out of unmarked cups. I’d be doing that in two days.

A hundred thousand people crammed into a precinct fourteen blocks long by ten wide. West of Avenue A: Polish, Italian, Russian, Jew, Hippy. East of A: Black, Hispanic. Pandemic: junkies, muggers, prostitutes, other assorted low-lifes. A cauldron waiting to boil over.

Back to the station house where I began walking the grid. In the East Village.

The EVil.