[00:18] Meg: Welcome to Desperately seeking the 80s New York edition. I am Meg.

[00:22] Jessica: I am Jessica. And I forgot what we do on this. Hey, Meg, what do we do on this podcast? We talk about the 80s.

[00:29] Meg: We talk about the 80s.

[00:30] Jessica: Which is when we grew up in New York City together in middle school and high school, and we revisit some of the stuff that happened at the time. With the perspective of actual grownup adulthood.

[00:45] Meg: And I do rip from the headlines. And what do you do?

[00:49] Jessica: Pop culture.

[00:50] Meg: That's right.

[00:51] Jessica: All right. So before we begin, I have something very important to talk about.

[00:56] Meg: Oh, okay.

[00:57] Jessica: I think that it's going to be a lot clearer in this part of the pod. I'm gesturing in my office, my side of the office, because you are such a good friend, Meg, that you gave me a new pop filter.

[01:14] Meg: Oh, yes, I did.

[01:15] Jessica: I love my new pop filter. I had been using, as you well know, the day that we began, I realized I did not have one. And I looked up online how you make one at home. So I Macgyvered a wire hanger and a stocking and rubber bands together and then taped it to the mic stand.

[1:42] Meg: It was pretty remarkable,

[1:43] Jessica: and it was astonishing that it worked but you had the funniest quip about it, and you said it was like an ex boyfriend of mine, which was “it was serviceable, yet hideous.” Yeah.

[01:58] Meg: Yes. Did the job temporarily, I think, is what I said.

[02:03] Jessica: Yes. But there was also a slam about the looks. So we're going to keep that person's name

[2:11] Meg: We’ve upgraded.

[2:12] Jessica: Yes, we're going to keep that person's name safely under lock and key. But we have this new pop filter, and we're going, he's so slick, he's so sexy, and he gets that job done. Woo! So we will privately refer to him as boyfriend number two, or as the case may be, 36. Okay. Anyway, thank you for my present, and I hope that it makes everything sound better. Just life. Life will sound better through the pop filter. Interestingly, by the way, the box for the pop filter says that it offers stability and protection.

[02:51] Meg: Are you kidding me?

[02:51] Jessica: So I'm just saying this pop filter is boyfriend material.

[02:56] Meg: And before we retire the first one, obviously we have to take a photograph of it and put it on the website.

[03:01] Jessica: There is no question. It's a sad, sad little creature, but it did its job temporarily.

[03:12] Meg: So, Jessica, my question for you is I want you to picture yourself late August, New York City. Where are you? What are you doing? What is that, like, conjure for you, that kind of humidity?

[03:34] Jessica: Well, if I'm trying to escape it and I'm in the city, I'm in Central Park, okay? But basically any place else in the city, all I can think of is grime sticking to you and sweat. So you know what it reminds me of in the 80s? Being a temp around Grand Central Station and having to wear stockings and a skirt and heels that would sink into the tar in the streets because it was so hot. So those are my associations.

[04:13] Meg: So the city gets really hot, and there's something about summer in the city that's got its own kind of atmosphere to itself. And that's when my sad story takes place.

[04:32] Jessica: Am I going to need to call a therapist for this one, too?

[04:36] Meg: Pretty much all of them.

[04:37] Jessica: Okay.

[04:38] Meg: I’m sorry. And I'll stop apologizing because it's important that we revisit these.

[04:43] Jessica: Okay. Is there a trigger warning that you need to put on this one?

[04:46] Meg: No, I don't think so.

[04:47] Jessica: Okay.

[04:48] Meg: My sources are: New York Times article from 1989, the HBO documentary Yusuf Hawkins Storm Over Brooklyn and Oxygen: True Crime. In the evening of the last week of August in 1989, at the tail end of a hot and muggy New York City summer, Yusuf Hawkins was watching Naked Gun with his friends Claude and Luther when another friend, Troy, dropped by and asked if they wanted to go with him to Bensonhurst to check out a used 1982 Pontiac that was for sale for $500. Troy had seen an ad in the paper for it and had called to get directions. So, the boys lived in East New York, a neighborhood in the eastern part of Brooklyn not too far from JFK Airport. Bensonhurst is in southeast Brooklyn, not too far from Coney Island. And if you want to get from East New York to Bensonhurst, it's either a half hour drive or an hour on the N train.

[06:00] Jessica: Can I stop you for a second? Sure. When you called them boys, how old are these people?

[06:04] Meg: 15.16

[6:07] Jessica: All right.

[6:09] Meg: When the teenagers got off the train at about 9:15, they stopped, p.m. They stopped by Snacks and Candy to get Duracell batteries, film and a Snickers bar. When they left the store, they headed for the address at the guy with a car. Now, Gina Feliciano lived right above Snacks and Candy. And there was a rumor flying around that Gina had invited a bunch of Black and Hispanic boys to her birthday party, one of whom she was reportedly dating. Thirty or more neighborhood guys who knew Gina were all hanging out at the schoolyard at PS. 205, just around the corner, when they heard that some black guys had been spotted in the neighborhood. They assumed these were the guys coming to Gina's party. The 30 neighborhood teens grabbed bats and ran over to Snacks and Candy. They surrounded Yusuf, Claude, Troy, and Luther, banging their bats and threatening them. Then four gunshots rang out. Yusuf collapsed, and the crowd ran off. Yusuf Hawkins died on the way to the hospital of two gunshots to his heart. He was 16 years old. Yusuf's family and friends were completely devastated. They also immediately recognized that the murder was racially motivated and were outraged by the senseless violence. Yusuf's father, Moses, reached out to Al Sharpton, who okay, and so this is 1989. And at this point, Al Sharpton had made quite a name for himself as a civil rights advocate. Sorry, civil rights activist, advocate. He'd led protests after Bernie Getz shot four black teenagers on the subway, also after Michael Griffith was chased to his death by a white mob in Howard Beach. And he had handled Tawana Brawley's publicity when she accused white police officers of raping her. I will cover at least two of these stories, if not all of them. Al Sharpton was a huge part of the 80s in New York City and, but this I think it's important to note that this is when he's at, you know, his career has already taken off as far as being a well known member of the community. The black community, by and large, trusted him. While white New Yorkers saw him as an opportunist. Dozens of media outlets and activists set up camp outside of Yusuf's home. Louis Farrakhan, a native New Yorker, incidentally, sent members of the Nation of Islam black nationalist movement, a more militant aspect of the traditional civil rights movement, to speak to the press outside of Yusuf's home. Now, Mayor Kutch, in the meantime, declared the murder a bias incident, but there was a competing narrative in the wind. The local news and front pages of the tabloid suggested Yusuf was part of a love triangle with Gina and Keith Mondello and that his murder was about jealousy rather than bigotry. Al Sharpton wasn't having that. He organized a march in Bensonhurst at the Feast of Santa Rosalina Festival, and the media outlets followed him. The press caught on camera the almost exclusively Italian American residents of Bensonhurst as they responded to Al Sharpton's protesters. And it was not a good look. Racial slurs were shouted over loudspeakers. The protesters were pummeled with watermelons. The young men of Bensonhurst basically lost their shit, beating their chests with agro anger.

[10:15] Jessica: Oh, my God.

[10:16] Meg: And this was on TV. Many people thought this kind of racist fury only existed in the south in the 60s. But that march through Bensonhurst showed the world it was alive and thriving in New York City, which prided itself on being the melting pot of the world. David Dinkins, who is African American, was running against Ed Koch for mayor, and it was a matter of weeks before the election or before the Democratic primary. Dinkins went to visit the Hawkins family in East New York, and it got a lot of press. While Mayor Ed Koch defended the Bensonhurst community and called for the marches to stop.

[11:03] Jessica: Another bad look.

[11:06] Meg: Yeah, exactly. In the meantime, the police rounded up a group of guys from the neighborhood, including Keith Mondello, remember Gina's Ex, who was angry at Gina for dating a black guy. And his pals, Pasquale Rauchi and Charlie Stresser. They interviewed a whole bunch of witnesses from that night but no one would finger the shooter. Rumors swirled that 18 year old Joseph Fama might know something about who had the gun, but no one could find him. The marches continued every weekend. So Al Sharpton is bringing people to Bensonhurst every single weekend. And incidentally, some of the angry Bensonhurst residents chanted “Fama, Fama,Fama” implying that the missing Joseph Fama was the shooter and that he had the community's support. But Bensonhurst, this isn't a good look for them and they feel they know that. They were suffering from all kinds of negative attention. And finally, Sammy The Bull Gravano, the local mob boss, called a meeting at Tally's Pool Hall in Bensonhurst and demanded that the people hiding Joseph Fama give him up. Then Joseph Fama joined five other defendants who were brought to trial on charges including menacing, discrimination, weapons possession and rioting. Fama and Keith Mandello were also charged with second degree murder. Right before the trial began, mayor Ed Koch lost the mayoral Democratic primary race to David Dinkins and an era ended.

[12:54] Jessica: Absolutely. And Dinkins was our first African American mayor. So very big deal.

[13:04] Meg: And probably would not have happened had not all these events.

[13:08] Jessica: Certainly

[13:10] Meg: At the trial, Mondello's lawyer said it was all Gina's fault. That she was a drug user and that she was the one who had instigated the whole thing. It's a girl's fault. Gina had a thing or two to say about that on the stand. She ripped into Mondello and his cronies. In the meantime, Al Sharpton continued the marches until the verdicts came in on May 17, 1990, Fama was found guilty of second degree murder and sentenced to 32 years to life. He, to this day, maintains his innocence and is up for parole in April 2022, just a few months. So we will have a follow up when that happens. Keith Mondello was found not guilty of murder, even though many people described him as the ringleader but he was sentenced to 16 years for other charges. The rest of the defendants got community service or were found not guilty. Many found the verdicts unsatisfactory and the marches continued. It was an incredibly polarizing time when I told my mother about our podcast just, I'm going to say, like a week and a half ago when we had dinner and told her the projects, the stories that we were talking about and stuff, and she said, the first thing she said was that I hope you cover the use of Hawkins case. And when I asked her what struck, I frankly was already working on this story, so I thought that was pretty interesting and when I asked her what struck her about the case at the time, because like, you and I were in college by then and we were outside of the city when all this happened. I'm not proud of it, but I think I might have conflated Howard's beach and the Yusuf Hawkins event because they seem similar. But anyway, so I asked my mother what struck her so much about the story, and she said that she was incredibly moved by Yusuf's boyish enthusiasm and naivete, that he had no idea how much danger he was in going into that neighborhood. And that his parents and actually all of the people of that generation, of his parents generation and I should have put this in the story, when they found out that their boys had gone to Bensonhurst at 09:00 p.m., they were freaking out. They knew that something bad would happen. There were no cell phones, there was no way to track them.

[15:55] Jessica: Here's a little pop culture twist, just for those of you who enjoyed the film's Summer of Sam and Saturday Night Fever. Bensonhurst was figured prominently in both of those films, showing the incredibly intolerant all Italian American communities, and that it was absolutely unthinkable for anyone who wasn't already part of that community to enter completely off, you had to be out of your mind.

[16:35] Meg: And I think it's very interesting that it takes so long to get from East New York to Bensonhurst. When it takes an hour on the N, it takes less time to ride your bike there. They don't want to connect those communities. Someone at some point said, let's make sure the subway line, let's make it difficult.

[17:00] Jessica: Do you really think that was by design? We'll flag that and look it up.

[17:05] Meg: Okay. And then the other thing that struck my mother was the images of Diana Hawkins, Yusuf's mother, who, with all these people who were justifiably so upset, she, in the meantime, was just dumb with grief, could barely function. But they kept putting her in front of the cameras and saying, say something, say something. And she, in the meantime, is just practically catatonic with grief. And you can now, in the documentary Storm Over Brooklyn, she speaks a lot, and, you know, she has a lot to say about that entire period of life, period of time in her life. And it's it's just heartbreaking. It's her baby boy. One other footnote. And I thought another fact is that the number of violent hate crimes against black people in New York City increased every single year in the 1980s.

[18:18] Jessica: And do you have a hypothesis that you've unearthed that you favor?

[18:25] Meg: I mean, I don't know if it's a hypothesis. It's just I think the fact that you did have a lot of people in power. Let's say Mayor Koch, for example. Obviously not Al Sharpton, but Mayor Koch, who wants to present New York City in the eighties. “Let's bring back New York City.” “Come, you can visit us now. We're not so awful.” They're working really hard on the PR of New York, and part of the PR of New York was this “melting pot.” and you can find people from all the home countries, live here. That's kind of selling point and that we all get along and we live right up next to each other, and that wasn't really accurate. And so if there's a lie that's being perpetrated like that, that maybe that causes things to bubble. I don't know.

[19:35] Jessica: Every time you share ripped from the headlines story, I feel like we have about 19 follow up questions. So begin your life as a sociologist and look that one up.

[19:49] Meg: Right? I mean, I don't know if I would ever come up with a conclusion on that, but yeah. Do you have any theories?

[19:58] Jessica: No, I wouldn't even dream of positing a theory, but I'm absolutely obsessed with looking into it. I mean, obviously, we both know that New York City in the 80s was still a holdover of the Bronx's burning of the 70s. We were still reeling from being an impoverished city being told to drop dead. So I think that that had something to do with it, but I don't and you know what? I'm just remembering, actually, that in the 80s, there was a lot of complaining when the city was bankrupt about social programs and welfare and any kind of assistance that was being provided for very low income families. And I think that might have been part, if not the match into the powder keg. It certainly was part of it. I'm just having this vague memory of really hideous references to welfare moms, do you remember this?

[21:17] Meg: Well, yeah and if that whole thing about Fear City is really blaming “oh, it's all because of the people in that neighborhood”, when, of course, that was not accurate. But if a certain community is being scapegoated for all the ills of New York, that will result in some hate crimes.

[21:40] Jessica: Well, to be further researched. Thank you, I guess. Well, it's very interesting.

[21:51] Meg: I mean I got to say, the more I read about these stories, the more I wish I had known more about them at the time.

[21:58] Jessica: I couldn't agree with you more. And that's actually a really interesting thing about our generation. The social apathy was really extreme, and I know that people who were a bit older than us were not as apathetic, but politically, I don't recall anybody say, like, one or two people who we went to school with who were on top of things. It was a really strange time.

[22:35] Meg: Well, thank you for listening Jessica.

[22:37] Jessica: Thank you for bringing another sunshiney story of New York City to the podcast. Well done.

[22:50] Meg: Hey Jessica.

[22:51] Jessica: Hey there, Meg.

[22:51] Meg: What are you going to talk to me today about?

[22:53] Jessica: Well, I'm going to talk about something that everyone cares about.

[22:59] Meg: Okay.

[23:00] Jessica: And everyone. And I'm going to start by quoting Fleabag, which is not from the 80s, obviously it's now, but I think

[23:10] Meg: the show?

[23:11] Jessica: Yeah. Phoebe Waller Bridge put a moment in there. I think it was in the second season, where her sister gets an absolutely horrific haircut and the hairstylist tries to weasel out of his shoddy work, which turned out to be perfect and exactly like the photo that she brought. But he tries to say, what's the big deal? It's just hair. And Fleabag gasps and says, hair is everything. And she's right. So I am going to talk about hair in the 80s today.

[23:52] Meg: Okay.

[23:52] Jessica: Now, because this is a show about New York City in the 80s, not going to really be able to talk at great length about giant hair, because that just wasn't what was going on in the city. There was a very different vibe.

[24:10] Meg: We didn't do the big bang.

[24:11] Jessica: So when you think of the 80s hair of the rest of the universe, what was the look?

[24:17] Meg: Well, yeah, when you see sort of the yearbook pictures, when people are sort of making fun of that look, it's it's very frizzy and the bang sticks straight up into the air. Yeah. There's a big sort of comb out thing happening right around the crown and it goes really big.

[24:40] Jessica: Right. Yes. So I think of tons and tons of layers. Curled, frizzed, crimped. Remember crimping? And a crimping iron. So you could really make your hair look the worst it could ever be. And it was layered so that the top could be like a dome, like a poof on top. And then the sides were like cocker spaniel ears. They were this big thing on the side. And that was a universal thing. It was, what was it? The higher the hair, the closer to God. That was it what they said, the bigger the hair you could yes, absolutely. And that was everyone from Cher with her giant hair and Julia Roberts, to those poor kids from Whoever ville, where they tried to make the bangs as big as possible and created an ironing board in the front of their heads. But for us in New York City, what was the look we were going for? That you recall.

[25:50] Meg: I have curly hair, as do you, so my goal was just to keep it down. Just please God, keep it down.

[26:01] Jessica: Yes. So in our world, we were part of the headband set. The all of the front is pulled up in a barret and then pushed forward slightly, kind of, but that didn't work for me. No. Smooth and sleek. And you and I have had many conversations about the incredible dearth of reasonable hair products at the time.

[26:32] Meg: What I used to do was, like, I would just kind of leave conditioner in my hair in hopes that it would help keep it from going crazy. It just made it look kind of greasy. It was awful.

[26:45] Jessica: I'm not speaking about your hair particularly, but for those of us who were not of some Nordic extraction, it wasn't good. Yes, it was just not good. And I recall vividly that when you and I found Tenax, we thought we had found the Holy Grail because it kept us from frizzing, but it gave us a really slick kind of look. It wasn't crunchy like Dippity Do, but it was a slick. It smelled good, but it wasn't good. So that's what was going on. I actually, if you recall, took a slightly different route, and it's my segue into the melange that is my presentation today. Okay. So in New York City, there was no shortage of fancy hairstylists. You know, you had Vidal Sassoon and you had Oribe and all of these places where, you know, it was just chi chi faux faux. But there was one place where anybody and everybody could get a haircut, and they were considered the coolest haircuts in the city.

[28:13] Meg: I know what you're going to say.

[28:15] Jessica: All right, so before we dive into that particular joint, I'm going to give you a quiz.

[28:22] Meg: Okay.

[28:23] Jessica: Did you know that there was a jingle or at least, a phrase about Alphabet City in New York?

[28:36] Meg: No.

[28:36] Jessica: So Alphabet City is the part of Manhattan Island that is all the way east, right on the East River. So from the East River, you've got Avenue D, then C, then B, then A, and then First Avenue.

[28:52] Meg: It starts at 14th street. Going south from 14th street.

[28:56] Jessica: Correct. So did you know that there was a little jingle?

[29:02] Meg: No.

[29:03] Jessica: Okay, so I'm going to share a few versions. So this is the avenue names. A is all right. B is be careful, C is caution and D is danger. That's the one I recall. There was also A, you're adventurous, avenue B, you're brave, avenue C, you're crazy, avenue D, you're dead. So that's what that was at the time .

[29:31] Meg: And no joke. I mean, even in the early 90s, it was rough.

[29:36] Jessica: Right. And all of the punk bands and the new wave bands that were coming up at the time and that were at CBGB's and places like that, all of those bands, they lived on Avenue A, maybe B, but it was really, really rough. And then some of them didn't even have plumbing. Like, it was bad. But there is a reason I'm bringing up the bands, because the look in New York City and look at some photos now that I'm bringing this up, it was all about New Wave, it was about the Asymmetrical Bob. It was about shaving one side of your head. It was about Mohawks, it was about very short haircuts on women.

[30:26] Meg: Yeah. Again, I could not pull that off.

[30:29] Jessica: Yes. And even for white boys with straight hair, they did those, remember, like Dead Poets Society Wedge swoops. They did that.

[30:43] Meg: But I thought that was kind of cute.

[30:44] Jessica: Yeah. And they catered to everyone in the city. In fact, they had a sign up right in the front. So the name of this establishment, which I've of course, now managed not to mention, is Astor Place Hairstylists

[31:00] Meg: Still there!

[31:01] Jessica: Yes. Astor Place was it. And part of the allure of going and saying you have a haircut from Astor Place was that it was right on the edge of Alphabet City. Astor Place is a very famous place, which I'm going to talk about in a second. But this little haircutter, very small. It had been around, I think for about 45 years already at that point, and totally democratic. They had and still have a big sign up in the front that says we speak Italian, Russian, Greek, Spanish, French, Polish, Uzbek, Farsi, Moroccan, Portuguese, Bengali and Romanian. Also bebop, hip hop, rap, rock, and a little English. So if you were cool, that's that's where you went. Now, my hair journey at the time was, I think it was 1982, and I had really long, pretty hair and it was curly, but it was like Andy McDowell curly, and it was long almost to my waist. And I decided that before I went to my new school, Nightingale, I was going to have a whole new look, which is always a bad idea. I don't know why my mother allowed this.

[32:28] Meg: How old were you at this point?

[32:30] Jessica: It's 1982, so I was twelve.

[32:33] Meg: Okay. Oh a new look when you're twelve.

[32:35] Jessica: A new look when you’re twelve. It wasn't a wise choice. So my mother, fearing the worst, didn't take me some place cool. She took me to the fanciest place she could think of, which was, I believe, Oribe, or whoever was in the top of Bergdorf Goodman. And I had all my hair cut off, all of it, a Pat Benatar short haircut. But for someone with curly hair, it didn't work. [33:07] Meg: It doesn’t work. Your hair is too thick.

[33:09] Jessica: It was, someone in our class, because I have very big blue eyes, someone in our class called me a girl we don't like, and we might name her, but she called me Baby New Year. Do you remember from the Christmas thing with Burl Ives?

[33:28] Meg: Don't say.

[33:32] Jessica: She was from Texas. She came to us from Texas.

[33:33] Meg: Got it. Okay.

[33:34] Jessica: Yeah. Really mean.

[33:37] Meg: She has low self esteem. And that's why she said that.

[33:41] Jessica: Well, as well she should. We really can't name her. Well, no, I mean, she's someone who got a nose job and tried to convince everyone that it was because she had broken her nose and then her whole family showed up with the same nose. So I'm just saying you're right about the self esteem. Anyway, back to hair. So I spent the next three years in high school trying to make it work, which was insane. I don't know why I couldn't just find the wherewithal to grow it out, but I couldn't.

[34:23] Meg: Well, I got to tell you, I think we have similar hair. We don't have the same hair, but we have similar hair. And it is hard to grow out curly hair. Two, it's hard to grow out thick hair because it takes so friggin long. So you might have been trying, but it's like a ten year exercise.

[34:42] Jessica: Well, it wasn't, and that's the worst part, was that by the time junior year rolled around. I had finally decided to bite the bullet and let it grow. And I had the cutest little asymmetrical bob. By the time senior year started, I was like, why did I torture myself like this? As all teenagers do. And it didn't help that I was very short and very thin. And I knew it was time to get a different haircut. That it didn't look on me like it did on Pat Benatar when I went to get rain boots with my mom and the clerk handed my mother the bag and said, I hope your son likes them. It was bad. It was just not good. So hair.

[35:38] Meg: Can I just say one thing?

[35:40] Jessica: Yes. Of course.

[35:40] Meg: I wanted a Dorothy Hamill haircut.

[35:43] Jessica: Oh, that would have been bad news.

[35:45] Meg: Oh yeah, I mean, please. And this is earlier, obviously, but yeah, my mother, you know, had to break the news to me like, honey, that's just never going to happen for you.

[35:56] Jessica: Could you imagine what you would have looked like with one.

[36:00] Meg: True but I hated the idea that I couldn't even dream of it.

[36:03] Jessica: That was the thing about the 80s. There was no dreaming. There was no rethinking your hair at the time. You were stuck with what you had but still told that you should look this other way. And with Christy Brinkley?

[36:18] Meg: It was actually impossible.

[36:18] Jessica: Right. With Christy Brinkley as the model of what was beautiful. That only blonde straight hair. Oh my God. And the rest of the, because the 80s was the age of the supermodels. They all had these rippling curtains of hair that you never would have been able to, so it was damaging.

[36:41] Meg: There weren’t any Curly heads. Except for Andy McDowell.

[36:43] Jessica: Exactly. Who is an outlier. But what's interesting is that 80s hair has come back and I encourage anyone from unassuming high school kid to hipster of all hipsters in, where do they live now? Red Hook.

[37:07] Meg: Hipsters?

[37:08] Jessica: Yeah. Where are they?

[37:08] Meg: I don't know.

[37:09] Jessica: Some place in Brooklyn. Take a good look at what 80s hair really looked like at the time because we weren't the only ones who suffered from a lack of product. Product was either used so liberally, the Dippity Do and the hairspray that you looked like what's that German horrifying folktale struwwelpeter, the one where his hair shocked Peter. His hair is like standing straight out and someone's running after him with scissors to cut off his fingers. Like something horrible like that. That was a look. That was a thing. So take a look at what the original was and be very glad that what's being sold to you now as 80s hair is really just a lot of volume, curly bangs and maybe a little bit of a they're calling it a modern perm. A perm is a perm. Let's just be honest. But yeah. So that's 80s hair in just 1 minute facet. This is just our little experience with 80s hair. But the thing that I wanted to bring up is that what I love about Astor Place Hairstylists is that its location kind of meshed with its own aura, that it has so much going on and bajillion languages are spoken and it doesn't matter who you are, you come, you get the haircut of your dreams. And by the way, it was all for like $5.

[39:02] Meg: Oh, yeah. Still, I think. I mean I don’t know if it's $5. But I know it's still cheap

[39:06] Jessica: Yeah, very, very in expensive.

[39:07] Meg: They recently had like right after the pandemic, they almost closed, but their wealthy.

[39:16] Jessica: Former clients, or maybe even current clients, bailed them out.

[39:20] Meg: So isn't that wonderful?

[39:22] Jessica: Amazing. But the one thing I'm going to add is that Astor Place has long been the location of activity in the city and where protests took place. General unrest. In 1849, there was a huge riot and I'm going to just read embarrassingly from Wikipedia, but I was not prepared. I didn't read the assignment. So here we go. Astor Place was the site of the Astor Opera house at the intersection of Astor Place, East 8th street and Lafayette Street. It's known now as the gateway to the east, to the village really. Yeah. And Astor Place, there was there was a huge riot May 1849. That was time of the Irish potato famine. And so Irish and English residents of the city were clashing terribly. And if you want a vision of this, think about the earlier part of Gangs of New York. That's the time period. And Astor Place was not far from where that was, the action of that movie was taking place. So there was this huge disaster going on. And the way that the tensions finally broke was this riot and horrible fighting between the Irish and the English. But the way they expressed themselves was by aligning with either one of two actors who were both performing Macbeth at the time. One Irish and one English 

[41:14] Meg: So classy. 

[41:15] Jessica: So let's see, the American actor Edwin Forrest and the English actor William Charles McCready were both presenting versions of Macbeth in nearby theaters. The protests in the streets against McCready became so violent that the police fired into the crowd. At least 18 died and hundreds were injured. The theater itself never recovered from the association with a riot and closed down shortly afterwards. Is that like an only in New York?

[41:53] Meg: I mean, who knows? Because we're not doing a podcast about Chicago or LA but it's a damn good story. 

[41:59] Jessica: And for people to get that upset about theater. I know it was really about theater. But still, it's kind of fabulous. Yes. So Astor place, gateway to cool, to punk, to possibility. And as you enter it, your first stop is Astor place Hairstylists, where you can still get a haircut. And when you go to Astroplace Hairstylists on the subway, on the six train, get off at Astor place and take a good look at the decorative tile in the station, and you will see a charming little beaver. And I think he's chewing on some wood or something. And Meg, do you know why there is a beaver?

[42:47] Meg: I don't.

[42:49] Jessica: Because John Jacob Astor's wealth came in some part originally from trading furs. And the creation of beaver hats. The top hats were made of so there you go. And for a very long time, the beaver was the mascot of City College of New York.

[43:12] Meg: And Brearley School 

[43:13] Jessica: and the Brearley Beavers. Anyway, so that's my rambling. How much can we include into the world of hair that isn't really about hair?

[43:27] Meg: Well, whenever you tell your stories, I feel like I want to take a field trip.

[43:31] Jessica: Oh, well, that's exciting. Maybe we should someday take a field trip with our microphones and interview the guys at Astor place. Exactly. We can do some follow ups.

[43:41] Meg: Awesome. Thank you very much.

[43:47] Jessica: Okay, Meg, so that is another, I think it's number two podcast finished. How are you feeling about it?

[43:55] Meg: I'm feeling really good. I am so enjoying this experience, Jessica.

[44:00] Jessica: I am, too. And I'm learning so much more about my own city, and, as always, super excited to share it with as many people as you believe possible.

[44:09] Meg: I have such a great story for you.

[44:11] Jessica: I'm already terrified I live in a constant state of terror, that I'm going to be wildly horrified. But I'm also dying to know what it is. And I will try to find something as light and fluffy as the hair we've described today.

[44:32] Meg: Balance. Balance.

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