[00:16] Meg: Welcome to Desperately Seeking the '80s. I am Meg.

[00:20] Jessica: And I'm Jessica. And Meg and I have been friends since 1982. We met in middle school and also went to high school together here in New York City.

[00:30] Meg: And we are still friends here. And now we are podcasting about it.

[00:33] Jessica: It's amazing.

[00:36] Meg: And I talk about ripped from the headlines, and I talk about pop culture. Let's get started. So, Jessica, before we get started, I wanted to share a very special story with you.

[00:49] Jessica: Please do.

[00:50] Meg: This is from Helen Fogerty, who went to Nightingale Bamford School. And she left I can't remember when she left, but she left before you did. Before I arrived. Yeah, before you arrived. So she was in lower school with me, and she reached out via the Facebook.

[01:08] Jessica: Oh, how delightful.

[01:09] Meg: Because she was inspired by one of the stories that you told about window washers on the FDR.

[01:16] Jessica: Oh, yes.

[01:17] Meg: And so she wanted to share this story with you.

[01:20] Jessica: Oh, Helen, thank you.

[01:23] Meg: My mom and I were at a light in Harlem when a guy in a trench coat walked up to our car, a huge Ford station wagon with wood siding. The guy flashed us and started peeing on the windshield. So my mom turned on the windshield wipers.

[01:46] Meg: And Helen says thank you. I love that childhood New York City memory.

[01:51] Jessica: That is really, I think that's a cartoon. I have to do that cartoon.

[01:56] Meg: Helen. Poor Helen.

[01:57] Jessica: Poor Helen, trapped in her mother being. And it's such a great, I can only imagine it as a deadpan response, like not moving a muscle, but the minute the urine hits the windshield, hitting the wipers, like the wipers, just another day up on the streets of New York. All right.

[02:18] Meg: I love that. And I loved hearing from Helen, who I haven't seen since I was, I don't know, eight, nine.

[02:24] Jessica: Well, crazy. That's that's fantastic. I love it. I thought that we would just give a quick thank you to our listeners who played our, our game, who entered our contest.

[02:36] Meg: Yeah, that's true.

[02:38] Jessica: And who won the incredibly cute, very 80s army bags with all of the vintage 80s buttons on them. Very cool. And it was Charlie and Bethany and Danielle.

[02:56] Meg: Exactly.

[02:57] Jessica: I can't believe I remembered. So, to you three, congratulations. And everyone else, we're going to be doing these contests pretty regularly, so please join in the fun.

[03:09] Meg: Yeah, we love merch. Ms. Jessica. Ms. Jessica Jones. Do you have a favorite New York Post headline by any chance?

[03:19] Jessica: Oh, man.

[03:22] Meg: Maybe I can spark a little memory. Have you heard of Headless Body in Topless bar?

[03:30] Jessica: Yes, I have.

[03:32] Meg: And this one I didn't see in real time, but At The End Of His Grope, referring to Cuomo.

[03:42] Jessica: Okay. Oh, my God. The End Of His Grope.

[03:46] Meg: All right, stupid. So my story, not surprisingly, is the the sources are a New York Post article from 1989 and a follow up article in 2018. Charles Sennott's book called Broken Covenant, a Los Angeles Times 1989 article and a The New York Times 1999 article. On December 12, 1989, the front page of the New York Post screamed, Times Square Priest Probed: Former male Prostitute cites 'gifts.' And with that headline, Bruce Ritter, founder of Covenant House, the renowned charity for homeless youth.

[04:42] Jessica: God, I remember this. That was so messed up.

[04:47] Meg: Became one of the first clergy to be publicly exposed for sexual impropriety and pedophilia.

[04:56] Jessica: A big shout out. Well done, Father Ritter. Outstanding

[04:59] Meg: Trendsetter.

[05:02] Jessica: Yes.

[05:02] Meg: In the early 70's to back us up a little bit, Greenwich Village and the East Village were magnets for homeless teenagers from all over the country. Bruce Ritter was a Franciscan friar living in a tenement building on East 7th street where he washed his dishes in the bathtub and paid $90 a month in rent. Now, I don't know if you knew this about Franciscans. Their whole deal is they live amongst the people. They don't live high on a hill. They tend to the people in situ. Exactly. Okay, so the Franciscans came to the East Village in order to help the increasingly desperate homeless community, especially the young people who gravitated there, because like San Francisco, Astor Place, St. Mark's

[05:55] Jessica: So the Haight-Ashbury, the corollary in New York was Astor Place

[05:58] Meg: And that's yeah, it's a magnet.

[06:00] Jessica: Yeah.

[06:01] Meg: And in fact and by the way, still is. Absolutely. And I was going to say, I lived on 7th Street, I recall, which is a block away from St. Mark's in the 90's and can attest to the teens sleeping on the sidewalk. So when I would get up, remember how I worked at a coffee shop? I would get up at 5:30 in the morning and have to walk over the sleeping kids in order to get to my job to open the coffee shop. Also, fun fact, there was a bar where all the friars would go in their robes on 7th street, and I didn't know they were Franciscan, so I called it the Monk Bar. I was like, hey, Joe, do you want to go to the Monk Bar tonight? Ritter eventually founded Covenant House, a charity that acquired properties and turned them into group homes for at risk youth. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan praised Covenant House in his State of the Union address for their efforts in aiding homeless and runaway kids. So, national attention. By the late 80s, Covenant House spent three times what the federal government did on runaways. And think about that for a second. See, Reagan loved it so much that he did nothing about it because the federal government didn't have to give any money to it. So he's like, oh, that's great. You run this wonderful thing that doesn't cost anything.

[07:32] Jessica: Trickle down economics.

[07:32] Meg: Exactly. Because it ran exclusively on individual donations. And Bruce Ritter was very, very good at raising money from individuals. He called the teenagers in Covenant House my kids, nice kids, gorgeous kids. But with his expose in The New York Post, 26 year old reporter Charles Sennott pulled back the curtain to reveal sexual misconduct and financial impropriety and a huge cover up. Kevin Lee Kite told The New York Post that Ritter met him in New Orleans early in '89, flew him to New York, gave him a nice apartment, a computer, a college scholarship, money for fancy clothes and restaurant dinners, all in exchange for sex. Ritter believed the 25 year old Kite was 19 and illegally arranged for a new identity for him, that of Tim Warner, a young boy who had died of leukemia in 1980. This is really dark and dirty stuff. The eight month affair was bankrolled entirely by Covenant House. Ritter tearfully denied Kite's story. He claimed he was being set up by organized crime.

[08:58] Jessica: Wait, can I can I backtrack for a second? Okay, hold on. So you said that the journalist was 26?

[09:05] Meg: Yeah.

[09:06] Jessica: And Kite was 25. He was 25, but he represented himself as being 19. Exactly. For his own purposes. There's nothing about like Father Ritter was like, I really like teenage kids. And he's like, oh, guess what? I'm 19.

[09:24] Meg: We don't know how they met in New Orleans.

[09:26] Jessica: Okay, so he decided this is the kid.

[09:29] Meg: Yeah.

[09:29] Jessica: He said he's 19. And why did he need a new identity?

[09:35] Meg: I think he probably had like, a criminal record at some point.

[09:39] Jessica: Oh, listen to me. Sheltered crazy. Okay, sorry.

[09:42] Meg: So they're like, we can wipe the slate clean. You can become a new person. I'm going to do everything for you. I'm going to pay for your college. I'm going to pay for your apartment. I'm going to give you a new identity so you don't have to worry about anything.

[09:55] Jessica: Oh my God.

[09:56] Meg: All you have to do is have sex with me. And by the way, guess who's paying for it? This organization that I run that's a charity for homeless youth.

[10:05] Jessica: The identity thing, really? That just seals the deal for me on the creepy level.

[10:11] Meg: Yeah. It gets creepier, though.

[10:13] Jessica: Oh, thank God.

[10:14] Meg: Yeah. So Ritter tearfully denied Kite's story. He claimed he was being set up by organized crime and many had his back. So he's been raising money nationally and in the city for quite a while. So guess who had his back? Governor Mario Cuomo, former Vice Presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro and Cardinal John J. O'Connor, the powerful head of the New York Archdiocese who said "I have held Father Ritter's work in the highest esteem." Anne Donahue, the executive director of one of the Covenant House shelters, said, "there's no question in my mind that this will be rapidly cleared up. We all knew the risk of working with the kids we work with." I just thought that quote was interesting because she's kind of slamming the kids. The kids.

[11:05] Jessica: So she was setting it up so that the kid had duped him.

[11:09] Meg: Right. He is a victim. Ritter is a victim. Kevin Kite's own father said his son was a chronic liar and thief with a personality disorder and a history of hurting those who tried to help him. In fact, according to the New York Post, Ritter enjoyed a cover up for the same reasons that other charismatic clerics with cult like followings do; unwillingness to blow the whistle on deviant priests who reel in money and garner political prestige under a veil of saintliness.

[11:41] Jessica: Well, and I suppose also all of the powerful people who donate don't want to then look like schmucks.

[11:46] Meg: Oh, the people on his board did not want to be associated with anything like this. But then it gets worse. Other young men came forward. It turned out that Ritter had sex with at least 15 young men at Covenant House, one of whom was 14 at the time. But he was never charged. Instead, the Archdiocese brokered a deal with District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, and Ritter was forced to quit Covenant House and pledged never to work with young people again. Since Ritter's fall, predatory priests have been found to have abused thousands of children and young men in New York and around the world. The Church has paid out billions of dollars in settlements, including $60 million by the New York Archdiocese in recent years. On a Sunday in December 1989, as the Covenant House scandal was breaking, Act Up made history with a massive protest at St. Patrick's Cathedral. 5000 people protested the Roman Catholic Archdiocese's public stand against AIDS education and condom distribution and its opposition to a woman's right to an abortion. Chanting protesters entered the Church and lay down in the aisles.

[13:02] Jessica: I remember this so vividly.

[13:04] Meg: Why? Forcing Cardinal John J. O'Connor to interrupt his sermon as they were carried out. Bruce Ritter was never charged for his predatory and financial misdeeds, retained his priestly faculties, and retired to the small town of Decatur, New York, and died of cancer in 1999. I'm happy to say, and this is important to say, that Covenant House survived the scandal and continues to provide housing and supportive services to homeless youth. And Charity Navigator gives it a four star rating with the promise donors can give with confidence. So that's good news.

[13:42] Jessica: Yes. It's so grubby how predictable it is.

[13:47] Meg: And the protection that he had from all the muckety mucks. I would also like to add that this story was suggested by our dear friend Regina George.

[14:02] Jessica: Yay! Hi Reg, great idea.

[14:03] Meg: Thank you. Well done. She reminded me of the musical Runaways.

[14:09] Jessica: I remember that.

[14:10] Meg: And she was in a student production.

[14:12] Jessica: Of it, which I which I also remember vividly.

[14:15] Meg: A young Seth Herzog, who I ended up meeting years later, was also in it. Its first production was at The Public, and it was written and composed and choreographed and directed by Elizabeth Swados about the lives of children who run away from home and live on the city streets. Swados developed it from real life runaways in the late 1970s. And it featured a 13 year old Diane Lane playing the character Jackie who sings the song The Minnesota Strip.

[14:46] Jessica: Stop it.

[14:46] Meg: Swear to god. It all comes around. So many of our stories come up in this segment. We've got Act Up from episode eight. We've got Astor Place from episode two. We've got The Minnesota strip from episode three. Do you love it?

[15:02] Jessica: I do love it, and I love that Reg is so on it.

[15:07] Meg: I know. She was like, you have to talk about the priest.

[15:10] Jessica: Oh, my god. Well, I always hesitate to say how fabulous your bits are, even though they are amazing and well researched and so smart, because I feel like I'm saying, yay. Bruce Ritter. No. Bad.

[15:28] Meg: What I thought was interesting about researching all of this is the idea that whenever you're in a bubble of some kind, I feel like because he was in this power bubble, that in and of itself is going to breed things that are not okay.

[15:43] Jessica: Well, it breeds things that are not okay, and it forces the person to lose perspective. So they become their own moral compass. They become their own guide. And just to specifically point to the Catholic Church, I mean, that's a bubble within a bubble within a bubble. So there's so many layers of obfuscating and reasons to justify and keep people out.

[16:11] Meg: And John J. O'Connor at the time was protecting this guy, and as it turned out, a lot of other guys who were doing similar things.

[16:18] Jessica: He was really a villain because there were so many people who were coming forward and just no one was covering it. No one was listening.

[16:28] Meg: Again, I want to say, thank goodness Covenant House pulled it all together. I think it was a nun who took over after. So, yeah, leave it to the ladies. And it really is very well respected now. And in fact, I'm going to put on the website a link if people are feeling generous.

[16:48] Jessica: Fabulous. Well, thank you for sharing.

[16:56] Meg: Okay, Jessica, I have no idea what you're going to offer me today.

[17:00] Jessica: I know I'm rarely so subdued about my topic. I have a question. I have an engagement question for you.

[17:07] Meg: I'm ready.

[17:07] Jessica: Okay. When you think of gardening, what is the color and the body part that are associated with gardening?

[17:20] Meg: The color and the body part? Well, Green, I guess And I guess a Green thumb.

[17:26] Jessica: Very good. But in New York, it's Purple feet. Oh, and I would like to thank our listener, Andy P, for suggesting that we talk about this.

[17:43] Meg: And my Aunt Laura.

[17:46] Jessica: Oh, Laura did this too. Okay. Well, thank you, Laura. And thank you, Andy. So the reason I wanted to talk about this is because it was a mystery to me, too, what this whole phenomenon was. And I remember seeing it starting in, I guess it was 1986, and I never knew. I never got to the bottom of it. And thanks to our two listeners, I now know what that's about.

[18:13] Meg: Please tell me.

[18:14] Jessica: I'm going to tell you a little story about community activism.

[18:18] Meg: Okay.

[18:18] Jessica: But before I do that, I'm going to introduce a villain who might come up some more, even though really he predates the 80s. But do you know who Robert Moses was? Yes. Okay, so Robert Moses was a city planner and developer, and he had a lot of ideas about how to modernize New York City. And one of his big ideas was to raise Greenwich Village entirely, just destroy it, to put an overpass in there. And because of his activity, some of the first grassroots building protection and historical sites and community activism against developers happened. And in fact, as we all well know, Greenwich Village still stands. And that's because the residents said, no thank you, no way. And it was a big message.

[19:14] Meg: And the reason that he wanted to do is because he was all about getting from point A to point B and he didn't care what was in between.

[19:21] Jessica: Exactly.

[19:22] Meg: All about transportation. It's all about highways instead of about residential areas, which is insane to me, but interesting.

[19:29] Jessica: Yes, correct. So Robert Moses was very busy in the doing that sort of thing. And a lot of buildings were getting knocked down all over the city that were deemed either structurally unsound and some of them were or unnecessary. And what that created all over the city in all five boroughs were empty and dangerous lots, open lots.

[19:57] Meg: Okay.

[19:58] Jessica: Open lots. And one of the concepts that I always retained from my legal education because I love the name of this so much, is An Attractive Nuisance which describes most of the people I've dated.

[20:15] Meg: Does that mean like a nuisance that makes people go towards it?

[20:20] Jessica: What it means is that no, it's actually that it's dangerous. So it is tempting to go there and then you go and you hurt yourself. And if that land is owned by the city, the person who's injured there can then sue the city.

[20:37] Meg: Got it.

[20:38] Jessica: So it was a precarious and weird time, as we know. And although my story starts in 1975, it then extends from, through to 1986. So here's what happened. A lovely hippie couple named Adam, who self titled Adam and Eve were living on Forsyth Street on the Lower East Side between, I think, it was Rivington and Stanton, and Forsyth runs parallel eventually with the Manhattan Bridge And where they lived I think they were at like 182 Forsyth, there was an empty lot right next door. And in 1975, Adam, whose real name was David Wilkie, looked down and saw little kids playing in this dangerous lot. And he remembered his own growing up experience in, I believe it was Missouri. Missouri. And he played in fields and had his feet in the dirt and was connected to nature. And he felt so bad for these kids that he thought we have to do better. So he and Eve decided to create The Garden of Eden. And they started on that lot at 184 Forsyth Street. Yes, I see you're having a reaction.

[22:00] Meg: I feel like I've walked by this it's still there, isn't it?

[22:03] Jessica: Don't ruin the story. I'm so sorry. So they started building. And as anyone who has ever seen any movie that shows New York City in the 70s that was shot in New York City in the 70s, when I say that it was an empty lot, I don't mean that it was tidy. I mean it was knocked down, filled with bricks and glass and all kinds of just dangerous stuff and in mounds just piled up.

[22:30] Meg: I bet people threw their garbage there, too. Absolutely.

[22:32] Jessica: It was really bad. So these two people on their own cleared the lot entirely. And then they brought in topsoil and they went to Central Park and collected manure from the carriage horses in Central Park to fertilize the soil. And Adam and Eve created this amazing 15,000 square foot garden that was constructed as concentric circles. And not only was it beautiful and filled with flower beds and little benches and that sort of thing, it was also a vegetable garden. And he planted trees, and they were walnut trees, so there was a lot of sustenance that could be gotten from what they did. I read that Adam and Eve actually had a falling out, which doesn't really.

[23:29] Meg: Look no one's perfect. No one's perfect because right now they're sounding kind of perfect.

[23:34] Jessica: They were perfect, but they had a falling out, I think, over the vision. But Adam stayed with his garden and he welcomed the community into the garden. And indeed, the garden was finished in 1980. And from 1980 to 1986, that garden fed the community.

[23:55] Meg: Are you kidding?

[23:56] Jessica: No. And it provided a safe place for kids to play.

[24:01] Meg: I'm dying.

[24:02] Jessica: And this was all before pocket parks, as they're known, were all over the city. Now, the city, it allows communities to develop lots for gardening or growing produce. But at the time, these parks that when I say pocket park, I really mean like it's one lot. And most of them actually are not farm related. It's actually what they call them. It's like mini farms.

[24:28] Meg: Can I just break in for 1 second and just say for anyone who was not here in the 80s, everyone loves Central Park now. I lived two blocks away from Central Park. We never went inside Central Park. We would go, like we would go in groups to run around the reservoir for gym class. For gym class. It was not kept up very well. It wasn't as beautiful anywhere near as beautiful as it is now. And it was also dangerous. And I certainly was never allowed to go to Central Park with just like, a friend, because that would be madness. So I grew up, like, playing in the street, literally not in a beautiful community garden like you're describing.

[25:16] Jessica: When I was a little kid. So I lived on York Avenue. And the next avenue over east was East End Avenue. And they had cul de sacs. Still do. Yeah, they're cul de sacs. And we would get our skateboards and ride in the cul de sac and bring our tennis rackets and play tennis against the walls. That was our playground. So it wasn't a beautiful, idyllic place by any stretch of the imagination. So these pocket parks that everyone enjoys now didn't exist, nor did these these, as I said, gardens that yielded sustenance for people. In 1974, however, there was one woman named Liz Christy who started a community farm garden, and she managed to get the land from the city and had a lease of $1 a year, I think $1 a month, $1 a year. It was nominal just to say that she actually had a valid lease for the land.

[26:20] Meg: Okay.

[26:20] Jessica: And so that was, I guess, the first blueprint, but hers was an arrangement with the city. Adam's Garden of Eden was completely what he called guerilla gardening. His example was picked up eventually by a lot of other communities. And you can see I mean, there's one not so far from my apartment up on Lexington, and I think between 101st and 102nd. And there's always something kind of cool happening in there. And they display textiles and crochet art that's woven through the chain link fences that's really kind of cool and weird. But anyway, so back to Adam. So Adam had this and is guerilla.

[27:02] Meg: Gardening or Gue..Right? Yes, it's kind of like squatting, right?

[27:07] Jessica: Yes, that's exactly right.

[27:08] Meg: Okay.

[27:09] Jessica: So that was Adam's real calling. And Adam was a little bit of a character, as I'm sure you can imagine, when he looked out his window and saw what was going on in that lot. He was a squatter as well, in his own home. He was in a building that had been, I believe, condemned, but he was living in it as, like, camping with no electricity, no water.

[27:34] Meg: Maybe that's why Eve moved on.

[27:36] Jessica: Maybe. It could be. Maybe she liked a good toilet, a functioning toilet.

[27:41] Meg: You can't blame her.

[27:42] Jessica: And so he was very counterculture. And as I said earlier, he came from Missouri, and he had a BA. A college degree, and a master's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri. And that's how he started out his life. And by the time he made it to New York, he had, excuse the expression, gone full hippie. And he could be recognized because he had a giant beard that went all the way down to his stomach, and he only wore purple.

[28:15] Meg: And Eve now we're getting back to.

[28:17] Jessica: Also only wore purple. So just keep that in mind. So Adam had this garden, and it was amazing. Even Ed Koch, who's obviously a recurring character for us, was very laudatory, he was amazed. And the example that it was setting and other gardens like that were starting to pop up. In 1986, if memory serves I think this is correct 1986, the city decided to reclaim the lot. So this 15,000 square foot garden that was carefully

[28:57] Meg: Was it 15,000 or 1500? 15,000. Oh, my God.

[29:01] Jessica: That was carefully laid out as precisely as Versailles, like really great trees, had grown to maturity. It was as though it had always been there in the course of 7 hours was knocked down to the ground, gone. Goodbye. What? No more.

[29:23] Meg: What was the reasoning?

[29:25] Jessica: Developers wanted it.

[29:26] Meg: Oh, my God.

[29:27] Jessica: So the city was able to make a lot of money, and they sold it to developers who made that lot into low income housing that you can see still to this day at 184 Forsyth Street. Adam continued on, but was really lost without his garden and wound up getting involved with eco warriors and the Times Up movement. And he was very into bicycling, and he wound up staying, living really in a very small room in the makeshift offices of Times Up. And because they were also, for some reason, I think they were also like a bicycle shop or something like that. They gifted him a foldable bicycle, and that's how Adam would get around the city. So you could see this fabulous hippie riding around in purple with his white beard flowing behind him on a foldable bicycle. And he inspired people all over the city to start community gardens. And he and Liz Christy, who died of breast cancer in, I believe, 1985, they're really the people who and Eve they're really the people who began a movement that now has 550 community gardens around the city, meaning all five boroughs where kids are taught how their food is grown, how to cook it and how to lead healthier lives.

[31:06] Meg: That's incredible.

[31:07] Jessica: But wait, when the garden was raised in 1986, one of Adam's friends was so incensed that, yet again, I love New York grassroots activism. He created a device that was essentially like a wheelbarrow filled with purple paint that siphoned down onto a rotating a wheel that had cutouts of feet. And wherever he rolled that wheelbarrow, there would be purple footprints. And all of the purple footprints around the city eventually led to 184 Forsyth to honor what Adam had done. That's what it was.

[31:55] Meg: I mean, I saw purple footprints all over all the time, and I never followed them more than a couple of blocks. But if I had, I would have ended up there.

[32:04] Jessica: And you would have wondered why. Because there wasn't a plaque. There still isn't. There's nothing.

[32:11] Meg: Jessica, that is such an incredible story. I have a question about Times Up. What is Times Up?

[32:18] Jessica: Oh, I didn't do the research on that. Don't be ridiculous.

[32:21] Meg: But it's not like women's movement. No, that's called Times Up.

[32:26] Jessica: No, it's not that. It's an eco warrior.

[32:29] Meg: All right.

[32:29] Jessica: Okay.

[32:29] Meg: So it's an eco warrior. It predates the 90's.

[32:34] Jessica: And I know this is going to sound grim, but I don't think it's grim at all. Adam was always seen traveling across the Brooklyn Bridge, because I believe that the Times Up building was in Brooklyn, so he was always shuttling back and forth, and he died either on his bike or wheeling his bike on the Brooklyn Bridge.

[32:56] Meg: Please tell me he wasn't hit by.

[32:58] Jessica: He had a heart attack. Okay.

[32:59] Meg: Okay.

[32:59] Jessica: He was 84.

[33:01] Meg: So, good life.

[33:02] Jessica: Yes. And I am a fan of die doing What You love. Absolutely. Here's a grisly side note. Our family accountant who was the coolest, most whacked out nutcase who could make anything happen with your taxes, we called him Magic Mel. Magic Mel loved blackjack. That was his thing. And he just had the worst health habits of any human being on the planet. And after tax season, he would always go to Atlantic City and play blackjack until he couldn't anymore. And that's exactly what he did. He played blackjack until he couldn't anymore. He died at the tables. I think that Adam was probably really lucky that he left in a location that was exactly what he loved the most and doing something that he believed in, which was no carbon emissions. And on his bicycle at 84. Not bad.

[34:10] Meg: Not bad at all. Thank you, Jessica. That was a beautiful story. I can't wait to try and find photographs. I hope people took photographs of purple footprint.

[34:20] Jessica: There are so many photographs online, and there are so many people who have written about him and eulogized him.

[34:29] Meg: He lives on.

[34:30] Jessica: He lives on. And he was called Adam Purple, as though that were his last name. And I think it's really charming. I think that it's a great example of, obviously, activism and how even in the most chaotic and gritty city, people are going to demand beauty and demand grace and demand a way to connect, and they will make it happen for themselves. And I love that. It's also it's like a David and Goliath story, which is kind of lovely. And you and I have talked about how in days of yore, we referred to people who were around in ways that would be considered really, really not PC now.

[35:18] Meg: Like Scarbelly. Yeah. But Purple Antman.

[35:21] Jessica: Well, that's who I was thinking of, that there were homeless people who were around our school. Around school.

[35:32] Meg: There were homeless people who would hang out, and they became they looked out for the girls. They actually looked out for the girls.

[35:37] Jessica: And they were sweet, and we knew them, and they knew us by name. And we only knew this one particular person as the Purple Hat Man. But he will always be in my.

[35:51] Meg: Memory as a kind.

[35:54] Jessica: Yeah. And these characters were not, they were left alone. They were part of the texture of our city and where we lived, and I just don't think that that exists.

[36:07] Meg: It's very different now. I mean, we should obviously talk about homelessness in in a bigger way when we can give it attention. There were a lot of people who were homeless who had been let out of mental institutions because there's no funding in the 80s for that. And they came out into the streets. Oh, many of them were completely benign. Some of them were not. Were not.

[36:31] Jessica: I realized I neglected to say that the reason that Adam was able to take over the lot for so long was because the city was bankrupt and they had no ability to do anything with it and didn't bother. So, yet again, the financial crisis of New York City, we're seeing how it reverberates through decades.

[36:53] Meg: Thank you.

[36:54] Jessica: That's Adam Purple.

[36:55] Meg: Adam Purple. Toast to Adam.

[36:57] Jessica: Toast to. clink dear. Wait, let's see if we can.

[37:03] Meg: So both of our stories had something to do with the East Village, which is interesting. Those little purple feet and Franciscan monks who were there to look after the homeless children.

[37:14] Jessica: Yeah. And although Adam Purple was not homeless, he was a squatter and never really issues. Yes, he had many housing issues, but was completely invested in helping his community. So I guess that's our takeaway. That New York City. Poor Adam Purple in with Bruce Ritter.

[37:33] Meg: No, we will not.

[37:34] Jessica: No, we won't. But what I think the other takeaway is that New Yorkers are very hard to keep down. They will do what they want when they want and deal with the consequences later. And we're always very community minded. Even our little chat about the Purple Hat Man, he was part of our world and part of our community on.

[38:01] Meg: Well we are all on top of each other here in this city. So we need to deal with each other in one way or another, and hopefully it will be in a way that we can help each other instead of fighting against.

[38:12] Jessica: Yeah, and I mean, to that point, during COVID I live in a big high rise. There are people I'd never even seen before who, during the worst of the pandemic, we were all helping each other. People who were and there are many people in my building who are doctors and nurses for Mount Sinai and Metropolitan Hospital, and they were sick a lot. And all of our neighbors came out of the woodwork and would bring their packages to their door so they could have their medication or whatever it was. So, yeah, you're right. Living on top of each other can be a huge pain in the ass when someone's blasting Pantera through your thin walls. But it's also if you take a moment to realize who's around you and what the possibilities are, you've got a very protective world at your disposal. So that's my love letter to New York City today.

[39:08] Meg: I love New York.

[39:09] Jessica: Yes. All right, so that is the end of our podcast and tune in next Tuesday for the latest. For the newest. But we refer to so many people and things over and over again because they recur during this period of time. Listen to the back podcasts and you'll see our cast of characters popping up again and again. So thank you for listening.