Race, Class and Sex Breed Contempt in Greenwich Village

Under pressure from residents, the New York City Council and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (R) recently increased police patrols, despite statistics showing that the area has one of the lowest crime rates in the city. The social services outreach part of the city's plan begins next month.

But to its denizens, the pier is a "safe place," with a gorgeous view. It's where Jessie, who likes girls, quietly confided in a male friend who wears his hair clipped short to his round head and likes boys. Both are 17 and African American. They're talking, again, about Jessie's girlfriend.

"Her mother sent her to Santo Domingo to get her away from me," said Jessie, whose bookish glasses and tightly coiled short hair add to her boyish look.

"Then they're going to send her to Pennsylvania. I'm going to be mad lonely."

Jessie's male friend has been consoling her for weeks, on the phone, on the pier. Someday they'll settle down, he promises, they'll have their own families and be done with these hassles.

A security guard cruises by. It's the 1 a.m. curfew on the pier. They begin the long, slow walk to the subway, back to Crown Heights, home to working-class blacks and West Indian immigrants.

The increased police presence on Christopher is noticeable. Several police vans and patrol cars line the street, and officers shoo away stragglers from storefronts.

"Trees, trees, trees," chants a headphone-wearing man who greets several of the pier's regulars with hugs. He's chanting about pot.

"My name is Paper. Put that in a big P, in bold. I'm a hustler," said Alan a.k.a. Paper. Despite the police van just five yards away, and his own low-grade homophobia, he keeps chanting. He pulls in $700 a week just on the strip. "Everyone knows that gays carry mad cash."

That's what keeps him in the Village. And he's one of the reasons Jay Jefferies, 64, fears leaving his Village apartment at night. How many times has he awoken to find people engaged in sex acts on the street or relieving themselves in front of homes?

"It's not that they're gay, it's not that they're black or Hispanic, it's that they are antisocial," said Jefferies, who is gay and a 40-year resident of Christopher Street. "They have no parental control. They come from neighborhoods where that doesn't exist very much."

Jefferies, a playwright who lives in a building once known as Leather Flats, says, "The only people who would rent in my building were leather numbers." Those were the pre-AIDS days, when he and other white men sunbathed and cruised for men on the same piers.

"It was different, it wasn't gentrified," said Jefferies. "These kids do nothing for the neighborhood. They don't solicit the restaurants or the bars. They have no money."

Jessie and her friend linger outside the subway entrance, watching some transvestites at the pizza joint across the street screaming up a storm at another woman. Jessie recognized them as bar-hoppers from the strip.

"Those are the girls that gave us cigarettes. People come here, get drunk, fight and get high," she said, explaining the scene unfolding. "This is where people come to be free."