Robert Sietsema

Sometimes it's preferable to dine underground

How to eat your way up Ninth Avenue

I arrived in New York City from Madison, Wisconsin, on June 10, 1977, driving a U-Haul truck containing all my worldly possessions. My girlfriend, Gretchen, had preceded me by several months and rented a third-floor, $150-per-month apartment in a block of nine crumbling tenements on East 14th Street between Avenues B and C, right across the street from Stuyvesant Town. In those days the East Village looked much like the South Bronx, with empty lots where burned-out apartment buildings once stood. When I arrived, just as the sun was setting, I found Gretchen and some of her new friends in one such lot sitting on dirt mounds before a roaring fire, roasting hot dogs on sticks.

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