1980s Downtown Manhattan Creative Spirit Lives On

When I talked recently with New York author Emily Rubin, the co-founder of a series of innovative literary readings in laundromats across the nation, I couldn't help but think back to another of my recent posts -- a review of Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen's comic meditation on nostalgia for the Paris of the 1920s. In those days, the City of Light was a magnet for Fitzgerald, Picasso and other young creative spirits of that era. But in the early 1980s, if you were a member of the Generation Jones subset of the Baby Boom like Rubin and wanted to ride a tsunami of rebellious, provocative creative energy, the Bohemia of downtown Manhattan was the place to be.

Three decades later, the Downtown scene has vanished as surely as 1920s Paris. A lot of the old avant-garde galleries and performance spaces have morphed into Starbucks and boutiques filled with designer attire. A few of those young hipsters, like Madonna and artist Jeff Koons, went on to become global glitterati. You might assume that the rest, the ones who didn't hit it quite as big, drifted back to suburbia, traded in those black jeans and CBGB's T-shirts for pinstripes and pantsuits, and joined the corporate establishment. But you'd be wrong. Because many of those hipsters, now in their mid-50s, are still out there creating. They never quite became famous, but that doesn't deter them.They're still writing and playing music and making art, because that's what they do.

Rubin, 54, exemplifies that indomitable hipster spirit. A native of Queens, she started coming into Manhattan to study modern dance as a teen, and was beguiled by its creative milieu. "I felt isolated in the suburbs," she recalls. "I wanted to be in that experimental world." After graduating from Bard College in 1978 with a double degree in dance and theater, Rubin moved to the Lower East Side. She became a writer and performance artist, doing her pieces onstage in rock clubs between the bands' sets, and staging her work in venues ranging from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe to the now-defunct Danceteria. During the day, to make ends meet, she taught writing workshops in public schools and helped organize theater programs at community centers.

Over the years, Rubin's hipster neighborhood changed, and the bars, nightclubs and church basements that had been her old artistic haunts started to disappear. In the early 1990s, Rubin, drawing on her theater experience, found steady work in television as a stage manager and producer. "The Food Network was in its early stages, and they were willing to bring people like me in and let us learn on the job. TV turned out to be a great way to make a living. Since then, I've met a lot of really interesting people, and gotten to work with everyone from Sophia Loren to Charlie Sheen."

Rubin still had the desire to write and perform, and she kept in touch with other aging Bohemians who had the same drive. In 2005, she decided to create a new forum for them. "Because of the real estate boom, the performance spaces were vanishing, and street theater had gone away," she says. "I missed all that. I had another writer friend, Gregory Rossi, who still lived a few blocks away from me. We started looking for someplace, an unconventional space, where we could have readings."

After contemplating a bodega, a church and a Chinese restaurant, they spied the Avenue C Laundromat, and something clicked. "We thought, this is a way to make the work accessible to people," she recalls. "It doesn't matter who you are, what community you're in, you're always going to have a load of dirty laundry to do. It's the great equalizer!"

The first event in what became the Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose reading series may have been a little puzzling to some of the regular laundromat patrons, but 70 or so literary enthusiasts showed up to hear readings by novelist and short story writer Sam Lipsyte and journalist/punk rock historian Legs McNeill. The success prompted Rubin and Rossi to organize more readings, and eventually to expand the series to other cities, such as Boulder, Colo., and San Francisco.

"There are times when I'll offer the ordinary customers a box of laundry detergent or ask if I can change their dollar bills for them just to make them feel more comfortable," Rubin says.

But some chance spectators end up getting into the literary spirit. "We had one reading where a huge guy came in, lugging these eight big pillows that he needed to wash," Rubin recalls. "So he's washing his pillows, and one of our poets is performing some sonnets she had written. After she's done, the guy comes up to her, and says, 'You know, a traditional sonnet has a very different form from what you use,' and to make his point, suddenly starts reciting a sonnet from Shakespeare. And she says, 'You're right,' and they end up having this great discussion about taking an old form in a new direction. All while he's waiting for his pillows to dry.'"

As her readings series began to get media coverage, Rubin continued to work on her personal writing project -- a novel, Stalina, inspired by the stories that Russian immigrant retirees had told her in an oral history class that she'd taught in Brighton Beach. "My own family comes from Russia, but they emigrated to the U.S. in the early 1900s, so I didn't have a strong connection to the country," she says. "But these people had lived there under Communism, and had lived these amazing lives and careers before coming here when they were older." Rubin reimagined those experiences, and created the story of Stalina Folskaya, a woman chemist in her late fifties who flees the crumbling Soviet Union in 1991 and lands in Hartford, Conn., where she has to adjust to a place that's far from the glittering paradise that immigrants sometimes imagine America to be. She has to take a menial job in a seedy motel, but Stalina isn't deterred from striving for a better life, even as she is haunted by the ghosts of her past.

"The character gave me an opportunity to jump back and forth in time, so it's both a coming-of-age novel and a story about aging," Rubin explains.

Rubin sent portions of Stalina to literary magazines, and a published excerpt was so well-received that she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize but then had to set the project aside when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. After three years of treatment, she regained her health. In 2008, she began contemplating how to get her novel published. "There's not a great market for literary novels," she says. On a whim, she entered Stalina in a contest held by Amazon.com to discover new literary talents, and was startled when she got a phone call last year from an acquisition editor, who told her that the online giant wanted to publish her work in both electronic and paperback form.

"Amazon hired a wonderful editor and a publicist to work with me on the book," Rubin says. "Those were just fantastic gifts to receive."

Since Stalina was published in January, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt also has cut a deal with her to publish Stalina in trade paperback format. Even though Rubin has now earned the endorsement of the literary publishing establishment, she still sees the world through the eyes of a 1980s Downtown Bohemian. "There was a time when I felt like all of that excitement that I felt about New York was going away," she says. "But there's been a resurgence. We're all still here. We've got jobs, but that's okay. We're still willing to create things, to do the work at street level. That's who we are. And hopefully, we'll have some success at it."

For more on Rubin and her work, be sure to check out her website.