New Brighton musician Edwin Santiago looks back at the 'Loisaida' movement
Edwin Santiago remembers the Lower East Side before skinny jeans, boutique restaurants and designer drugs. Coming to New York City from Puerto Rico in the early 1970s at the request of a friend who was starting a band, Santiago found an urban war zone along Avenue C between 14th Street and Houston. Gangs fought with clubs and knives in the streets. To get your fix, you lined up at 3 or 4 in the morning with 50 other unsavory characters, any of whom might decide to mess with you. "They were purposefully burning down the buildings to rebuild -- that was the kind of gentrification that was happening in New York at the time," says Santiago, now 52. "We were in the Lower East Side when nobody wanted to be there. It was really bad -- I'd never seen anything like it coming from Puerto Rico."The New Brighton transplant -- known as "Pupa" to his friends -- wasn't necessarily an angel himself. He was a rock musician in the 1970s. When looking through his wealth of old photos and show flyers, the guitarist stops on one -- noting the gaunt, vacant look in his young face. "That was when I was into some bad stuff man. Look, you can see it in my eyes," he says. "But I've been clean for over 20 years. I don't drink, I don't smoke, nothing." Now, the long gray-haired musician works in his own studio, recording and teaching all ages and kinds of local musicians, playing in his band, Santiago, and working on the weekends running musicians' space The Studio in Manhattan. But he sometimes likes to look back on his more than three decades of community building and activism in New York -- both good times and bad. |
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