Eat the City(50)

JORGE Torres is an expert in how to eat cane. First, it has to be cut—he gets out a machete stashed in the casita, poises his right hand, slashes—into a length you can hold. Then its thick bark has to be removed, so he uses the machete as a vertical peeler, hacking all around the stalk, revealing a wet, white center that looks something like the flesh of an apple. You have to bite that fibrous middle to release a bit of juice, and suck and chew and knead out more. It’s not as intense as a spoonful of white table sugar, but has a light, fresh, lingering sweetness.

For hundreds of years while sugar refining was big business in New York City, you might have been hard-pressed to find a piece of cane to suck outside of the odd import in Chinatown. But when people from the Caribbean came, they wanted their ca?a. “Out of huge barrels loom red sugar cane, six or eight feet high, which later, cut in short lengths, is eaten as stick candy by children,” wrote a visitor to Harlem in 1928. As generations of Puerto Ricans continued to settle in the city, Jewish merchants at East Harlem’s markets began to stock tropical produce.

When his children were young, Jorge Torres would go to the bodegas near his Bronx apartment, with their bins and boxes of fading sugarcane, prehistoric yucas, blackening mangoes and plantains and papayas—enough mottled imports for every household between the Cross Bronx Expressway and the Bronx Zoo to produce some pale version of a tropical diet. He brought the cane home to his children, but it had aged in its travels from Puerto Rico. “Old sugarcane smells bad and tastes bitter,” Jorge said, and its pure white flesh becomes reddish. The stuff available at the bodegas was, in his assessment, “worthless.”

Why the impulse to grow cane struck when it struck is hard to explain. “I like the taste, I like the way it looks,” Jorge says. “I like to give it away.” Sugarcane juice is good for the kidneys and for blood pressure, he says. “Sugarcane is healthy and it makes you grow,” he insists, ignoring all evidence of tooth decay, obesity, type 2 diabetes. People are still shocked when he takes out a machete and slices through the stalks on his windowsill nursery to retrieve some cane for the kids to chew. One day, his brother came over with a camera phone to make a video of the cane to put online.

Back in Puerto Rico, the area where Jorge cut sugarcane is now filled with sidewalks and highways and houses. Yet some people on the island, and Puerto Ricans like Jorge in New York, still remember how a man might say a girl is like sugarcane in February—the time of year when the cane is barely mature and the sweetest for plucking. You’re sweeter than molasses, a man might say to a woman. You wiggle more than sugarcane in the wind, a parent might tell to a restless child. His machete is sharp, a person could say of a man known for his way with women. His machete is blunt, one might say of someone dull. That’s worth less than the chaff. He’s stingier than the knot of the cane. It stings more than cane fluff. May your cane juice always be sweet.

All over New York City, sugar has left its mark. The sugar exploiters, men like Peter Stuyvesant and Henry O. Havemeyer, and the sugar laborers, people like Jorge Torres and Joe Crimi, have shaped the city. Our whole mercantile, freewheeling, improvisational town descends in part from the Dutch West India Company’s sugar-rich investments. Sites where sugar clerks administered their sugar kingdom still exist, including the Havemeyers’ offices at 117 Wall Street, now renumbered, rebuilt, and occupied by Citibank. Plans have stalled to gut the sugarhouse of the Domino plant in Williamsburg to build high-priced condos, and the smokestacks and the company’s iconic yellow sign still telegraph the industrial past.

Assorted Havemeyers live in the city with Harry’s objets d’art, though the bulk of his collection of Spanish and Impressionist art, including works by El Greco, Velázquez, and Goya, is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Citibank has branches all over the city. On weekends in Central Park, on the beach at Coney Island, in small community gardens like Jorge Torres’s, bomba y plena musicians sing plaintive songs of another time and place: “I can see from here/the cane fields … where I was born.”

And in Jorge Torres’s garden in the South Bronx: a red stalk of sugarcane with a thick white pith. “My kids don’t even know what it is,” says Jorge, before biting into the flesh of his cane plant. What it is: the early withdrawal from school, the grueling labor, the hot sun, the blazing fires in the fields, the twenty-five-cents-a-day wages, the recurring meals of yams, the stunted growth, the adolescent exhaustion, the decision to leave everything and flee to a faraway place. His kids don’t know anything about those things. “But they eat it,” says Jorge, smiling. His gift to them is the cane without its cost. He has found a way to pass on his history without its damage. He offers the privilege that so many others take as a given—that here in New York, his children should never know the debilitating side of the cane, only its sweetness.





BEER


THERE ARE JOSH FIELDS and Jon Conner, standing inside the cinderblock-walled freight elevator off the kitchen in Jon’s loft space. They carried kegs into the elevator from their temperature-controlled storage space in the garage, brought the lift to the second-floor kitchen, stalled it, and opened the door. They hung a sign saying: SAVE A DINOSAUR—REUSE YOUR CUP! They pulled over a table and piled it with plastic cups so they could offer beer service from within the elevator shaft.

Now men in plaid shirts and women in tight jeans—sculptors, photographers, painters, cabinetmakers, glassblowers, jewelry workers, graphic designers—fill the bright, cavernous kitchen. A blackboard highlights the beer specials, which Josh and Jon brewed: Land Lover, a dark brown ale with an earthy feel; Frank Lloyd Rye, an India Pale Ale with a floral hint and a spicy note of rye; Robot Small, a rice ale, similar to Sapporo. There’s After Glow, a pale ale with an orangey haze, and Shark Attack!!, a bitingly high-alcohol IPA made with hops with a tropical mango flavor. There’s Eric, a mild smoked porter, named after Jon’s friend Eric Porter, who extracted a promise of eponymous tribute for all porter beers. It’s months of effort they’re offering, many mornings of huddling over the brew kettle. Now as Black Mountain and Lil Wayne provide a soundtrack, Jon and Josh remain in the elevator shaft, pouring.