Lower East Side

“I mean, the thing I missed the most when I left New York City when I was younger was the community of people I grew up with on the Lower East Side. And in that community, your references — what you learned, what you talked about when you went out, what you emulated in your performances — that was the way you communicated.”

Yet “Chromatica’s” disco excursions were largely lost to the pandemic, and anyway “Mayhem” is more fortunately timed, with Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan having brought color and pageantry back to the Top 40 after a long stretch of whispery gloom and Charli XCX having revived the so-called indie-sleaze aesthetic that once ruled Gaga’s beloved Lower East Side.

After the Dhruv concert, I headed to a TimeLeft dinner in the Lower East Side after seeing an Instagram ad promising I’d “meet five new people over dinner.”

He was into loan sharks in Hells Kitchen, on the Lower East Side, the Village, all over town when it came right down to it.

Neither the robbery nor the timing made much sense, but making sense wasn’t on the menu for either Johnny Machine or Beansie, his friend since they were kids on Avenue C on the Lower East Side.