Habitats: Private Lives in the Big City

21 Caretakers of a Culture: LULU LOLO AND DAN EVANS IN EAST HARLEM (August 22, 2010)

1 1 9 21 Caretakers of a Culture LuLu LoLo and Dan Evans in East Harlem AUgUST 22, 2010 LuLu LoLo, a performance artist, and her husband, Dan Evans, a playwright and artist, in their 19th-century town house in East Harlem. (Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times) 1 2 0 For decades, the signs along East 116th Street have touted cheap airfare to San Juan and Mexico City. Restaurants and bodegas hawk cuchifritos and tacos. Salsa is the music of the streets. Except for culinary landmarks like Rao’s and Patsy’s, along with venerable institutions like Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, the great stone church on East 115th Street, little survives from the days East Harlem reigned as the city’s largest and most vibrant Italian-American neighborhood. The Italian immigrants who began flooding the area in the late 19th century are largely gone, along with most of their descendants. A newspaper article published a few years ago about the neighborhood’s fading Italian presence noted that fewer than a thousand Italian-Americans remained in East Harlem, that Mount Carmel stopped holding Italianlanguage masses several years earlier and the church’s lone surviving Italian-American priest was 90 and bedridden. “They used to come back for weddings,” a Spanish-speaking priest at Mount Carmel said of the older generation of congregants. “Now they just come for funerals.” Yet that all-but-vanished world survives in the brick and brownstone town house on East 116th Street where LuLu LoLo and Dan Evans have lived for more than 35 years. Encrusted as it is with relics of the past, their house is not everyone’s cup of tea. As you move from room to room, you almost expect to hear period music from hidden loudspeakers or snatches of conversation from iconic immigrant events, perhaps the clamor of families arriving at Ellis Island. It’s no surprise to learn that LuLu LoLo is obsessed with the obituaries of strangers, especially those who died in obscurity. Every so often a ceiling collapses, wearied by age, and there’s nothing chic about the coffin in the parlor. Yet this homage to a largely forgotten past is unexpectedly affecting. A noted judge named Joseph Boccia owned the house until his death in the 1960s. Boccia represented a link to the days when the fiery congressman Vito Marcantonio ruled these streets—he was a pallbearer at Marcantonio’s funeral in 1954—and his initials are traced in black wrought iron on the front door. Photographs of LuLu LoLo’s parents, Pete and Rose Pascale, are tucked into the metalwork. In the rooms beyond , a virtual-reality version of the old neighborhood endures as if enclosed in a bell jar. C A R E TA k E R S O f A C U LT U R E 1 2 1 This is largely thanks to LuLu LoLo, a performance artist who, not surprisingly, started out as the far more prosaic Lois Pascale and arrived at her stage name by way of a grandmother to whom she was always LuLu. Her roots in this part of the city run deep. Her grandparents emigrated from small towns in southern Italy, and her parents, pillars of the community, lived their entire lives in East Harlem, the neighborhood where LuLu LoLo grew up in the 1950s. Her father died in 1997, her mother last year. Her father especially was a mythic figure in the neighborhood, so revered that her street bears his name. His obituary in The New York Times described him as a man “who loved East Harlem so much he made it the focus of his life, his work, his dreams and his memories.” LuLu LoLo and Mr. Evans were married in 1965, and in 1973, by then parents of three young sons, they bought the four-story building on East 116th Street from the judge’s aged widow for $15,000. Only because the widow trusted Pete Pascale, with his impeccable neighborhood credentials , did she agree to be pried away from her family home. The house stood opposite the tenement where LuLu LoLo’s mother lived as a child. In those years, buying property in East Harlem struck most people as an act of insanity, even for a son or daughter of these streets. “The neighborhood in those years was terrible,” LuLu LoLo recalls on a summer afternoon, sitting in the rear garden...