BY ELIZABETH RUF-MALDONADO | Ralph Feldman and I became friends when I moved across Tompkins Square Park to his block in 1992. He was a part of ABC Garden on Eighth St. between Avenues B and C when Miguel Maldonado and I got a plot in the garden in 1993.
Ralph helped found De Colores Community Yard across the street when Giuliani bulldozed ABC. Eighth St. neighbors Carol and Cuba were already gardening there, growing vegetables and white roses. Ralph was tending a strawberry patch in the back and kept his motorboat (a large craft painted the yellow-orange color of caution lights with a face and teeth like a barracuda) parked along the eastern wall.
Ralph was always present, marveling at women’s capacity for hard work. (I was pregnant with my daughter, Clara, at the time and carting out wheelbarrows full of rubble.) Nursing his daily 24 cups of cafe con leche from Pedro’s (later Rebecca’s) bakery along with four packs of cigarettes, Ralph would converse for hours on end on pet topics like hard-working women, his adventures in the Fire Department and the Scriptures. (I was trying to read the Bible at one time but lost focus after the Pentateuch.)
Ralph wanted to name our garden the Garden of Eden. I remember standing up at a Community Board 3 meeting in the mid-1990s to take Ralph’s part on some issue or other and a neighbor taking me aside after the meeting to inform me that Ralph was the Devil.
Somewhere I have a photo of a mural on Eighth Street between B and C depicting a dream World Court with six international figures (Nelson Mandela, Rigoberta Menchú, et al.) and six folks from the neighborhood, one of whom was Ralph.
I remember the ramshackle piano and the jazz concerts in the old shul Ralph was instrumental in rehabilitating two doors down from the garden, the eight or nine guys looking like Hester St. a century ago, smoking pot (which one of them also famously supplied on a medical basis to the poor and afflicted) and looking for a minyan. I miss their music and obstreperous conversations and their camaraderie.
I remember the shul’s beautiful miniature dioramas in glass cases depicting Jewish life in ancient Egypt and the irreplaceable frescos of the signs of the zodiac along the perimeter of the women’s congregation upstairs. That’s my kind of museum — hard to find its ilk in millennial New York City.
Ralph’s sculpture of a huge metallic hand clutching the burning beams of a collapsing building still stands in the sanctuary at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
Somewhere I have a photocopy Ralph gave me of a newspaper article about that work of art. The accompanying photo shows a swarthy, mustachioed young Ralph standing beside his sculptural homage to fallen firemen, looking like Omar Sharif.
There are so many stories. I was continually surprised over the years how Ralph managed to have his hand in so many things I loved about the Lower East Side in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.
In the 1980s he produced an experimental musical, “Candy Store,” in the beloved reclaimed community space CUANDO on Second Ave. and First St. This piece featured a young artist now known as Angel Eyedealism, who, years later, has become my friend.
As a landlord, Ralph helped many neighbors and artists with affordable space outside the nouveau gentry’s real estate racket. He could also be merciless. In the years I knew him, I saw how his habits aggravated his mood and vice versa, and how the whole situation took a harsh toll on his health. He behaved both irascibly and kindly, and there’ll never be another like him.
