Person in the audience: “I’d love to hear about your experience growing up in this neighborhood and all the cultures because, you know, you had immigrants who were Ukrainians, Poles, Puerto Ricans, etc. I would love to hear about the community that Patti operated in that allowed you guys to come together.”

Al Diaz: “When I grew up here it was a little prior to Patti's, since hers was in the '80s mostly, and I grew up here in the '60s and '70s. I mean, my neighborhood, it was like the kind of place you're supposed to move out of. People got thrown off rooftops and s*** like that. All the kids I grew up with are gone, None of them are alive basically, and it was kind of as though you were still stuck on the ave as we call it. That was your world. However, I was lucky enough to have some kind of precocious sensibility, and the whole city was my backyard, you know. In high school, I would just explore, since you don't want to stay in the projects because that's very limiting. Everybody I know that stayed in the projects are gone, you know, and they were my friends, I grew up with them. By the '80s, the neighborhood and a lot of buildings were burnt out. I mean, you could get an apartment for $65 a month, so that invited a whole generation of people from other places. Patti was from Ohio, and a lot of other people that came into New York that culturally changed and uplifted New York were from other places. My mother finally moved us to Brooklyn when I was 15 'cause, I mean, we were stepping over bodies. At some point it got very serious. There was a dude, an old dude, that OD’ed in front of my door, and I remember my mother was putting ice down his pants. She saved him. But that was every other day, you know? For instance, I heard one of my neighbors kill her husband, "bang bang", with three shots. I was five years old when that happened in the hallway, and I didn't see it, I heard it. Anyway, that was what the Lower East Side was like. That s*** was rough. It was not like any other; it was like the South Bronx. But in the 80s was when it reached its peak, everything was burnt, a lot of blocks were empty. 8th Street and 9th Street were empty, it looked like Hiroshima. People started moving in and It wasn't the Gentry yet, this was the artist people trying to do stuff, and then more people came and more people came, and since we're like pack animals - we like to do and be with other people that are doing the same thing. So, of course, when you make an area cool, guess who follows you?"

Amelia Alberti: “Rich people?”