“He had all the symptoms: he had sudden fits of rage, he had delusions of grandeur, he didn’t like touching people, he had fantasy followers. “He was a classic nut,” says the Peddler. “He’d feed people a couple or three times a week.” “He prepared a lot of chicken mainly,” says Jerry the Peddler, a local squatter and community leader. He would return to the apartment with 30 or 40 pounds of food, cook it all up, bring it to Tompkins Square, and feed the homeless there.
Strangers shopping at the store would buy him just what he asked for: chicken, potatoes, butter, bread, vegetables. Hanging out by the front door, he asked people for donations.
He’d watch until dawn, saying “C’mon Sylvia, watch TV - just one more show, there’s something good coming on!”ĭespite a gaping hole in the wall opposite the stove, the kitchen was another plus: Rakowitz would often wake up in the morning and head for Key Food on Fourth and B. “He had a home, he could take a shower, he had a big TV.” In fact, Rakowitz developed a fixation for television. “I saw a change in Daniel: he felt like he was a normal person,” explains Sylvia. ”I didn’t really get to know him until be moved into the apartment.” Rakowitz, a 28-year-old part-time cook and marijuana dealer who was sleeping in Tompkins Square Park at the time, agreed to cover half of the apartment’s $500-a-month rent. “When I first met Daniel a year and half ago, he sold me pot in Washington Square Park,” says Sylvia. Sylvia and her boyfriend Shawn, both from Morris Plains, New Jersey, had been living together in a cramped two-bedroom apartment at 700 East 9th Street for a couple months. But you put the sock on, and the rooster just lay on its back with its legs up in the air.” And after 10 hours I said, ‘Daniel, the rooster - it looks like he’s dead.’ And he says, ‘No, he’s in a trance.’ He’d take the sock off - the rooster was fine. And the rooster would lie on its back with its legs up. I told Daniel one night, ‘Daniel, I can’t listen to this rooster anymore.’ So he took a sock, and he put it over the rooster’s bead. “The rooster’s name was Rooster,” remembers Sylvia, a pale 27-year-old nursing assistant with long brown hair and a striking red-and-blue tattoo on her right arm. Daniel Rakowitz moved in with Sylvia and Shawn on July 7, bringing his scrawny brown rooster and three cats with him.
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