I had cousins who lived in Chatham Towers during the Seventies and we'd go down to visit them and they'd take us across the street to Columbus Park between Baxter and Mulberry and you could cop anything you wanted. This was right after Bruce Lee died and Enter the Dragon came out, Bruce's face was everywhere in Chinatown, there was a huge mural of him on Canal St by the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge. Anyway, Columbus Park was where we would go to cop fireworks and street weapons like Nunchucks, throwing knives and stars and switchblades and butterfly knives. Not to mention nickel bags of weed and worse if you wanted, it wasn't until many years later that the irony of us engaging in this illicit business just steps from the intersection of the Five Points, where it all started decades before I was born, dawned on me.