Fourteenth Street · New York · 1939–1993
The Gramercy
Gym
Two flights up · one room · no alibis
The author, thirty seconds before the hardest work of his life. Behind him, the man who taught him how to do it — the great Al Gavin.
The Room
A staircase, a ring, and a standard
You came in off Fourteenth Street and climbed two flights of wooden stairs that creaked in a particular way, so that a man already upstairs could tell by the sound of it whether you were nervous. At the top was one long room with a ring, a row of heavy bags, a radiator that knocked all winter, and windows that looked out onto Irving Place.
There was no lobby. There was no juice bar. There was a bucket for the spit and a bench for the men waiting their turn, and if you were not ready to work, the room knew it before anybody said a word.
For more than half a century this was the classroom. It is gone now — the building came down in 1993 and the street was renamed for the man who ran the stairs — but the standard that was set in that room is not gone, because standards don't demolish.
The Teacher
Cus D'Amato
Constantine “Cus” D'Amato opened the Gramercy Gym in 1939 at 116 East 14th Street. He was a man who believed that boxing was not a business of fists but a school of the mind — that fear was the only real opponent, and that a fighter properly taught could learn to think inside the storm.
The hero and the coward both feel the same thing. The hero uses his fear, projects it onto his opponent, while the coward runs.
He was stubborn, honest to a fault, and famously hard to do business with, because he would not sell a fighter short. What he built on Fourteenth Street was not a gym so much as a method: a way of teaching a man to stand his ground with his hands up and his mind quiet.
Out of one room on Fourteenth Street
Champions, and men who were champions in their own right
Floyd Patterson
Brought up out of Brooklyn and the Gramercy stairs. In 1956 he became the youngest man ever to win the world heavyweight championship — and in 1960 he became the first man ever to win it back.
José Torres
A Puerto Rican kid from the Lower East Side who learned his trade on Fourteenth Street and became world light heavyweight champion in 1965. Later a writer, and always a teacher.
And the rest of us
Countless other boxers, champions in their own right — the ones who never got a belt but got their lives back. The plaque at 120 East 14th Street says it plainly: the gym salutes them all.
“For more than half a century, the Gramercy Gym stood on this site. Legendary boxing trainer and teacher, Cus D'Amato, trained world champions Floyd Patterson and Jose Torres along with countless other boxers who were champions in their own right.”
Historical marker · 120 East 14th Street · New York CityWho's In Your Corner
Al Gavin, and the reason Trinity exists
D'Amato eventually sold the gym. The man who took it over — the man standing behind the shoulder in the photograph at the top of this page — was Al Gavin, one of the finest corner men the sport has produced.
Ten years before that picture, the kid in it was a comic-book nerd who wore a Captain Kirk shirt to Star Trek conventions and had panic attacks just being in a crowded room. In that picture he was getting ready to fight in front of fifteen thousand people in the New York City Golden Gloves finals at Madison Square Garden.
Without that man in the corner telling me what I could actually do, and teaching me this mystical skill with which to do it, I don't think I could have escaped that skin prison I was living in between constant fear and quiet desperation.
Al Gavin and his partner Bob Jackson are the reason Trinity Boxing Club exists at all. This gym is a living testament to every trainer, gym owner and fighter who ever made doubt a dead religion.
Get off your stool.
The stairs are gone. The standard isn't. Come up to Trinity and put your hands where they belong.
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