Reporting by David Stone
Assorted Ideas, Large & Small
The Mayor Meatpacking, Post Pandemic
Having not run into Roberto Monticello, the one and only Mayor of Meatpacking, an historic district now more inclined toward art, I was a little concerned. He’s as visible a symbol of any neighborhood as you’re likely to find.
But, in fact, I hadn’t found him in a dozen or a dozen or so visits since before the pandemic waged microbial war on New York City.
My concerns were assuaged with an awareness that Roberto Monticello, for all he’s been through and what he stands for, is not someone likely to lose out to a virus. Meet him, and it just becomes something you know about him.
So, it was a relief, but not a surprise, running into him in the seating area The Whitney sets up between the museum and High Line Park.
Catching up with the Mayor of Meatpacking
Like other outsized public figures, Monticello’s eager to talk about himself, and it’s funny how he usually and immediately explains why he’s where he is, what he’s up to.
On this day, he’s “waiting for friends.” From Europe. He asks first if we’d been in The Whitney, and we had. An inspiring exhibit by photographer Dawoud Bey could not be missed.
As for the Mayor, he’s close to finishing a film on human trafficking, a years long project, and plans on premiering it in Toronto, later this year. He’s grappling with how to pull the end together, the subject matter — pedophiles — visually awkward.
And one other small thing. He has, he says, been approached three times by producers hoping to feature him in reality films or TV series. But he’s fended them off because they’re stuck in the quagmire of tacky commercialism.
He’d love doing something, though, genuine about his real life interests.
Meeting the Mayor of New York City (Meatpacking)
Monticello’s story doesn’t come close to meeting the expected narrative. We’re accustomed to neighborhood eccentrics who dress funny and draw attention to themselves, benign characters news stories gloss over lightly.
Banish that stereotype, and learn about Roberto Monticello.
On a chilly, spring evening my wife and I paused in the glass-walled lobby of the Whitney Museum of American Art in Chelsea. It’s near the Hudson in the far west section of the Meatpacking District.
A wrinkled overcast crept slowly up over the river and New Jersey.
While we sipped wine before a walk through the Biennial, a man in a brightly colored jacket and wearing a bright red hat stood nearby. He wondered out loud about a friend who was late. In a casual aside, he told my wife that he was “the Mayor of Meatpacking.”
You can look it up…
He pointed toward my wife’s smartphone. “Look it up. ‘Mayor of Meatpacking.’ It takes eleven seconds to come up.
“There it is,” she said.
“I’m a filmmaker,” he told us. “I made three films about this area.”
That understates his work by about the same margin as if you described Michael Moore as a guy from Flint who made a movie about General Motors and some other stuff.
I finally got his name at home that night. I looked at his business card.
When I dug deeper, I discovered that Roberto Monticello is lot more than the Mayor of Meatpacking. The title is little more than a tool for his more serious efforts to do good without, it seems, getting his values lost in hopes of doing well.
Who is Mayor of Meatpacking?
Let’s get this part of the story out of the way.
It was accidental.
After living in the Meatpacking District for a dozen years, Monticello broke up with his girlfriend at Florent, the legendary, now closed restaurant on Gansevoort Street, a half block from where the Whitney rose twenty years later. It was April 9th, 1992, a date he remembers, because his suddenly ex-girlfriend threatened suicide and/or murder.
An NYU film crew walked in and asked Florent Morellet, the AIDS activist who owned the restaurant, if he was “like the Mayor of Meatpacking.”
Morellet, who worked but didn’t live in the district, declined the title.
“The real Mayor is Roberto here. He works and lives in the district.”
“It’s funny, of all the work I’ve done in human rights and disaster relief, I’m best known as the Mayor of Meatpacking,” reflects Monticello.
“I never wanted to become a public figure,” he told the website, Guest of a Guest. “But now I see the good it may do for the causes I’m working on. To create films that bring to light the realities of the suffering going on in the world it takes funding.”
Mayor of this once crime-ridden area, then known as “The Wild West,” carries no official duties, but it has privileges. It gives Roberto Monticello a frequent platform for humanitarian causes. He’s pursued throughout his adult life.
“I get contacted every time something happens in the neighborhood. It gives me a little platform to push my causes,” he told the website What Should We Do?
Mayor of Meatpacking, Refugee Child of Refugees
In 1978, Roberto Monticello was sixteen. He fled Cuba and landed in New York. Both his parents were refugees, his father from Spain, his mother from Italy. One fought Franco; the other, Mussolini. He has it in his blood. His devotion to the used and abused of the world is unceasing.
In an astonishingly underplayed summary of his current activities, Monticello wrote me, “Currently working on two films; a pro-immigration feature and my third documentary about human trafficking, where we rescue the children involved, 126 so far. Just finished a doc about the war in Aleppo, Syria, called ‘hell.’ And finished shooting the pilot for a tv series, ‘little west 12 street’ about finding your purpose in life in the meatpacking district, where as the mayor I am trying to turn it into an arts district.”
Rarely has so much been said with so little ego or self-promotion.
You can get a 10,000 foot level view on his profile at the Internet Movie Database, but it isn’t current.
What this man has done includes not just involvement in 56 plays and 28 films but working to end the embargo of Cuba, where he delivers needed medicines each year; documenting human rights abuses in Afghanistan, going back to the Russians; being shot while investigating Native Indian killings in Guatemala; suffering a beating while pursuing Nazi war criminals; directing a refugee camp in Ethiopia and more.
But the state of the media is such that you might never know we have an international hero who cheerfully waves back at tourists hailing him as the Mayor of Meatpacking.
Not one of the big three New York City newspapers noticed him, but the Village Voice acknowledged his efforts in getting the embargo and travel ban lifted.
Update: What’s up with Roberto Monticello in 2019
Last week, I ran into the Mayor of Meatpacking at the Whitney Museum in Chelsea, his regular hangout. He sat in a small cafe with a friend. Reluctant to interfere, I promised an email.
I wanted an update. Here’s what he told me in an email conversation.
“Finishing my third documentary about human trafficking of children,” he wrote. This is a major focus for him.
“Should start screenings in October,” he said.
“Have new script ready about The Statue of Liberty and Immigration called “The Torch” – as part of it we follow the arrival of an Irish, a Italian, a Jew, etc etc as they arrive in America.”
Monticello’s interests are broad.
“Also, starting to push ‘Cafe Resistance’ —-in response to the ever-growing anti-semitism In Paris and elsewhere. Takes place in a Montmartre Cabaret during WW2 with 8 very strong women characters.”
And risky…
“My French Producers/Investors are now scared, so moving the production to NY.
“Showed another Cuban Film at the Festival Of Cinema NYC for a huge audience and called for the end of the the US embargo of Cuba.”
The odds on Roberto Monticello, the Mayor of Meatpacking, slowing down are slim.
Conclusion
Some have recognized Roberto Monticello for his work:
- UNICEF Relief Dag Hammarskjold Metal
- The Film Humanitarian Award at the Queens International Film Festival for his work in Darfur, Cuba, Serbia, Rwanda and Sri Lanka.
- Best Director at the New York International Independent Film & Video Festival for The Stand-In
But more needs to be done. He’s ready to do it. You can help. Find out what’s current at his website or you can also drop him an email: robertomonticello@gmail.com.
You never know what you’ll find when you’re looking for something else. I thought I was going to enjoy some of America’s finest modern art, and I did that. But I also met an unforgettable international hero who just happens to be the Mayor of Meatpacking.
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Some people just stand taller than others…