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Through all the changes, accordionist plays on

Helen Stratford playing one of her accordions in Tompkins Square Park.  Photo by Yannic Rack
Helen Stratford playing one of her accordions in Tompkins Square Park. Photo by Yannic Rack

BY YANNIC RACK  |  Heroin, Heineken, Haagen-Dazs and Henry. In that order.”

These are the things that Helen Stratford gave up on her way to discovering the accordion, the last one on the list being her husband.

“Being a musician was never on the list of things to do,” she said.

On a sunny day you can find Helen, 58, sitting on a bench in Tompkins Square Park, in the heart of the East Village that she first called home in the late ’70s. In fact, back then she was actually living in the park, homeless.

“I came here because I was sort of an addict and an artist — and in the late ’70s, the two were compatible,” she said. “The East Village really romanticized and glamorized the underworld, and you could come here and hide. You could just dress like a bohemian or a character edited out of ‘Kojak’ and get underneath the radar, and people would say ‘artist’. I’ve slept in this park. There were times when I was sleeping in stairwells, in parks and on rooftops.”

Nowadays, you’ll find her much more cheerful and life-affirming, playing for herself — and without a box for change — in a bright turquoise Chinese dress and an elegant straw hat over her shoulder-long blonde hair. But long before you see her, you will hear the heavy sound of her accordion, one of six she owns, with her first name inscribed down the front in bold silver letters. She has a wide repertoire, enriched during many travels, and readily strikes up Eastern European tunes, French classics and German folksongs, often singing along in the original language.

The very first song she ever learned on the accordion, after buying a used one in a pawnshop in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, was “Amazing Grace.”

“I was married at the time and my husband was off at work,” she recalled. “I figured out how to play ‘Amazing Grace’ on the accordion, and I was so proud of myself. And when my husband came home from work — and he happened to be German — I said, ‘Hey Ralf, watch this’, and I brought out the accordion and I played ‘Amazing Grace’ and he said” — at this point, she falls into a broad German accent — ‘Very good, Helen, but you’re holding the accordion upside down.’ So I had figured out how to play the accordion all by myself, upside down!”

Since then she’s improved, playing in bars and clubs around the East Village, like Joe’s Pub, P.S. 122 and Sidewalk Cafe, but also carrying her music — which she often writes herself — to places as far away as India, Morocco and all across Europe.

“My accordion took me all over the world,” she said, ”and it’s opened up all kinds of borders for me.”

She once played an engagement party in Egypt and has just come back from a trip to Paris — where she was staying with someone who first heard her play in Thailand.

Helen says she grew attached to the accordion in Czechoslovakia, which she visited when the Berlin wall came down.

“When I got to Prague, I sort of fell in love with the city,” she said. “It combined three elements that you don’t often see in unison, which were beautiful architecture, poverty and intelligence. In those days, no one there had any jobs, life took place on the street and on park benches, and you’d see all these people with their shoes duck-taped together, missing teeth, speaking very passionately about Christian existentialism versus Jewish existentialism — it was very passionate and very beautiful. And there would always be the sound of the accordion, somewhere off into the distance.”

Helen mainly plays in the park to escape the isolation of her apartment and has stopped playing for change.

“If you put a box out, some people will ignore you and keep walking,” she noted. “This way, they can just listen to me!”

A heavily tattooed young man on his lunch break told her how much he loved her music, and an Orthodox nun stopped by to say hello. Spending time with her makes the East Village still seem like a village. When, in the distance, a white-haired man walked by with his dog, she called out to see if it was Jim Power, the famous street artist who has been installing his mosaics all over the area for 40 years. (It wasn’t.)

“New York and the East Village — you know, people came here because they were artists, and original,” she said. “When I moved here, the East Village was poor. But, like in Prague, there were poor intellectuals, poor artists, every nationality, every race and every ethnicity. It was like a refuge.”

Does she still like it now?

“Um…it’s a little yuppie, it’s a little antiseptic,” she offered. “Back in the late ’70s, it was like war-torn Beirut or something. I mean, most of these buildings didn’t exist. Tompkins Square Park was very dangerous and ominous and full of homeless and down-and-outs and derelicts and denizens. The East Village used to offer promise, much like Berlin or Krakow or Edinburgh now.”

Helen Stratford herself is clearly a part of the old East Village, an East Village that still hangs on. She shared a little anecdote as I walked her to her next appointment of the day, along St. Mark’s Place.

She was walking home from the park recently and saw Jim Power riding his “old people’s bike,” a red mobility scooter, across the street, she says.

“Do you know [the movie] ‘Easy Rider?’ Yes? Well, me and Jim, we’re that generation. So I called out to him, ‘Hey Jim, born to be wild!’ And he loved it.”

Before we said goodbye, she played me one of her own songs, a sentimental melody called “Autumn Rhapsody” that she wrote as a tribute to Tompkins Square Park and her history with it.

“There’s going to come a point in mid-October when all of these leaves are topaz and gold, and it’s just beautiful,” she explained.

Then she started singing the first two lines of the song, echoing more than just her own past and present: “Well hello, do you remember me? I’m not the girl I used to be.”