Miguel Piñero was born in 1946 in Gurabo, Puerto Rico. When he was four, he moved with his parents and sister to the Lower East Side. After his father abandoned his family four years later, Piñero would steal food so that his family could eat.
He joined gangs and was soon committing crimes. After stints in juvenile detention and on Rikers Island for robberies and drug possession, at age 25 he did a year in Sing Sing Prison for armed robbery.
While in jail, he wrote the play “Short Eyes.” After his release and with the support of the Public Theater’s Joe Papp, it was nominated for six Tony Awards and won the Obie Award for Best Play of the Year, springboarding Piñero to fame.
In 1970, he founded the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, along with Miguel Algarn among others. Piñero also acted, with roles in such movies as “Fort Apache, The Bronx” and “Breathless,” and portrayed drug kingpin Revilla in “Miami Vice.”
Piñero died at age 41 of cirrhosis. His ashes were scattered across the Lower East Side, just as he had wished in “A Lower Eastside Poem,” his famous 1985 work, which begins:
Just once before I die
I want to climb up on a
tenement sky
to dream my lungs out till
I cry
then scatter my ashes thru
the Lower East Side.
Photographer Arlene Gottfried, who now lives in Westbeth in the West Village, was friends with and documented the multitalented Piñero, who she fondly called Miky.
“When you were with Miky Piñero you felt like you were in a movie or a play,” Gottfried said. “He was a genius self-destructive dramatist. If he loved you, you were friends for life.”
