The event that would be the seed for a Brooklyn kid’s lifelong drive to become famous enough to make it out of Brooklyn is almost comically on the nose.
One day during the spring of 1977, 8-year-old Michael McLeer came upon an almost impossible sight. A film crew had descended on his Bay Ridge neighborhood, and they were shooting a movie. It was about a guy from Bay Ridge named Tony Manero who liked to disco, particularly on Saturday nights, but he would learn these details later.
What captivated Michael in that moment was seeing his idol, John Travolta — Vinnie Barbarino from “Welcome Back, Kotter” (Tuesday nights on ABC at 8:30) — strutting down the Brooklyn sidewalk in white polyester, trailing hubris and Brut by Fabergé.
Michael would have to wait till his mother took him to the PG-rated version of “Saturday Night Fever” to see it for himself, but it was the first time he could remember watching somebody from his neighborhood become something, which is exactly what he planned to do.
“If Tony Manero could get out using his talent,” he thought, “maybe I can, too.”
His mother, Donna Blanchard, had spent much of her life trying to do the same thing. She grew up in Brooklyn, the daughter of Italian immigrants from Naples. Her drive for fame was passed to her by her mother, who was one of the Quattrone Sisters, a musical group of six siblings who sang standards in Brooklyn hot spots of the late 1940s.
Everyone said Donna resembled a young Sophia Loren, and they expected her to go to Hollywood. But then she got pregnant with Michael at 18, and soon after split with his father. She took waitressing jobs to keep the family going and, realizing that she was stuck in Brooklyn, transferred her dreams of fame to her son.
Mr. McLeer recalls a day that he and his mother were in the welfare office. She told him to scan the room. “You’re no better than anybody here,” she said. “But you’ve got talent, and if you do something with your talent, you could have anything you want.”
After many fits and starts, dead ends and a moment of near devastation, Michael McLeer did make a name for himself. He became an actor, a dancer, a rapper, a celebrated graffiti artist. But none of his successes felt the way he had imagined when he watched John Travolta on the sidewalk that day.
It was only when he stopped trying to break out of Brooklyn that he realized what he was meant to do.
The Birth of ‘Kaves’
That name he made for himself was actually bestowed on him. As a teenager in the 1980s, Mr. McLeer ran with a posse of Brooklyn kids — all, he said, “on the wrong side of the tracks” — climbing bridges, hopping turnstiles, roaming tunnels and tagging subway cars. He was good with a spray can and a marker, and he become a celebrity in the graffiti world, using a nickname given to him by an elder. “There was a cave in the Verrazzano Bridge all the kids hung out in,” he said. He started signing everything with his new tag, Kaves. “I liked the way it sounded.”
But then the Police Department’s Vandals Task Force caught him decorating the side of a train with the visage of Sonny Crockett, from “Miami Vice.” He was ordered to pay a fine and do community service. His mother was less than pleased at his arrest, but she took a philosophical approach. “At least I wasn’t robbing cars or doing dope,” he said.
He realized he needed to get his voice out in a new way.
The answer was rap music. He had the right look — he was picked as one of the break dancers in the 1984 Chaka Khan music video “I Feel for You.” By the early ’90s, Mr. McLeer and a younger brother, Adam McLeer, started a hip-hop group they were calling the Verrazano Boys. They made a demo and shopped it around, and the record producer Rick Rubin was interested; his label, Def American, was going to put out their debut record. Brooklyn was still years away from becoming international shorthand for a kind of urban hipness, but Mr. McLeer knew the Lordz of Brooklyn, the group’s new name, was headed for huge success.
On the morning of June 7, 1994, Mr. McLeer’s mother and his 4-year-old sister, Michele, were walking home from a grocery store on Fort Hamilton Parkway and 92nd Street when a white box truck careened into them, killing them instantly. The truck sped off, and the driver was never found.
On the cusp of the McLeers finally making it out of the neighborhood, the family was shattered. “Imagine the most terrible thing that could happen to you,” Mr. McLeer said. “The grief doesn’t end.”
The ‘Sanford and Son’ House
Mr. McLeer, now 26, had vowed to do whatever he could to become a star, but as the oldest child, he knew he had to take charge of the family after his mother died. Mr. McLeer’s longtime girlfriend, also named Donna, moved in and helped him raise his 6-year-old brother. But he didn’t exactly cast his aspirations aside, as his mother had done. The Lordz of Brooklyn finished their record, and it came out, almost a year after the hit and run. They toured in Italy and Japan, opening for Cypress Hill and House of Pain. They were even teased on “Beavis and Butt-Head.”
He kept at music for a while, touring occasionally, but the anguish of loss was too much.
Over these years, Mr. McLeer worked a wide array of jobs. He opened a tattoo parlor, a graffiti gallery and a pizza and concert venue, the Brooklyn Firefly. All the while he showed his own artwork in museums and galleries and did design work for clients like Porsche, Gretsch guitars, the Cow Parade and Bay Ridge itself.
He and Donna eventually moved out of his childhood apartment and bought a house in the neighborhood, where they would raise three sons and a daughter of their own. He made money, and he loved his new family, but he felt like he was in a “creative coma.” No matter what he did, he couldn’t escape the grief he felt for his mother and sister.
So he started collecting. He can’t say exactly why. “I was always interested in things,” he said.
The things he collected were all over the map, but they did share a common trait: They represented an ideal Brooklyn.
He found an original “Saturday Night Fever” script. He had Jackie Robinson’s locker from Ebbets Field, the original storefront sign from Zig Zag Records in Sheepshead Bay and Al Pacino’s motorcycle from “Serpico.” At an auction, he won the facade from Lenny’s Pizzeria, where Tony Manero bought his slices in “Saturday Night Fever.”
The nostalgia frequently morphed into something entirely personal. He already had incorporated his Fonzie bedsheets and his Kiss belt buckles into the collection when he felt compelled to acquire the wrought-iron gates from his childhood apartment building, which he had coveted for years. “They reminded me of happier times,” he said simply.
“People would say to my wife, ‘Oh, you live in the “Sanford and Son” house,’ because everything was in the yard,” he said with a laugh. “For 25 years I had school tables and apartment building doors and signs out front.”
He didn’t care what his neighbors thought. “One man’s junk is another man’s treasure,” he said.
In 2014, around the 20th anniversary of his mother and sister’s death, he painted an enormous mural in their memory. Their faces loom over the intersection where they died. And the intersection had a new street sign as well: Donna and Michele Blanchard Plaza.
It was a moment that brought Brooklyn, his family, his ambitions and his art into alignment. “I always had it in the back of my mind that I had to do something epic for Brooklyn,” he said. “I was tired of being sad and feeling like a victim. I said, ‘I’m going to do something beautiful instead.’”
Brooklyn Pop
He decided he would tell his story and his mother’s story and the story of their Brooklyn. From his commercial mural work (for hotel chains and restaurants), he was accustomed to working at a large scale, so he devised an immersive art installation/time capsule/performance piece/museum. He found an 11,000-square-foot space in Industry City, a gentrified warehousing and manufacturing complex on the Brooklyn waterfront, and spent a year creating his magnum opus.
He called it Brooklyn Pop, and it opened in September 2024. Visitors move through a maze of vignettes honoring Brooklyn’s music, films and working-class neighborhoods. T-shirts emblazoned with images of the Honeymooners, Crazy Eddie and Ralph Malph dangle from a clothesline. A Puerto Rican flag billows from a piragua cart. There’s a shrine to Notorious B.I.G.; a pizza joint inspired by “Do the Right Thing”; and a pigeon coop nodding to Mike Tyson, who raised them as a boy in Brownsville. The Fonzie sheets are on display in a replica of his childhood bedroom.
The Lenny’s Pizzeria sign hangs next to the disco ball and flashing dance floor from “Saturday Night Fever.” And next to that: Mr. McLeer’s beloved wrought iron gates.
“You’re not just looking at artifacts and pieces of memorabilia,” said Jim Somoza, managing director of Industry City, who helped Mr. McLeer find the space. “The story is what ties you to it.”
Roughly once a month, Mr. McLeer stages a play he wrote about his life. His son Quinn plays him from ages 18 to 23, when Mr. McLeer had brought Public Enemy to Bay Ridge to play a club called Ernie Barry’s.
His wife, Donna, who has been with him since age 15, has always greeted his proclivities with indulgence. “When he came home with the iron doors from his apartment building that weighed a ton, I said ‘What are you going to do with those?’” said Ms. McLeer, 55, a film editor. Her husband responded the way he had countless times before — “It’s going to be part of my art one day.”
The show hasn’t exactly been what anyone would call a hit, but Brooklyn luminaries have dropped by: John Turturro, Darren Aronofsky, Rosie Perez. The actress Debi Mazar, who grew up in Brooklyn and met Mr. McLeer through the graffiti artist Lee Quiñones, said she was stunned by it.
“Michael is keeping the culture alive,” she said.
Mr. Travolta hasn’t visited yet, but the men have met. Three decades ago, before the first Lordz of Brooklyn record came out, Mr. McLeer wrote Mr. Travolta a letter inviting him to be in a music video. The single was called, of course, “Saturday Night Fever.” He never heard back. But then a couple of years ago, Mr. McLeer was introduced to Mr. Travolta’s assistant, and he sent another letter through him.
“After I won the Lenny’s Pizzeria sign from an auction and hung it in my gallery, he wanted to meet,” Mr. McLeer recalled. A few months before Brooklyn Pop opened, he finally got a chance to talk to the man who set him his path as an artist.
“I always heard that while filming ‘Saturday Night Fever,’ he lost his fiancée, and I remember feeling ‘If he can go through that sort of pain making that movie, I could find the strength to make my record,’” he recalled.
After the exhibit opened, Mr. Travolta sent an email through his assistant: “After all these years, the fact that ‘Saturday Night Fever’ still resonates and continues to inspire says so much about Brooklyn, about ambition and about the spirit of people who never give up on their dreams,” Mr. Travolta said in the email. “It feels meaningful in a way that goes far beyond nostalgia, and I am truly grateful to be connected to it.” Mr. McLeer also sent him a painting he had done of the last scenes in the film, when Tony rides the graffiti-plastered train into Manhattan.
Last summer, Mr. McLeer dedicated a bench on the Bay Ridge Promenade, the same bench where Tony Manero used to sit, a few blocks from Donna and Michele Blanchard Plaza. The plaque reads: “In honor of John Travolta and Karen Lynn Gorney (Tony and Stephanie) and all the Brooklyn dreamers.”
The post He Thought He Had to Break Out of Brooklyn. Instead, He Celebrates It. appeared first on New York Times.
