I’d like to steer you off the page for a moment to check out Lost City’s great reminiscence of Ludlow Street. I too spent a goodly portion of the 90s on said strip, and it equally pains me to see how it’s transforming today. It’s become one of many streets I simply avoid these days. This was not always the case.
My favorite spot on Ludlow was the old Ludlow Street Café. Sure it was a great, cool bar with an nice, intimate performance space, but my main affinity for the spot had more to do with their awesome Cajun cooking. They made a fried chicken dish there that made you want to get up on the table and shout. Anytime I had a friend in from out of town, I’d always take them there. It was fantastic. I also vividly remember having a drunken discussion about tattoos while sitting at the bar one night. A friend and I were talking about the best tattoos we’d ever seen (which is just the type of dumb-ass chat you have after seven or eight Red Stripes). Out of nowhere, the bartender, who’d looked decidedly disinterested through most of the proceedings, spoke up. “I got all those beat,” he said. We scoffed. He promptly undid his pants and bent over. Upon his unseemly posterior was an incredibly detailed depiction of the Seven Dwarves (of “Snow White & the..” fame) building a bridge over his ass-crack. I think I fell off my bar stool and cracked a rib laughing.
Across the street, of course, was (and, for now at least, still is) the mighty Max Fish. I logged many an evening here, pumping far too many dollars into its jukebox (which was never loud enough) and scribbling tearful paeans on the men’s room wall about the unfortunate break-up of local heroes, Cop Shoot Cop. If Ludlow Street is the hipster’s Mecca, then Max Fish is surely its Kaaba. Down the way a block or two was another favorite bar, Barramundi. Don’t bother looking for it now, the building was torn down. The bar moved, but I hate it when bars move, so I refuse to acknowledge its new spot. It was in Barramundi that I discovered my never-ending love for the Thai beer, Singha, and also wherein I developed a dubious habit of burning holes with a lit cigarette in the t-shirt sleeves of my compatriots when they weren’t looking… for no readily apparent reason. I don’t smoke, so I needed something to do with them, I suppose.
I guess all I was doing was slumming with all the other sickly white-boy hipster-wannabes, but back in the early 90s, Ludlow Street did indeed feel like a charged main circuit of cool. Lippy underground icon Jon Spencer even immortalized it in song in the Blues Explosion’s riff-romp “Ditch” (in the second verse, hit play below) from their seismically awesome 1994 album, Orange.
Like I said, I rarely have a reason to walk down Ludlow these days. Many of my favorite spots on it are long gone, and the giant glass towers being erected on either side of it block out the sun. I’d rather keep it in my head as I remember it. And when I do, this song always comes back to me. Turn it up and set fire to a yuppie’s tie.
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