I can't quite remember why I was searching for it, but for some reason, I recently did a Google image search for pics of the old Kim's and came up with the picture above (a photograph posted in 2008 on the Skullbrain forum, dating back, presumably, to the late 1980s). But let's turn back the clock a wee bit first, shall we?
Sure, we all remember Mondo Kim's on St. Mark's Place -- the multi-tiered geek funhouse of underground music and transgressive cinema. But before that, there were a few Kim's outlets scattered around downtown at various points. There was one over on Avenue A (the original? It's now a restaurant), there was one on Bleecker and West 10th Street (now an upscale coffee bar or something) and, for a little while, there was another one on Bleecker Street, just a few steps west of Laguardia Place (housed on the ground floor of 144 Bleecker, the former home of Mori's restaurant as immortalized in this photo from 1935 by Berenice Abbott). Nowadays, there's only one Kim's, over on 1st Avenue between St. Mark's and East 7th Street.
While I was a frequent visitor in each of the Kim's outlets listed above (or at least each of them until I got in a very heated debate with the beardy dude behind the counter at the one on Bleecker & 10th about whether or not Stewart Copeland ever played for lamentable prog-rock band, Curved Air -- I said he did, beardo-weirdo said he didn't -- and I was right, of course), my favorite was always the outlet at 144 Bleecker. Whether shopping for music or foraging for then-rare VHS copies of obscure movies like "Picnic at Hanging Rock" or just buying cool, punky postcards to pin to my dorm room walls during college, I could frequently be found skulking about at that Kim's. It was a regular stop in between other favorite spots like Rocks in Your Head down in SoHo, Second Coming Records just a block or so to the north or that ol' standby, Bleecker Bob's (ironically not on Bleecker Street). Apart from Bob's, most of those places are now long, long gone. I still regularly walk around this neighborhood, and there are precious few vestiges of those days, apart from Pizza Box, wherein my similarly-inclined music-geek compadres and I would compare spoils. Even that establishment, however, has been threatened.
Glancing again at that photo above, however, it's striking how much has changed. Kim's is gone. The Triumph Diner is gone. Magic Shoes (where I used to buy my Chuck Taylors and Doc Martens like the dutifully-uniformed "rebel" I aspired to be) is gone and Children of Paradise Toys (a great haven for lost, far-flung vintage toys) is gone, gone, gone. The only things on that little strip today are a Duane Reade and a friggin' bank. Yeah, like we don't already have enough of those.
In any case, here's that same little strip today.
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