I have two kids. And a camera. And a head filled with ultimately meaningless rock trivia. Put those elements together, and you have the recipe for a fine Saturday of wasting time on these mean Manhattan streets.
I’ve certainly done it before, so why not again?
On Saturday, my little boy Oliver (a newly-minted 10-year-old, above) and I had the day to ourselves (with my wife and our daughter Charlotte off in New Jersey visiting family). It being a lovely, early Spring day, I suggested we get up and out and hit the streets for a walkabout. And that’s just what we did.
Along the way, of course, we passed by a few spots of strenuously arguable significance that I simply could not resist commemorating via my long-suffering Instagram account. Herewith some of the fruits of our labors. You’ll be relieved to hear that Oliver was rewarded for his efforts via an unwieldy and expensive visit to the Madison Square LEGO store later in the day.
Our first destination was a subway stop on 8th Avenue and West 23rd Street. Now, ask any rock jerk worth his or her salt why the southwest corner of 23rd & 8th is significant, and they should swiftly inform you that it’s the location for the sleeve of Dressed to Kill by KISS (and if they give you any other answer, you should snort derisively and walk away). Oliver and I have already paid homage to this site (here and here, if you care). That’s all fine –- but there is another spot right nearby that even the die-hards may not know about.
As I understand it, the original sleeve for Dressed to Kill, which was shot by the great Bob Gruen, wasn’t necessarily intended as an album cover, but rather as part of an elaborate fumetti for Creem Magazine. In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, a fumetti is basically a photographic comic book. National Lampoon used to do them all the time (usually involving someone being topless, but that’s another story). In any case, the fumetti in question portrayed the boys in Kiss as a gaggle of superheroes. Upon hearing a distress single, the mind-mannered, plain-clothed members dash into a phone booth –- Clark Kent-style -- and emerge in their flamboyant stage gear circa 1975. The shot in question of them doing so are below…
As it turns out, these shots were taken just downstairs from the corner that graces the sleeve of Dressed to Kill, at the 23rd Street platform serving the A, C and E lines.
Now, 1975 was a long goddamn time ago. As such, things have changed a little bit since the Kiss lads stomped down into this station in their ridiculous stacked heels. Those phone booths, for a start, are long gone. That said, we tried our best, and I think we did a decent job of replicating the second shot of the boys emerging in their leather duds. We may have put Oliver too close to the wall, there.
Anyway, moving on, we then headed back east, bound for a spot on Broadway in the 20's. Some years back, you may remember, I devoted a number of posts to divining the precise location of a photograph of the nascent Beastie Boys I'd originally spied in an issue of SPIN Magazine. Here's that original photo...
I later learned that the photo in question, snapped by one Josh Cheuse, was taken on West 26th & Broadway. Here's another shot from that session...
Upon completing that challenge back in 2011, I took a celebratory tribute pic of then much-littler Oliver...
Here, five years later (and five years older), is Oliver in the same spot...
A little bit beyond there, we stopped into the not-quite-a-year-old incarnation of Rizzoli. Sure, Rizzoli trades primarily in big, glossy and expensive coffee table books, but I'm damn happy anytime New York City actually gains a book store. They're not exactly plentiful, these days. Here's Oliver pointing out a book I'm thinking of adding to my "to read" stack.
Anyway, from here we scooted back home to cool our heels for a bit. After some lunch and a needless change of t-shirt on Oliver's part (not entirely sure why), we set out again, this time to points east. Originally, I thought it would be fun to try to pose Oliver in the location of the original Ramones sleeve, but that particular slab of concrete is now behind a locked garden gate. As such, we cheated a bit. This isn't that same location, rather it's the north-facing facade of a building on Houston between Broadway and Crosby. Right above Oliver's head used to be that giant DKNY mural (long gone). The two green pigs are filling in for the missing Ramones.
Speaking of the Ramones, our next stop was 6 East Second Street, just off the Bowery. This was the home of Arturo Vega, the Fifth Ramone and visual designer for the band.
Here, meanwhile, is a shot of Vega with da brudders supposedly in front of same, but I'm not convinced it matches up. This was taken by the great Roberta Bayley.
From here, Oliver and I swung south to East First Street. Now, once upon a time, this street felt like verily the end of civilization. There was a huge open lot at the western stretch of the south side (between Bowery and First Avenue), with the remnants of 285 Bowery (i.e. McGurk's Suicide Hall) at one end, and the fabled Mars Bar on the eastern end. I went into more detail about this street on this post, but suffice to say, it's a very different place in 2016. It's now a canyon of glass and steel and business ventures of all stripes. Apart from the Howl Arts Gallery at 6 East First, it's all pretty dreadful.
In any case, on the south side of the street, there used to be a variety of posters from graphic designer Mike Joyce from the Swissted series. Joyce replicated actual gig posters from various punk and post-punk luminaries and re-imagined them in Swiss Modernist style. I'm doing a shit job of describing them, so click here to learn more. In any case, that was a few years ago, and they've since started to erode and peel. Here's Oliver channeling his best Glen Danzig in front of them.
Lastly, we found ourselves on the eastern end of Jersey Street between Lafayette and Mulberry. Cinema-heads might recognize this strip from the opening scene of Jim Jarmurch's "Permanent Vacation" (below). The building on the left hand side is the Puck Building, while the building on the right (which now houses a library on the Mulberry Side) is the apartment complex Bowie lived in.
And after that, it was chocolate milk and a trip to the LEGO store.
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