Yep, it's another one of those photos I set aside. Not sure where I first spotted this (or who took it, alas), but herewith another shot of the ol' Record Factory on West 8th Street, between Fifth Avenue and MacDougal Street.
Time was when Record Factory was only one of a string of music shops, that also included It's Only Rock 'n' Roll, Revolution Records, the original iteration of Venus Records and a place I don't really remember called -- I think -- Pantasia. There were also music-themed places like Butterfy's (wherein you'd procure your rock t-shirts) and Postermat, for all your poster and badge needs. Suffice to say, in 2017, all those ventures are gone.
I wrote about it originally back on this post, but Record Factory itself wasn't anything to write home about, but it was a safe bet for new releases and such. You wouldn't find anything too esoteric, indie or imported therein, but I liked that it was there -- and it was there for a long time. I don't remember when it closed, but the last business that held that space's occupancy was a nail spa/foot-rub joint. That closed a little while back and it's now vacant.
Here was the Record Factory when it was in full swing...
I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this, as I said pretty much everything I had to say about the place back in 2009 and 2010, but it appears that DBGB -- Daniel Boulud’s crassly named Bowery bistro -- is closing. Yeah, boo hoo. Boulud also has the audacity to cite the “changing neighborhood” as one of the reasons for the restaurant’s closure.
I can't shake the feeling that I might have shared this album of images before, but I can't find any evidence that I did, so I'm serving them up now. If you've already seen them, my apologies.
Via this link, you'll find a remarkable selection of photographs on Flickr snapped by one Pete McAlister in New York City in 1983. In his own words about same, he writes:
I visited New York from London a number of times in the Eighties, on business, and took these photographs in 1983. It was an exciting time for me. I was fascinated by the streets and the informal graphic dialogue covering a lot of the available space. My memory of the exact locations is sketchy but I walked a lot of miles around the lower East Side and Alphabet City. I would welcome feedback if it rings anyone's bells.
Within, you'll find striking images of street art, city living and elements of Manhattan topography that are nigh on unrecognizable when compared to today's iteration. It's some great stuff. Check it out.
I don't have too much to say about this image, being that I've already spoken in detail about that iteration of Freebeing Records (just three storefronts to the left/south of Gem Spa on the corner below) a couple of times. Regrettably, I do not recall where I first spied this image, nor do I know who snapped it, let alone the year it was taken. If I had to guess -- based on the cars and storefronts depicted -- I'd say it dates back the late 70's. I'm not certain when Freebeing opened.
These days, of course, Freebeing is long gone. B&H Dairy is still with us, but not at that same location on this strip, I don't think. Hunan Taste is long gone, replaced by a burger joint of some variety. Gem Spa, amazingly, is still there. Not only is it a great place to still get a credible egg cream (good band name, that -- The Credible Egg Creamz!), but rock geeks of a certain stripe will doubtlessly recognize it as the location of a fabled photo of the New York Dolls. You can also still see the row of phone booths the `Dolls posed at (and I wrote about) just to the west of Gem Spa.
Of course, the southern end of this particular strip (not pictured) basically exploded a couple of years back. There's still a wide lot where three buildings stood.
I can't remember the last time this corner seemed so comparatively free of crowds, but that could said of the entirety of Manhattan, these days.
As I’ve probably mentioned in the past, I am forever setting images “to one side,” to speak, for the purposes of later rumination and extrapolation here on Flaming Pablum. In the last couople of weeks, I’d noticed I’d amassed something of a robust glut of images that was starting to get a bit unwieldy. As such, I thought I’d round them all up in to one single post, tie a big bow on it and that would be that. But my way in, for lack of a better way of putitng it, seemed somewhat clunky and contrived. I was striving to make some sort of overarching statement about the perils of nostalgia and finding my comfort zone in the here and now while still being able to indugle my predilections for the past. But then I read it again, and it just seemed like a pretentious pile of claptrap, so I’m abandoning that.
The problem remains, however, this big glut of images. I now figure that instead of trying ot address them all in a single narrative, I might as well post them as individual entires as originally intended, and not worry about trying to compose some sort of thought-provoking statement about them. Yeah, you’re welcome.
Below is a photo I first spied on the Facebook group, Manhattan Before 1990. It’s a shot from 1987 by one Franz Jachim. A poster in that group threw open the postulation of the location and a veritable feeding frenzy ensued, with many throwing out suggestions like Bleecker Bob’s and Freebeing Records, among several others.
Being that vanished record and disc shops of Manhattan is something of a feverish preoccupation of mine, I can confidently say that the image below is definitively Golden Disc Records, which was situated just steps to the west of Carmine Street on Bleecker (essentially just west of Father Demo Square at Sixth Avenue). The same spot was later commandeered (and rearranged a bit) by its incarnation as Bleecker Street Records (before that was pushed off Bleecker, decamping to West 4th before vanishing).
I vividly remember shopping at Golden Disc fairly regularly, although I remember some somewhat shady business practices. For example, my friend Rob was looking to procure a hard-to-find promotional artifact from U2. It hung on their wall for a princely sum, as if it was this desperately rare object. When he finally ponied up the money for it, he couldn’t help noticing that the dude behind the counter at Golden Disc just opened a box FULL of numerous copies of this disc. We left feeling a bit gouged.
In any case, it was still one of our regular stops, and I was indeed sorry when it vanished. What’s striking to me about this picture, though, is look how crowded it is!!
I think the first time I set food in the Great Jones Café would have been in about 1989. It had been open for a few years, by that point, but I remember ducking in there one night with some friends from SPIN (where I'd been interning at the time) and really feeling like I'd found the perfect downtown place to dine on my measly budget. Between the Great Jones Café, the Ludlow Street Cafe (back when it served Cajun food), the Cedar Tavern, a sushi place near St. Marks called Sharaku, a place called Texas on 16th Street off Union Square, the Cowgirl Hall of Fame in the West Village and a joint on Bleecker Street called the Manhattan Chili Company, most of my culinary needs were handily met.
You obviously see where this is going, right?
Well, of all those places above, only Sharaku (where I haven't been in years) and the Cowgirl Hall of Fame remain. As I understand it, tonight, the Great Jone Café joins the ranks of the vanished, according to my comrade E.V. Grieve.
Countless are the nights I remember sipping many a beer, tucking into the fare and enjoying the lovingly curated jukebox under the strings of Christmas lights and Mardi Gras beads on Great Jones Street. It was cool, affordable and welcoming. I don't recall every having anything less than an excellent time within its garish orange exterior. It breaks my heart that it's leaving.
I wasn’t going to post about this originally, but then it seemed like kind of such a “New York moment” -- if such things really exist anymore -- that I thought I’d give it a go.
I’ve written about my love of the strenuously silly black metal band Venom here a few times (notably here, here and most laboriously here). Suffice to say, they’re not for everyone, nor has their shtick aged especially well, despite having unwittingly inspired a nation of humorless Scandiweigians to behave unconscionably. But in the wake of the notoriety and accompanying infamy of the subgenre Venom spawned, their own shenanigans seem comparatively vaudevillian. Where once they arguably embodied a sonic extreme, they now seem downright accomplished, or at least when compared to their stylistic progeny.
Anyway, blah blah blah, enough ersatz-rock historian blather. An appreciation for Venom’s music – especially in 2017 -– is a relatively rare thing, so when I encounter someone versed in their cacophonous oeuvre, I usually light up like a demonic pinball machine.
Imagine my glee, then, upon my commute home, yesterday, when I spied an invocation of Newcastle’s favorite, infernally damned sons from across a busy West Broadway. Following a long day at the office, I was standing on the corner waiting for the light to change and glanced up to spot a guy on the far corner of the next block sporting a vintage Venom t-shirt. Not only was it a Venom shirt, though, it was a design from the At War with Satan era of the band (i.e. the album that served as my indoctrination). Every now and again, you might see someone sporting a Black Metal Venom shirt or one with the sleeve of Welcome to Hell on it (I have one of those), but – again, comparatively speaking – an authentic At War with Satan shirt is pretty rare (or it at least seemed rare until a Google search brought up any number of options wherein to procure a garment boasting that vintage design today). In any case, this fellow’s shirt looked pretty weathered and distressed, so I immediately assumed him to be a Venom lifer.
As I approached, I considered the idea of engaging him in conversation, maybe asking him if he was planning on seeing Venom Inc. (basically vocalist/bassist Cronos with some hired guns filling in for drummer Abaddon and guitarist Mantas) at the Gramercy Theater in September. But, as I got closer, the scenario sort of changed. I started noticing the context of his positioning on the corner, and he looked a bit more bedraggled as he came into full view.
He was hunched over a garbage can and zealously shoveling its contents into his mouth.
I haven’t the foggiest fucking clue who Emmy Collins is (maybe she’s incidental?), but as far as I’m concerned, being in NYC means being in the epicenter of everything that matters. It means art, culture, music, literature and intellectual insight seemingly lost on the other 49 states (to say nothing of the rest of New York state). It means hard-as-nails emotional candor, and a heat that beckons you out of the goddamn kitchen if you can’t handle it. It is an island nation unto itself. It’s a hive of possibility, tolerance, reinvention and forward thinking that formerly owed precious fuck-all to its mainland. Being in NYC means being able to find anything you could possibly want, if you’re savvy enough to know where to look. Or it used to mean all those things.
The fact that it merely means access to yet another build-your-own salad chain to someone makes me vibrate with contempt.
Holy crap, how is it Friday already? Sorry, it’s been another busy week for me, and I haven’t managed to get as much content up as I’d planned, but time got away from me. I’m sure you can all empathize.
En route to the office today, however, I veered off my normal course (I usually either go straight down West Broadway or down Lafayette), and strolled down Mercer Street. I’ve talked about my personal associations with Mercer Street a few times here (notably here, here and most recently here), but I doubt I’ll ever be able to walk down it and not think of my tenure at 55 Mercer Street Gallery, especially on swelteringly hot summer days like these. That all said, the Mercer Street of 2017 bares precious little resemblance to the Mercer Street of the late `80s and early `90s.
As mentioned in those other posts, the gallery I worked in was on the second floor of a then-musty, antiquated building, and in my capacity as a “gallery sitter” (i.e. the person who answers questions, opens and closes the place, mans the phone and basically makes sure no one fucks with the art), I was frequently alone for hours on end, given that not too many people were willing to climb the rickety stairs or take their chances on the elevator, which would practically groan when you entered it. It should also be pointed out that there was no air-conditioning. There was a sporadically functional industrial fan, but otherwise, it was often stuffy and sweaty.
As a result, I would often repair to the front and sit on the fire escape overlooking Mercer Street, trying to cool off. And when I’d had the foresight to bring my boom box (it could get really quiet at 55 Mercer Street, otherwise), there were a clutch of regular selections that would score those long, sweaty days. Deep in the throes of my Anglophilia, at the time, regular favorite selections included the Stone Roses’ debut album (still a towering achievement this many years later), Gala by proto-shoegazers Lush and, of course, the blistering Extremities, Dirty & Various Repressed Emotions by my beloved Killing Joke. But the album that reminds me the most of my days at 55 Mercer is the eponymous 1990 album by The House of Love, specifically the first couple of tracks, those being “Hannah” and “Shine On.” For whatever reason, the spacey, expansive vibe of that opening track immediately brings me back to that fire escape as if it had happened yesterday.
Today, 55 Mercer looks nothing like it once did, nor does the street it sits on. The street art is significantly diminished, the storefronts are now occupied by pricey clothiers and new construction is everywhere. The gallery closed up shop ages ago, decamping to another borough. The building was completely gutted and renovated in the 2000’s and turned into an exclusive, luxury condo. The fire escape I used to sit on was removed from the façade. The high-ceilinged rooms within that I used to sit around in are now someone’s master bedroom and kitchen, one assumes.
But walking by it all this morning, I dutifully dialed “Hannah” up on my iPod, and while the surrounding visuals no longer match up, it still puts me right back there.
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