I’ve written about 113 Jane Street in the West Village here a few times, usually in relation to its former incarnation as the site of so-called Rock Hotel, which hosted a series of notable hardcore punk shows in the early-to-mid `80s, featuring bands like Samhain, Bad Brains, Kraut, the Cro-Mags, Murphy’s Law, Discharge, The Exploited and many more. But while that might be incredibly significant for rockheads like myself, it should be noted that the building has a far richer history beyond once playing host to a bunch of unruly cretins with mohawks.
Originally built in the early 1900’s, 113 Jane Street was initially designed as a residence for sailors, which makes sense, given its placement on the Hudson River. It gained greater notoriety, however, as the hotel that hosted the survivors of the Titanic who soggily arrived at the pier just across what is now the West Side Highway.
By the 1940’s, the hotel basically became a string of hospitality ventures, gradually devolving into essentially a flophouse for drunks, drug addicts and drifters. At some point in the 70’s, the downstairs ballroom was turned into a theatre space. Some years after that, a promoter named Chris Williamson started putting on punk rock shows there, morphing the space into the Rock Hotel, although by 1985, Williamson moved the Rock Hotel series over to the roomier Ritz.
Around the time the Rock Hotel was vacating the premises, a certain aspiring drag superstar was moving in, that being RuPaul. A friend and kindred spirit of maverick videographer Nelson Sullivan (whom I’ve also mentioned several times here), RuPaul gave the budding proto-vlogger a tour of his space in the top tower of the still fairly rough-&-tumble Jane Hotel. See that below…
Circa 1992, the downstairs space turned into a venue called Sweet Jane, a rather lamely obvious nod to the Velvet Underground tune of the same name. Under this guise, it hosted at least a handful of live shows, notably the New York City debut of once-promising Atlanta hip-hop collective, Arrested Development and a typically cacophonous and volatile show by the notorious Missing Foundation. Here’s a noisy little taste of the latter.
This might be purely conjecture, but given Missing Foundation’s formerly pronounced penchant for riot-incitement and wanton property damage, they very well might have been the reason Sweet Jane stopped operating. By 1998, six years later, the downstairs theatre space became the off-Broadway home of “Hedwig & the Angry Inch.”
By the dawn of the 2000’s, however, things took another turn. The hotel was refurbished in 2008 with an eye towards luxurious douchebaggery. The downstairs space was re-imagined once again and turned into “The Jane,” a club that swiftly attracted a new variant of high-volume revelers who eschewed combat boots and drag finery for Manolo Blahnicks and monogrammed billfolds. As The Jane, the venue invited a lot of scorn from affluent, post-gentrification residents who now occupied the newly-tony neighborhood. The club was later taken to task for allegedly allowing in under-age drinkers (gosh, where have I heard that before?) and not having an “assembly permit.”
To be honest, here in 2022, I wasn’t quite sure what was transpiring in that space today, but when I fielded an invite from my sister, this weekend, to come attend a celebratory get-together in honor of my nephew’s engagement to his girlfriend of three or four years, I leapt at the offer. To be clear, I would have happily gone regardless to help ring-in this very happy development, but the fact this it was transpiring in a space that sparked my curiosity made it a no-brainer.
Imagining that the event was going to be held in the downstairs space that once played host to afore-cited names like The Exploited, Missing Foundation, Arrested Development and “Hedwig,” imagine my bemusement when were informed upon arrival that the soiree was happening “upstairs.” The wife and I boarded the elevator and ended up walking into the very same sixth-floor space that had been RuPaul’s pad as detailed in that video above.
Oh how times have changed. See pics below.
Recent Comments