I would love to say I was cool enough to go to Tier 3 was it was a going concern, but I would have 13 years old, at the time. That may not have stopped everyone, but it certainly stopped me.
To walk by 225 West Broadway today, you’d honestly never know anything punky, cool or hip ever occupied the space. Today, it’s a comparatively genteel Italian restaurant named Terra, which used to occupy a space across the avenue. Back back circa 1979-1980, this tiny venue played host to local and/or East Coast bands like Bad Brains, the Beastie Boys, DNA, The Bush Tetras, the Bongos, Glenn Branca, 8 Eyed Spy, The Lounge Lizards, as well as British bands like The Raincoats, Madness, The Slits, Young Marble Giants, The Pop Group and eve Bauhaus. Today, at 225 West Broadway, you’re more likely to find a persnickety TriBeCan complaining about how their pasta primavera is too tepid. Where once this chunk of TriBeCa was a sort of a bohemian frontier, here in 2023, it’s a fairly monied, well-traveled slice of covetable real estate.
I probably first heard the name “Tier 3” in “After Hours,” when Terri Garr’s character, Julie suggests to bedraggled Griffin Dunne’s Paul Hackett, deep into an evening of Kafka-esque turmoil, that “Tier 3 is still open!” It was already long gone by the time I’d ever heard of it, so for me to wax rhapsodic about its absence is a bit rich. Luckily, however, there is Amy Rigby.
I first invoked Amy Rigby here and then went onto interview her here. A veteran of the original Tier 3 scene, Amy recently put the video below together. Here’s what she had to say about it.
I made this short film as an intro for a panel on Tier 3: The Little Club That Could at the 2023 PopCon academic conference held in April at NYU. Holly George-Warren moderated our discussion of this beloved lower Manhattan nightspot that played a big part in our lives. Hilary Jaeger (who brought us in and booked the bands), Cynthia Sley of Bush Tetras who played there many times, and myself part of the Stinky's dance party crew & club coat check girl - we were also joined by my brother Michael McMahon who made many of the club posters, and Angela Jaeger from Stare Kits (our early band - first to play at the club) and later Pigbag and Instinct. Tier 3 was one of the only women-run punk clubs on the East Coast. And it was much more than that: it was a clubhouse for misfits in the land of misfits. With photo contributions from Julia Gorton, Steve Lombardi, Hilary Jaeger, Lucy Sante, Robert Sietsema, Niles Jaeger, Angela Jaeger, Amy Rigby, Pat Irwin, Beate Nilsen, Charlyn Zlotnik Artwork by Amelia Faulkner, Michael McMahon and some uncredited folks, let me know who you are) and Video by Liza Bear and Michael Mclard Thanks for watching - so many bands and artists played and showed their work at the club, would love to expand this to include more of them.
Without further ado, here’s Amy’s video.
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