The SIN Club — actually an acronym for “Safety in Numbers,” and not an allusion to transgressions of divine law, although a few of those probably went down there, too — on East 3rd Street between Avenues B and C allegedly only lasted a few months in 1983. I can’t speak with any authority on that, given that, at the time, I was a snot-nosed, 16-year-old high school sophomore from the Upper East Side for whom environs east of Avenue A were forbidding on the best of days. It may be hard to reconcile, here in 2024, when the East Village and what used to be called Alphabet City are now overrun by brunch-obsessed millennial influencers and ambitious finance bros with oversized golf bags, but huge swathes of the Lower East Side used to be a genuinely dangerous, if you weren’t minding your p’s and q’s, so to speak.
As such, dubbing this pop-up live-music venue “Safety in Numbers” was no accident. While it was a place for the like-minded to congregate and enjoy this particular variant of left-of-center expression (bands like the earlier iterations of SWANS, Sonic Youth, False Prophets, etc. not exactly being to conventional taste, at the time), being that it was tucked way to the east in what was largely considered something of a lawless badlands, it was in everyone’s best interest to travel to and from the club in a pack. Wander the darkened streets of Avenues B and C in the early-to-mid-`80s alone, and you were more than likely to fall prey (literally) to some of the neighborhood’s less convivial elements.
I’ve written fleetingly about the SIN Club a couple of times here (notably here and here), prompted by rare photographs that documented its brief tenure but, again, I never went to the place, much less did I hear about it until way after the fact. Sure, I was fortunate enough to attend since-vanished ventures like CBGB, the Ritz, Danceteria, The Cat Club, The Pyramid, King Tut’s Wah-Wah Hut, Brownie’s, Sin-E, The Bank, Downtown Beirut, the Luna Lounge, Coney Island High, The World, The Spiral and even the Lismar Lounge (not what anyone would call “a nice place”) and a few others I’m forgetting, but — by most accounts — the SIN Club made those establishments feel as legitimately underground as The Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel.
Legend frequently looms larger than actual fact, but the SIN Club seemed to really be that rarefied entity … the kind whose very existence defied all semblance of likelihood and logic. When I heard of the list of bands that played that space and the ensuing scene (a refreshingly open-minded mix of hardcore punk, experimental noise rock, burgeoning hip-hop, electronic dance music, etc.), it seemed too cool to be true, especially given its geographical placement in the unwelcoming heart of Alphabet City.
Recently, a gent named Steven Wishnia, who formerly played bass for the aforementioned False Prophets, put together a great oral history of the SIN Club for an outlet called Hell Gate. Check it out here.
As I understand, when the SIN Club was finally shut down, the space became occupied by an interest called The Living Theatre, where my old CREEM Magazine colleague Charles' band Fractured Cylinder played.
But that's probably a post for another day...
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