In early November of 2023, I was inspired by a conversation with a friend about how different the New York City of 2023 was for kids than the city of the early-to-mid 80’s had been for us. I quickly typed up a list of ten activities, places and things that routinely ate up my time as a petulant, acne-speckled teen (see above) that were (and remain) simply unavailable for teenagers today, and titled it – wait for it -- 10 Things You Could Do as a New York City High Schooler in the `80s That You Can't Do Today. You can read that by clicking right here.
This morning, meanwhile, upon firing up ye olde YouTube, I was presented with some content presumably tailored to my habits by the platform in question. On the top of that stack was the video below. Struck by the comparable theme to my aforementioned piece from 2023, I pressed play and was … well, nothing really surprises me anymore, but … suffice to say I was disappointed. Re-cast as if by some clumsy replicant, this video limply mines my original content, albeit thinly re-written by AI and given an incongruous and unconvincing voiceover.
Check it out below, but as the saying goes …. accept no substitutions for the real thing.
An inauspicious occasion to be sure, but this week marks the thirty-second anniversary of the death of GG Allin, who overdosed on heroin on June 28, 1993, after a typically tumultuous final performance at the infamous Gas Station -- aka the Space 2B Art Yard -- on East 2nd Street and Avenue B.
I’ve written about this fabled show probably too many times here, despite having not attended it. My friend Aaron went, though, and even appears in the notorious video of same – shot by Lower East Side legend, Clayton Patterson -- which I’ve posted here periodically. Like Chantal Akerman's "News from Home" (albeit in this way only), the GG Allin Gas Station footage frequently pops up on YouTube, only to be brusquely taken down in very short order. If you’re not up to watching it (which is perfectly understandable, if not advisable), it documents the fateful day, starting with an abortive soundcheck, a brief, brutal performance rife with the Geeg’s signature brand of ribaldry, and culminates in an ersatz riot that spills out onto the byways of Avenue B and the surrounding environs. Not exactly “The Last Waltz,” but you get the idea.
As mentioned in several other posts here over the years, while my pals and I were frequently tempted to go see GG Allin & The Murder Junkies play, the very real possibility of being physically assaulted by the star attraction, let alone getting messily pelted with greasy fistfuls of the man’s own freshly produced dung, always kept us away. If you have a hard time picturing that outlandishly unseemly scenario, might I recommend watching Tod Phillips’ grimly hilarious 1993 documentary, “Hated: GG Allin & The Murder Junkies.”
Thirty-two years later, you’d be exceptionally hard-pressed to find any evidence of the messy shenanigans of that day on that particular strip of Avenue B. The Gas Station was razed in 1995 to make way for a brutalist eyesore of a building with a Duane Read in its ground floor. I used to periodically suggest that the troubled ghost of GG Allin probably haunts its back aisles. The building itself, meanwhile, according to my excellent bloggy comrade EV Grieve, changed hands, last year, for the princely sum of $43 million dollars. Street Easy describes the current iteration of the building this way…
194 East 2nd Street is a full-service elevator building with a 24-hour doorman, elegantly re-designed lobby, hallways, and common areas, a new high-end fitness center with an infrared sauna and yoga/pilates room, and a tenant’s lounge with a billiard table.
The rest of that block is now peppered with sports bars and brunch destinations that cater to young, monied aspirationals and cloying, self-styled influencers, who are just as revolting, to my mind, as some might have found GG Allin & the Murder Junkies, but to each their own, I guess.
Once again, if you’re genuinely curious, you should seek out the full Clayton Patterson footage (currently to be found here), but someone synopsized the day’s events in this homemade music video for an early GG Allin track (when he was a bit more genteel behind the mic) called, somewhat presciently, “NYC Tonight.”
Today, meanwhile, I fielded a comment from a reader named Charles, who wrote…
I found film footage of this attraction while watching a Frank Sinatra movie called Contract on Cherry Street in 1977. I was wondering what opening scene about 2:30 in the movie this was shot in and came across your blog.
Sure enough, in one of the opening segments of the film, The Mill at Burlington House is used as a location.
Released in 1977, “Contract on Cherry Street” stars Ol’ Blue Eyes as a hardscrabble detective also named Frank who is trying to take on the Mob after his partner is killed … or something like that. In the scene in question, Frank meets his undercover informant, the ridiculously named Jack Kittens, to get some dirt on an automotive fencing ring. In fittingly clandestine fashion, they meet on the conveyer belt of The Mill.
Watch from about 02:30 onward…..
In all honesty, the movie looks like a bad, half-baked cop show from the `70s, but who knows? It might be great, not least for period-specific NYC locations like this one.
It’s a bit of a cliché, here in 2025, to point out how very different various downtown neighborhoods used to be. The East Village used to be squalid, scary, dangerous and a hotbed of punky, bohemian expression. SoHo used to be gritty and filled with artists. TriBeCa used to be desolate and deserted. The so-called West Village used to be quaint, quiet and manageable. Obviously, none of these things are still true today.
Then, of course, there’s the Meat Packing District which, as I said here way back in 2013, underwent a radical facelift that was easily the most severe in of the city’s transformation over the last few decades.
Formerly a grimly picturesque realm of urban desolation when still populated by genuine meat-packing businesses, underground leather clubs and a robust ring of transexual prostitution, the Meat Packing District could seem like a forbidding part of town throughout the `80s and `90s. But the area was also home to a host of beloved-if-eccentric spots like Florent, The Hog Pit, The Cooler, The Village Idiot, The Vault and, well,…er.. The Toilet (as fleetingly recounted by my friend and former Meat-Packing resident Pat Blashill here). It may not have been “something for everybody,” but folks who enjoyed the Meat Packing District enjoyed it for that very same grit, funk and character, of which there was an ample abundance.
I’ve mentioned it before, but as recently as 2000, I remember my songwriter friend Dusty Wright organizing an outdoor music fest for Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation called Beefstock to help raise support to designate the "Gansevoort Market" area (which loosely stretched from just below Gansevoort to just above West 14th) as a historic district, thus protecting its architectural integrity and sense of community. While that event was great fun, the events of September 11th the following year laid waste to any landmark protections for the Meat Packing District. There were bigger fish to be fried.
In any case, suffice to say that the Meat Packing District of today is just yet another dreadful outdoor mall of luxury retail and pricey bistros, completely bereft of the neighborhood’s formerly storied distinction.
It might be hard to picture the Meat Packing District of 2025 as anything other than what it has become. But through the magic of video – in this case, provided by long-time friend of the blog Gregoire Alesandrini of New York City in the `90s fame – you can re-visit the neighborhood in all its gritty desolation, circa 1993. Enjoy.
Like many other folks, I think the first time I ever heard of the storied Los Angeles punk band FEAR was via Penelope Spheeris’ 1981 documentary “The Decline of Western Civilization.” Hilariously obnoxious and inappropriate at every turn and actually way more musically accomplished than most of their contemporaries, FEAR became an instant favorite of mine, prompting me to immediately seek out their full-length debut LP, The Record. The band released further music – notably the “Fuck Christmas” single and a great follow-up album, More Beer in 1985, but if I’m being honest, The Record remains their definitive statement.
For whatever dumb reason, however, I didn’t get the opportunity to actually see FEAR properly play live until a decade or so later, when they plowed into New York City to play the New Ritz (the space formerly occupied by Studio 54) in the summer of 1992. I wrote floridly about that show here.
As mentioned in that reminiscence, however, I invoked a strange, pop-up acoustic performance I’d caught by them around the same time whilst mixing and mingling at the New Music Seminar at the Mariott Marquis hotel in Times Square. Here’s what I wrote…
Memories are slightly hazy, on this point, but I believe it was during this same visit in 1992 that I also saw FEAR deliver an incongruously acoustic -- but still endearingly objectionable -- performance as an impromptu event at the New Music Seminar in Times Square's Mariott Marquis hotel. Sadly, I've found no documentation of that performance, but a current co-worker remembers it well.
As I remember it, FEAR kind of appeared out of nowhere (they were pretty hard to miss) and set up shop on a random level of the hotel where badge-wearing attendees, at the time, were milling around schmoozing. Drummer Spit Stix (yep, that’s his name) merely whacked away on a cardboard box while lead singer/icon Lee Ving exhorted away. I can’t remember if Derf Scratch was still on bass, at that stage, but the band played a short, typically hilarious acoustic set to a gathering crowd of both the converted (geeked-out rock scribes like me) and otherwise bewildered industry types. I seem to remember standing next to singer/songwriter Vic Chestnutt and both of us enjoying it immensely.
In any case, while I’d gone on to recount the tale of this weird acoustic show many times, I could never find any evidence to corroborate its actual happening, although a former co-worker later verified that she’d been there to witness it, too.
Well, 33 years (to the day) later, my writer friend Jason Pettigrew – who was also at the gig in question – just posted the flyer…
I was shocked and saddened, over the weekend, to note the sudden departure of longtime graffiti stronghold Scrapyard on West Broadway.
Originally called Bomb The System (they changed names in the wake of 9/11), Scrapyard was a resolute chapel of the street art subculture (I've written about it here). It stood across the street from its sibling venture, SoHoZat ... a sort of underground comic/zine emporium. Around the corner on Canal Street, meanwhile, was The Trader, a grim Army/Navy store where you could also procure ridiculous items like throwing stars and nunchucks. Now, all three of these spots from my teenage years are gone.
Evidently, the space Scrapyard occupied for so many years is stated to be some sort of bespoke eyewear boutique. Pour one out.
Well, I am indeed back from our travels in Türkiye. In the past, after I’ve come back from trips to, say, Ireland, Beirut, France and other places, I’ve shared a bunch of pics. Unfortunately, the service provider that hosts this blog has been suffering from an ongoing image-hosting issue, presumably the same issue that routinely causes images here to break for no reason. It now takes forever and a day to successfully upload a single picture, and now – after multiple attempts – I’m throwing in the towel. You’ll have to make do with the pic above of the majestic interior of the sprawling Blue Mosque, and the one of me below, standing outside it like a smug American tourist.
If you happen to be friends with me on Instagram and Facebook, you can see my pics there, if you’re truly curious, but there simply isn’t enough time in the world, bandwidth on the web or patience within myself for me to keep fighting with the failings of my aforementioned so-called service provider.
In a nutshell, however, Türkiye is just an amazing place to visit, and I cannot recommend it zealously enough. We basically spent a week in a boat (or, gulet) off the Southern coast, and then a week in the massive metropolis of Istanbul, a teeming city of 13 million that makes my native New York City seem quaint, orderly and entirely manageable.
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