In the wake of so many conflicting reports, I decided to swing by the Corner Bistro this morning, and I'm happy to relay that they are indeed back open for biz, beers, booze and -- wait for it -- burgers.
I spoke with the owner, who was loading new supplies into their kitchen. As speculated, they were indeed re-doing the floors, but after "some idiot on Barstool" started the rumor, he'd been inundated with texts and calls and panicky emails, etc.
In any case, it's still goin'. Go tonight, why don't you?
It was unconfirmed as I posted this, but credible reports seem to be asserting that the Corner Bistro, the iconic West Village corner bar largely considered to serve “the best burgers in New York City,” has closed for good, soon to be replaced by a coffee joint of some kind. Like we need another of those.
I can’t remember the first time I went to the Corner Bistro, but it was invariably during my college years, lured by the legendary burgers and cheap beer. Indeed, their burgers were completely goddamn swell, and it was a very cool place to drink and hang out in. I vividly remember going there with friends from both my high school and college, my fellow abused interns from my SPIN days and, later, the woman who’d become my wife and, later than that, my kids. I remember being spotted “snogging” with my future Mrs. there by the friend of a friend. I also remember having a burger and a beer there by myself on the early evening when I heard my stepfather had passed away.
Yes, in more recent years, it was almost dependably too packed to get into, but I don’t think the quality of their fare ever dipped. The last time I went to the Corner Bistro was probably around last Christmas with my great friend Rob and my son Oliver. It’s hard to fathom that it won’t be there anymore. Like so many New York City institutions -- like the Cedar Tavern or the Roseland Ballroom or Gem Spa or Lucky Strike or fuckin' CBGB -- it seemed like the kind of place that would be there forever.
Evidently, not so.
For the doubters among you, here are two shots snapped by Greenwich Village Grapevine member David Drumgold earlier this week.
In about 1997, one of my best friends, Rob D. – then still a freshly-minted husband to my friend Joanne (I unwittingly introduced them, some years prior), decided that he and his new bride were swiftly outgrowing the five-story walk-up in the East Village they’d been renting. Technically, Rob had moved into Joanne’s apartment on East 9th Street after hopscotching around between Manhattan and his original home turf in Pleasantville (where, we were fond of pointing out, Ace Frehley had allegedly lived). Prior to all this, Joanne had lived in an apartment on East 4th Street that, we learned well after the fact, had also played host, at an earlier point, to unlikely neighbors Madonna and Peter Missing of Missing Foundation.
Regardless, they needed more space, so Rob & Joanne said goodbye to the East Village and decamped to Hell’s Kitchen, right off the “The Deuce” at 303 West 42nd Street, just a few steps to the west of 8th Avenue. The building’s biggest claim to … er … fame was that it played host to the notorious Show World Center, an age-old “sex emporium” from the neighborhood’s fabled bad old days.
Circa `97, while the surrounding area was sharply in the throes of some seriously intense gentrification (largely courtesy of the authoritarian reign of Mayor Giuliani), I believe Show World was still conducting its usual business, which largely consisted of live-sex shows (I shouldn’t have to explain to you what this entails) and floors lined with these strange adjoining booths (see pic below, courtesy of Jeremiah Moss' Vanishing NY).
“Dancers” – for want of a better term – would wait outside of these closet-sized booths, and when a patron expressed an interest, they would each enter their respective halves (kind of like confessionals in a church). The patron would summarily enter tokens he’d have procured upon entry to the premises into a slot, and a hatch would ascend like a curtain between the two halves of the booth, revealing the “dancer” on the other side of a doubtlessly smeary windowpane. To keep the hatch from descending and obscuring full view of whatever the “dancer” might be doing, the patron would have to keep pumping tokens into the slot. Eventually, he’d either run out of tokens … or steam, so to speak, … and the hatch would slam shut. End of show.
Here's a great shot of the 8th Avenue entrance, as captured by Gregoire Alessandrini.
While all that was going on, meanwhile, Rob and Joanne were setting up their new home in a comparatively spacious and bright one-bedroom several flights above. Right off the living room/open-kitchen area, there was a wide fire-escape, where we’d often hang out for hours, drinking beers and talking nonsense. If you climbed those fire escape stairs, you were treated to an amazing roof-top with a full, birds-eye view of the entirety of the surrounding Hell’s Kitchen. That part of it was legitimately magickal.
Newly enamored of Hell’s Kitchen, I picked up a copy of “The Westies” by T.J. English, an exhaustive -- but truly excellent -- history of Hell’s Kitchen’s era under the reign of the titular Irish mob, led by colorful figures like Mickey Featherstone, Jimmy Coonan, Mickey Spillane and their bloodthirsty cohort. That book loosely served as the inspiration for the similarly inclined 1990 film “State of Grace,” starring Sean Penn, Gary Oldman and Ed Harris. Like a pair of green-gilled dilettantes, Rob and I started exploring many of the neighborhood’s less salubrious drinking establishments like Mr. Biggs (formerly owned by mobster Jimmy Coonan as the 596 Bar, where Coonan had rival mobster and loan shark Carles “Ruby” Stein murdered and beheaded), The Savoy, McHale’s, Siberia Bar, The Bellvue Bar, Druids, Rudy’s, The Holland Bar and several others, grimly romanced by the neighborhood’s already swiftly eroding character.
As it happened, however, Rob & Joanne’s stay in their adopted Hell’s Kitchen ended up being pretty short. After only about a year and a half, they decamped to City Island in the Bronx (right across the water from haunted Hart Island) and then, very shortly after that, to New London, CT, the former stomping grounds of Rob’s literary hero, Eugene O’Neill. In the grand scheme of things, Rob & Joanne had only been in Hell’s Kitchen for barely an instant, but the changes to that neighborhood (from a grimy sleaze Mecca in a lawless badlands into a Disneyfied tourist trap) during their brief tenure were pronounced.
Once R&J had split, my journeys into the heart of Hell’s Kitchen decreased in frequency until I took a job – briefly, as it would turn out – at MTV News Online in neighboring Times Square in the mid-to-late 2000’s. Now, almost two decades later, I barely recognize Hell’s Kitchen when I’m back in it. The very name itself – Hell’s Kitchen – has come under fire, in more recent years, from real estate developers trying to re-christen the neighborhood in an arguably more inviting/less inflammatory manner.
Since those days in the `90s, most of the bars I cited have vanished, notably The Savoy, McHale’s, Siberia, The Bellevue Bar and Druids. I believe the Holland Bar might also have closed but am not sure. Rudy’s and Mr. Biggs are still there, last I checked. In the summer of 1998, just prior to meeting the lady who I’d later marry, I had a truly surreal and disastrously Kafka-esque blind date that culminated in Mr. Biggs. Suffice to say, that ridiculous experience left me disinclined to ever want to return to that undoubtedly cursed space (even though, today, it’s just another douchy sports bar). Bad vibes, to say the least.
But, again, this is just my experience. For a more nuanced, detailed and authoritative take on Hell’s Kitchen, check out this documentary below…
They cleaned up its exterior, in more recent years, but Billymark’s West on 9th Avenue at West 29th Street was both a storied -- and deceptively intimidating -- dive bar and a veritable canvas for eye-catching street art, for many years. I can’t say I was in any credible way a regular, but I do remember stopping in for beers, a few times, throughout the `90s.
Prior to its more recent makeover, the interior of the bar exuded a pointedly frill-free aesthetic. The only demographic it really catered to seemed to be local, unabashed day-drinkers from the westerly Chelsea environs. It was by no means a place to see and be seen, so to speak. It always struck me as the type of dive that the Westies (i.e. the Irish mob that formerly reigned in neighboring Hell’s Kitchen) might have held court in.
Again, in later years, it got kind of a facelift and then they put in a bunch of flat-screen televisions to make it more of a sports bar, unwittingly diluting much of its former character, to my mind, but what do I know?
In any case, this morning, I was sad to note that my friend Robert posted the pic below. Billymark’s West is evidently no more.
As lazily invoked in this old post, I used to have an embarrassingly robust collection of arguably offensive t-shirts, most of which devoted to extolling the merits of any number of objectionably monikered ensembles like the Circle Jerks, Butthole Surfers, Pussy Galore, Cop Shoot Cop, Nashville Pussy, MDC (aka Millions of Dead Cops) and a few others. As a disagreeable teen, I was evidently far less concerned with ruffling the feathers of the easily riled or possibly just plain oblivious as to why certain juvenile slogans, images and/or invocations might be perceived as problematic or insensitive.
In more recent years, said collection has largely been whittled down not so much by a newfound influx of maturity so much as by the rigors of age (i.e. the garments in question quite often no longer fit my fifty-something frame or just look ridiculously unflattering when I do squeeze into them). Then, of course, there have been a few that I’ve just come to terms with as being indefensibly provocative. One such example of this was a pair of t-shirts my friend Howard made and sent me in exchange for a large-sized print of a photograph of mine. The shirts in question featured a familiar portrait of an unblinking Charles Manson, surrounded by choice quotes from the man as if they were pithy bon mots one might parrot at a cocktail party. While I was profoundly tickled by Howard’s signature blend of macabre humor, I rightly deduced that I could never wear either iteration (one white, one black). I handed one off to a videographer-turned-dubious-importer/exporter friend of mine and the other lived in the bottom of a drawer for a while before it found its way into a bag destined for my local Goodwill outlet. I wonder if they’ve managed to sell it.
But there’s one t-shirt I’ve since parted with that I thought of the other day, and I can’t for the life of me think of why I no longer possess it, not least in that I remember it being oversized (which means it would have fit well today). I wrongly identified its legend in that earlier post, but it was a shirt designed by Don of Terror Worldwide – who did a series of shirts “back in the day,” so to speak, and possibly one or two for my beloved Cop Shoot Cop – for the original Ludlow Street iteration of Max Fish. The design looked like a bit of art appropriated from communist Chinese propaganda, but manipulated to fit the irreverent sensibility of the Lower East side bar it was advertising. Featuring a smiling, kerchiefed proletariat woman – albeit with a third eye in the middle of her forehead – brandishing a can emblazoned with the name of the bar over the commanding legend “SURF SATAN!”
I don’t remember the circumstances of buying the shirt – probably a decision I emphatically realized while markedly inebriated on my way out of the bar, one evening – but for a spell in the mid-`90s, I remember wearing the Hell out of it, usually prompting a wide variety of reactions in others, from consternation to outrage and all points in between. It was never immediately clear that it was a shirt espousing a bar, but that probably wouldn’t have mattered anyway.
Personally speaking, after fourteen years of Catholic education, there are few things I find more amusing than needless invocations of Satan. The fact that otherwise seemingly enlightened individuals can be so effortlessly disturbed by the mention of the name or accompanying blasphemous iconography continues to fascinate me. Longtime readers might remember a similar post wherein I unspooled a yarn about breaking up with a girl I’d been briefly dating because she was shocked into speechlessness by the cover of a record she’d found on my shelves, that being To Mega Therion by Celtic Frost. We broke up on the spot. Sorry, but I’ll take Satan over the fear of divine retribution every time.
Anyway, either it was lost in a move between apartments, poached by friend or surreptitiously thrown down the garbage shoot by the woman who’d become my wife, the “SURF SATAN!” shirt hasn’t seen the inside of any drawer or closet of mine in decades. The pics of it above are not mine, but rather lifted from the internet, where the shirt in question is now something of a collector’s item. Go figure.
As for Max Fish, as I discussed back on this post, I gradually aged out of it, so to speak, and then it closed and moved to Orchard Street in 2010, but I never went to that iteration, and it closed shortly afterwards, anyway.
If you never went to the original one, here’s a brief taste of its interior…
I was beginning to slowly piece together an entry about some comparatively ancient doings along the stately byway of Grand Street (which may still see the light of day) but got sidetracked by another item about a former location near the westerly end of that street, namely the Moondance Diner.
Read any write-up of the Moondance Diner on the web, and you’re likely to see many of the same invocations about how the iconic eatery was featured in episodes of “Sex & the City,” “Miami Vice” and “Friends” and in movies like “Spider-Man” and “After Hours.” I can’t speak for those other dumb-ass titles with any authority, but I’d really like to (again) clear up the misconception that the Moondance Diner ever appeared in “After Hours,” a film which is something of a preoccupation of mine
While, yes, the Moondance Diner was very definitively in SoHo -– the geographical heart of “After Hours” -- not that far from various other neighborhood-specific locations in that film, Scorsese actually filmed the diner scenes (both the interior and the exterior shots) at a diner in Hell’s Kitchen called the River Diner on West 36th Street on 11th Avenue (where John Lennon was once photographed). It certainly would have made more sense to film them at the Moondance, but for whatever reason – he didn’t. So, when you read that bullshit on WikiPedia and/or in any other articles on the subject -- don’t believe the hype!
Now, of course, I already addressed this inanely trivial bullshit in this post from back in 2010, wherein I lamented the absence of the Moondance Diner with juxtaposing photos of the deeply shitty hotel that was erected on its former site. One would think that was the end of the story, right?
One would be wrong.
The way it shook out, the Moondance Diner was allegedly forced to close its doors circa 2007, when they could no longer realistically meet the demands of lower Manhattan’s spiraling rent. The physical diner itself – complete with ornate, rotating-moon signage – was sold and shipped to the wide-open spaces of a town called La Barge in Wyoming, of all places.
That should have been it, but, tragically, the winter climate of Wyoming (where, one assumes, they get a significantly greater amount of snowfall than Sixth Avenue & Grand Street ever does) spelled a comparatively quick demise for the Moondance diner, which closed again in 2012.
On a personal level, the Moondance Diner was a longtime favorite of mine from both when I was a single, beery rock pig on the hunt for greasy food after an evening of ill-advised high decibels and from when I became a doting dad to two little, tiny people. Not only was it an iconic spot on the map, but the food was spot-on. Since its departure, I always envisioned some grand road trip I’d take upon retiring, wherein I’d drive around the continent, visiting bits and pieces of downtown Manhattan’s past like the Moondance Diner, and the bar from the Cedar Tavern (now in a bar in Austin, TX) and the giant lizard from the top of the Lone Star Café (now also located in Texas). That expedition probably won’t be happening.
As of this time last year, as reported in this story in the Cowboy State Daily, the dormant diner was being eyed for re-opening by various parties, but I don’t know if any of that has come to pass since the publishing of this article.
About 11 years ago, I wrote a little rant here about an online concern called Do You Remember Tees, an outlet that sold t-shirts emblazoned with the names and iconography of many long-vanished nightclubs, from the widely celebrated to the comparatively obscure. I had a bit of an issue with that, as I expressed here:
Personally speaking, I'm not sure how I feel about this venture. I mean, I love the notion of preserving and celebrating these places, but it kind of gets back to the whole notion of whether you should be wearing the t-shirt of a place you never actually went to. I mean, here in 2013, as much as I cherish my own memories of, for example, seeing bands at The Ritz, sporting a crisp, brand-new t-shirt with the Ritz's old logo on it seems a bit disingenuous. Beyond that, I don't think many of the places ever sold t-shirts to begin with, but that's a pedantic quibble at the end of the day.
Suffice to say, I never bought any of their stuff. I doubt my sniffily disparaging post had anything to do with it, but the link to Do You Remember Tees went offline a while back and, as far as I can tell, that business is no more.
Cut to 2024 and along comes DEFUNCT, a similarly inclined venture as Do You Remember Tees, hawking t-shirts and coffee mugs with the names and logos of more since-vanished New York City clubs, bars and record stores, and I have many of the same nagging reservations. I mean, in this instance, not only are they offering t-shirts splashed with club names like The Ritz, Danceteria and The Palladium, but also several shops I held quite dear like Rocks in Your Head and Rebel Rebel and some dear-departed bars like Chumley’s and Lucky Strike. While, yes, I was a huge fan and regular patron of all those businesses cited above (devoting a laborious number of posts to each one of those spots here on this stupid blog), the whole thing just feels like a shallow rip-off. I have no recollection of Rocks in Your Head ever selling t-shirts, but I’d sincerely wager that, if they did, they sure didn’t look like the ones on offer here. I can guarantee you that Danceteria never sold friggin’ coffee mugs.
Maybe I’m being the gatekeeping “Name Three Songs” guy that I’m entirely capable of being, and maybe I’m making much ado about absolutely nothing (I mean, at the end of the day, ….t-shirts, coffee mugs …. It’s all just stuff), but the whole thing just reeks of (obvious) inauthenticity.
I've written about Suicide (above, as captured by Adrian Boot) several times here before.
Punks before Punk was Punk, Suicide were genuine trailblazers, making bold new music in an environment then charitably described as hostile. Pairing Martin Rev's spartanly innovative electronics with Alan Vega's confrontational stage presence, Suicide shows left precious few audiences indifferent.
And they started doing all this way before there was any semblance of a compatible scene for them to slot into (and even when there was, Suicide didn't always "fit").
In any case, I spied the flyer below on the band's official Instagram page and again my eyes went right to the address.
Dating back to the early `70s (when the world was otherwise listening to stuff like Pink Floyd, Elton John and Bread), Suicide maintained a residency at a venue called Museum at 729 Broadway. Curious punters weren't charged for admission. Every Friday night, for a while, Suicide would get up on stage and let unsuspecting audiences have it. For free.
Here in 2024, the space that had been Museum is now....a Fresh & Co.
ADDENDUM: In the spirit of full disclosure, it should be pointed out that the building which housed Museum at 729 Broadway was razed some time ago, and the Fresh & Co. building that stands in its footprint is a different structure entirely. While, in recent years, it's conceivable that surviving member Martin Rev may have indeed enjoyed a salad within the blindingly bright, white antiseptic walls of that Fresh & Co. (although I somehow doubt it), the building currently standing on that corner never hosted a live Suicide performance.
Appetizer: In late 2019 – just a little before New York City was blanketed with an all-encompassing shut-down over COVID-19 (gosh, remember that?) -- a little vegan concern opened up on Warren Street, down in TriBeCa, just a few blocks away from my office. Dubbed Lekka Burger, this venture served “plant-based” fare, ostensibly disguised as conventional cheeseburgers, not too different from the grub served at Superiority Burger on the other side of town. Always game to try something new and arguably healthier than my usual diet of abject crapola, I gave Lekka Burger a whirl and found their food to be perfectly fine, albeit light years from particularly exciting. As much as I wanted to like and support them, vegan food just isn’t my thang. I remain a carnivore.
Sadly, the COVID years hit Lekka pretty hard, and they never really recovered, finally throwing in the towel in March of 2023.
Late last week, meanwhile, I took a westerly detour on my way to the office just so I could walk down that stretch of Greenwich Street. When I reached the portal in question, I duly documented it with a photo of my own.
In the wake of the TriBeCa Citizen posting, meanwhile, I fielded a nice note from a reader named Jean H. who had this to say…
Alas, poor Yorick, I knew them well. Ms. Lunch lived downstairs for a while ( I gave her my bike).. many of those bands, including the Jerks, the Contortions, the Voidoids, Mars, D.N.A., “ practiced”…(smoked, drank, partied) on the second floor of 81 Warren Street. It was wonderful. Those were the daze, my friends…..
I thought that was fascinating bit of intel, so did some further googling, unearthing this nugget, taken from the liner notes of a No Wave compilation, as documented here...
We moved to [painter/musician] Donny Christensen's [later The Contortions] place on 81 Warren Street, just a few blocks away [from Nancy Arlen's loft on Duane Street, ed.], where The Cramps and others were already installed. There we met Lydia Lunch and James Chance, who were squatting next door, and soon started playing together there as well, in Teenage Jesus. This period is well represented by a complete rehearsal set on tape 1 side B."
Don's place was an abandoned old basement storefront with no hot water on 81 Warren Street in lower Manhattan, which then also served as a rehearsal space (named 'The Hole' or 'Home For Teenage Dirt') for The Cramps.
Intrigued, I tried to place the exterior of 81 Warren Street in my head, but had to do some further Googling.
It turns out that hotbed of insouciant, bohemian activity all went down … in the same space recently vacated by Lekka Burger.
Dessert: Here’s a little taste of Mars, who were mentioned above…. Bon Appetit.
Someone on the No Wave Facebook page posted the above photo of the nascent Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, arguably the preeminent band of the No Wave ….er… wave, then featuring drummer Bradley Field, a bass player named Reck, the great James Chance (later to front his own band, The Contortions) and the inimitable firebrand that is Lydia Lunch. This uncredited photo was supposedly snapped in 1977.
But the thing that jumped out at me the most, from this photo, wasn’t one of the preternatural coolsters pictured, but the surrounding environs. Acting on a hunch, I did a quick Google search and struck oil. I walk by that distinctive doorway pretty frequently on my daily treks to my office.
The band is pictured posing in front of 335 Greenwich Street, in what is today known as TriBeCa. WikiPedia suggests that TriBeCa -- a portmanteau of "Triangle Below Canal" -- was actually coined in the early `70s, but who knows? I didn’t really start exploring TriBeCa until about 1989, but even as late as that, it was still a comparatively desolate part of town.
Today, however, …. not so much. The door they’re standing in front of is now the entrance to a venture called Joseph Carini Carpets, a bespoke rug emporium specializing in high-end wool products colored with rarified Nepalese and Tibetan botanicals. Suffice to say, nothing sold by this business can be described as cheap.
To that same end, if you were to want to purchase an apartment in this building, it’s probably going to set ya back about $3 million, so … y’know … maybe break open that change jar.
Across the street to the north is Sarabeth’s, an upscale bistro where you can pay $22 for a “smashed avocado.”
So, yeah, TriBeCa has changed a bit since the `Jerks were loitering around its streets.
Photos from the same shoot -- I'm still trying to divine the name of the photographer -- made their way onto gig flyers.
Start your morning off with a bang with some vintage Teenage Jesus....
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