Tumblr is a platform I don’t find myself using, too often (although I do still maintain my own space there, that being Get Back to Work). That said, there are a few specific Tumblr users who cotinue to raise the bar. One of my very favorites is OldNewYorkLandia, which is an astonishing well curated aggregation of archival images from eons past, mostly all responsibly credited. The one below is one such image, taken by Leonard Freed in 1954 or 1955. This is, of course, Jersey Street in what was then technically known as Little Italy but is now perceived more as just part of SoHo. Indie cinema heads might recognize it from the opening scene of Jim Jarmusch’s “Permanent Vacation” or from the video for “Down By Law” by Madball.
For more amazing vintage New York City pics, definitely check out OldNewYorkLandia, but be warned … it’s easy to get sucked in and spend hours scrolling.
This post was started several times over the past four months but was regularly abandoned over the maintenance required to plug in all the links. It was almost aborted entirely in the wake of the week of September 11th, when nostalgia for the way New York used to be reached fever pitch. But since I started it, I figured I might as well finish it. So, here goes. We’ll see if I bring it to fruition this time.
If you’e anything of a regular reader, you might pick up on my frequent allusions to having interned at SPIN Magazine back in the balmy, comparatively carefree days of 1989 (that all started on this post). While entirely true, it should be noted that in the grand scheme of things, I was only at the magazine in its then-grotty office on West 18th Street from about July 1989 until January of 1990, when the managing editor who’d implied that he was going to hire me on full-time was fired. Overall, my tenure at SPIN — while certainly informative for me — didn’t really make too much of an impression on the magazine itself. While formerly toiling paylessly under its auspices, I contributed one small news item about Public Enemy. Big whoop.
But prior to my short-lived, star-crossed few months at SPIN, the magazine had been hugely influential on me. I remember picking up its third issue (with Sting on the cover) in July of 1985 under the misapprehension that there was a feature on one of my then-favorite bands, 7 Seconds (there wasn’t), but becoming totally hooked anyway. Unlike shitty Rolling Stone, here was a magazine that dared to discuss and review bands like Scratch Acid, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, the Sisters of Mercy, Squirrel Bait, the nascent Beastie Boys and the Butthole Surfers. The writing was assertive and irreverent. Their approach was fresh and different — they had Pia Zadora interview Joey Ramone and Lydia Lunch interview Pat Benatar. They periodically gave Henry Rollins the back page to talk about his impressions of Madonna or wax rhapsodic about his then-two favorite records (White Light, White Heat by the Velvet Underground and Funhouse by The Stooges). It was amazing stuff, and for many years afterwards, I was a dutifully loyal reader, even after my brief internship.
In time, SPIN started …er…spiraling, shedding long-time staffers left and right and eventually even jettisoning its longtime editor-in-chief and founder, Bob “The Gooch” Guccione Jr. The magazine lost whatever voice and edge it once had and started following the curve as opposed to staying ahead of it. While everyone I’d originally known from my intern days were long gone, certain other people I’d worked alongside from various other outlets came and went through the outlet’s perpetually revolving door. The last physical issue came out on 2012 before it became a strictly online affair.
Here in 2021, the online iteration of SPIN admirably strives to compete in a vastly different landscape from the one it first launched in, but I don’t know anyone who writes for or edits it anymore, as far as I know. I cannot say that I read it often enough to have a credible opinion about whether or not it’s worth checking out, these days, but I somehow doubt that it pushes any envelopes in the way it used to do.
In any case, blah blah blah …. enough of about me and my experience at SPIN. This post ostensibly had nothing to do with all that, but I’m so damn narcissistic that I couldn’t help dredging all that bullshit back up. No, this post was about how friggin’ anaemic much of SPIN’s more recent ….. or, Hell, not even that recent ... content has been.
What triggered it was a listicle they first posted in 2013 called “The 40 Best New York City Music Videos.” Longtime readers know I used to spend an inordinate amount of time and bandwidth documenting same, so I was of course curious to learn which ones made their list. Somewhat predictably, said list was both rife with cliché and pandered strenuously to certain demographics, although still somehow managed to omit some truly obvious choices like, say, “Waiting on a Friend” by ye olde Rolling Stones. I was, of course, appalled, and planned to compose my own, authoritative list to combat SPIN's blinkered myopia at once.
The trouble was, as mentioned earlier, while I had a fever for the subject matter (however ridiculous), it was going to be a labor-intensive post … all that cutting and pasting of links and whatnot. I kept a running list of clips I thought were worthy of citing, and that seemed to stretch on for days. I’d be out running an errand and something I’d see would remind me of, say, the video of “We Want the Airwaves” by the Ramones (shot on Joey’s rooftop on East 9th Street) or the slow trek through Chinatown in “Coming Down” by the Dum Dum Girls. After a while, the list got pretty long, if not unwieldy, completely dwarfing SPIN’s pathetic list of 40.
But when the task seemed too laborious, I set it to one side and then got back to my life, only to fleetingly invoke it a little while back in this post. It seems laughably unlikely, but perhaps SPIN spotted my invocation of it, because now when you go to their link, all that remains is their one-paragraph preamble. Their list is strangely gone.
So, when you go through my list and wonder where, say, “Love is Strong” by the Rolling Stones, "New York, New York" by Ryan Adams, “Steppin’ Out” by Joe Jackson and/or, good lord, “Empire State of Mind” by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys are, know that I left them out because they were on SPIN’s list, and I didn’t want to be duplicative. Also, “Empire State of Mind” completely fucking sucks and makes me want to destroy the earth.
Here’s my list. Enjoy it or not. I did it alphabetically by song title. There is no hierarchy, although, personally speaking, I like some of these way, way more than others.
ADDENDUM: Some new clips were added on Tuesday, October 12 and Wednesday, October 13.
“All or Nothin” by Madball - Tompkins Square Park, East Village, Lower East Side
“All That I Wanted” by Belfegore - Pier 25 in TriBeca, West Side Highway
"Ana Ng" by They Might Be Giants - Randall's Island
“My Kinda Town” by The Undead - World Trade Center, Times Square, Medical Corridor, East Village
"New York City" by Joey Ramone - Lower East Side, East Village, The Bowery, Chinatown, Cortlandt Alley, TriBeCa, Times Square, Midtown, Central Park, West Village, Flushing, Queens, Brooklyn Bridge, Civic Center
“Where I’m From” by Digable Planets - East Village, TriBeCa
"Why I Drink" by The Candy Snatchers - East Village
"World Order in New York" by World Order - Central Park, Midtown, Grand Central Station, Rockefeller Center, Wall Street, Williamsburg, The Dakota, Times Square, Brooklyn Bridge, Washington Square Park, Flushing Corona Park, Queens,
Now, as I understand it, there really was a Club Berlin somewhere in Manhattan in the `80s, although it was invariably before the era wherein I was nocturnally out and about, roaming these New York City streets. The first time I’d ever heard about a nightclub called Berlin was, of course, via my laboriously over-cited favorite film of all time, that being “After Hours.” I’ve devoted more space on this stupid blog to the minutia of that film, so if you genuinely care, please just do a Google search.
In any case, in the film, insouciant, topless sculptress Kiki Bridges asserts that Berlin is on the corner of West Broadway and Grand Street. Today, that particular corner is a douchey restaurant called the Sola Pasta Bar, but back in the `80s, I honestly don’t remember it being anything other than a wall whereupon fabled SoHo artist Renee extolled the merits of his own work (see below as captured by photographer Leo London). That doesn’t mean it wasn’t there, though. More to the point, I’m lazily assuming for no discernible reason that we’re talking about the southwest corner of that particular intersection, and who knows if that’s even accurate?
In 2015, meanwhile, I interviewed my friend Fran Power, who had a memorable cameo in “After Hours” during the scene in which protagonist Paul Hackett gains brusque entry to Club Berlin and almost gets his head shaved. Here’s what Fran had to say about that.
Where was it filmed?
It was filmed in an empty space that they had made into a club in what is now Tribeca. It was a really dead neighborhood at the time …not a real club.
Wasn't there an actual Club Berlin?
Yes there was a real Berlin club…a girl from one of my bands worked there but it wasn't where we filmed at.
Here it in the film, as spotted from looking south from Spring Street, just a few steps to the west of Hudson.
From at least the early `90s on, that space had become a deli. I took a shot of my kids in front of this same strip pictured above in 2013.
And, as resourced from the great new cinema blog NYC in Film (which I discussed here), here’s a shot of the exterior from 1984, taken from across Hudson Street, looking southwest. Note the checkerboard paintjob. Was that simply during Scorsese’s filming?
Today, my friend Chung Wong posted a great photo on Facebook from 1976 by a photographer named Bevan Davis. This is that same space that would later play host to Scorsese’s location of Club Berlin and that deli, then a bar called JJ’s West, as looked at from Hudson Street looking West.
Today, that particular space is all boarded up with a sidewalk shed. Something in in the works, but not sure what.
For a really great, recent breakdown of the "After Hours" locations, check out NYC in FILM.
ADDENDUM:I did a little further searching around, and came up with some information from this site. For a start, it seems JJ's West was a topless bar (back when New York had such establishments), but prior to that, it was a storied jazz club called The Half Note Club. Says the archives site....
The Half Note Club was one of the premier places to hear jazz in the 1960s, and at least a half-dozen records were “live from the Half Note.” John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Cannonball Adderly, Billie Holiday, and Judy Garland all performed here before it became a topless bar in 1974. It’s now a deli.
In 16 years of composing this silly blog, when I’ve been searching for evidence of some great, lost aspect of the Manhattan of my youth, I’ve periodically found interesting fodder in the short, experimental films made by NYU Tisch students. For all their arty pretensions and aspirations of insightful cinematic depth, they frequently come steeped in the visual trappings of the era.
I wasn’t really searching for anything when I happened upon this one, but it’s worth a viewing all the same. Filmed in 1987, directed by one Jason Rosette and shot all over Manhattan,“Salt” is an absurdist short about one man’s delusional quest, that starts on Cooper Square, just across from that squat little Cooper Union building that was later replaced by that space station.
Once I gleaned that the original site of the elusive Plasmatics mural from my distant memory was the tellingly-titled Graffiti Hall of Fame on 106th & Park Avenue (this discovery coming courtesy of an uncredited photo on “Graffiti Database”), I started to wonder if I could find any other — and/or preferably better — photographs of the art in question, but tireless Google searches were giving me nothing further on the subject. I mean, Hell, I was lucky to find that first photo to begin with.
Branching my search out further, however, I noticed that there is a very robust subculture of reverent graffiti-centric publishing. As such, when I spotted a fetching, paperback coffee-table book on Amazon that was exclusively dedicated to the very spot where the original mural was, I figured there was a sporting chance it would include another shot of it. And even if it didn’t, I was intrigued enough by the story of the place and its accompanying images that it would be cool to own. Tweny-something bucks later, it was mine. It arrived today.
Much to my delight, fourteen pages into the book comes a beautiful wide shot of the wall in question that was obviously snapped at least a year or two earlier, as the artwork is still vibrantly colorful and unsullied by other tags. This photo was taken by maverick shutterbug Martha Cooper. I remain mystified as to why these artists chose to immortalize the Plasmatics in this manner, but, again, perhaps they were just simply fans.
As a lark, I have reached out to Ms. Cooper to see if she’s consider selling me a print of the photo. We’ll see.
Incidentally, you can check out more of Cooper's amazing work on her Instagram page. Tell'em Flaming Pablum sent ya.
It’s been a long while since I’ve been as fixated with one, but I used to be pretty hung up about tracking down the locations of photographs of favorite bands of mine. I have a whole category on the blog devoted to it (and comparable mysteries), but I’m thinking my exhaustive (and exhausting) search for a specific shot of the Lunachicks some years back may have broken the back of that preoccupation … or maybe it’s just because I haven’t encountered another photo that captured my imagination the same way. Who can say?
In any event, along the way, I was aided and abetted by a few folks whose sleuthing skills were considerably sharper than mine, notably my comrade Bob Egan of Popspots NYC and a friend on Facebook named Chung Wong, among a few others. On several occasions, both Bob and Chung gamely dove in and helped divine the true provenance and practically the precise longitude and latitude of the locations in question.
As it happens, there is apparently another prominent and versatile cat on this beat. Slated for an upcoming session on my friend Drew Stone’s “New York Hardcore Chronicles” live, one Steve Birnbaum is an artist, photographer, filmmaker and fellow music head who takes comparable pains to seek out and artfully replicate shots of famous music luminaries. Where I was inclined to mimic the shots with the then-willing aid of my little kids (now that they’re in their teens, they are less enthused about such shenanigans), Mr. Birnbaum adds his own signature by framing the original photograph within the larger environment of the location. In a weird way, it’s a little reminiscent of the Instagram account of Murad Osmann. If that name doesn’t ring a bell he’s that self-styled “travel influencer” that continually photographs his smokin’ hot spouse from behind in the “follow me” series as they jetset around the globe. In Birnbaum’s case, instead of holding his lovely lady’s hand, he’s brandishing the original source material.
You can see the fruit of Birnbaum’s labors on his Instagram page called TheBandWasHere. On it, he covers a lot of the bases I, too, sought out, like the Misfts in the West Village, the Beasties in Charles Street, Joe Strummer on East 14th, The Cramps on Charles Lane and several, several others. He and I have clearly been bitten by the same bug.
Hot on the heels of sharing the Apology Line podcast with me earlier this week, my pal Caroline (both a fellow former Upper East Side resident and kindred spirit in all things punky/indie/underground, specifically of the New York variety) shot me another link to another podcast, albeit to a very specific episode. She did this, I assume, given my penchant for getting fixated with finding elusive minutia from my ever-distancing youth.
In any case, in this episode of the Reply-All podcast, a man becomes singularly mystified by not being able to identify (nor find any evidence of) a song he vividly remembers both the lyrics and the melody to, and it haunts him. He searches all over the internet, but finds absolutely nothing to back up his recollections. This is the story of the lengths he goes to in order to solve the quandary of the mystery pop hit from his memory.
Anyway, it was definitely right up my alley, and I totally empathize with this story’s protagonist. Want to find out how it all ended? CLICK RIGHT HERE TO LISTEN.
By its very design, street art is ephemeral. Not necessarily made to last and furtively executed either in haste, overnight or under the radar, it is a guerrilla-style form of expression the very clandestine nature of which is to surprise its viewers and then, in most instances, vanish forever. I’d suggest that huge parts of its appeal are in its fleeting existences and outlaw status. You may not have expected it. You did not ask for it. You cannot control it. You cannot own it. The most you can do is paint over it.
Graffiti is loved and loathed in equal measures by the city’s residents. But despite New York’s own robust history of trailblazing street art, there isn’t really one, formal public record of it. Sure, names like Zephyr, Lee Quinones, Futura 2000 and Dondi are frequently cited by denizens — to say nothing of artists whose work went “legit” like Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Richard Hambleton and Jean-Michel Basquiat — but, as far as I know, there is no single tome or collection that authoritatively documents the work of the most celebrated street artists and graffiti-writers. But, I suppose that’s the point. It’s a wild, organic art form. You’re not supposed to be able to institutionalize it.
It’s for this very reason that I’ve been so preoccupied with a certain quest — to find the Plasmatics wall.
It seemed sort of wildly out of place to spot an invocation of The Plasmatics — very much a downtown concern — on a wall up in Spanish Harlem, much less an invocation composed in the signature bright colors and stylized renderings of graffiti, which, in those days, was more steeped in the burgeoning culture of hip-hop than in punk rock. But, again, it’s easy to assign such meaningless parameters for the sake of neatly encapsulating an era. There, for whatever reason, was a colorful depiction of Wendy O Williams and the Plasmatics' logo on a facade north of East 96th Street. Why was it there? Who knows? Maybe whomever spray-painted it was simply a fan.
But, as mentioned in that post, when I sheepishly went back to find it after that school trip, pedaling nervously on my shitty BMX past the “the border” between the Upper East Side and Spanish Harlem at East 96th Street, I couldn’t seem to find it again or, more likely, I wimped out and did an about-face before getting too far uptown.
And that was basically that.
I cannot recall what prompted my penning of the post in 2010 about it other than that it’s always been something I was struck by and remembered. After a while, though, given that I never found any further evidence of its existence, much like that certain “punk” issue of New York Magazine (which I, of course, later found), I started wondering if maybe I’d imagined it, and started giving up the notion of trying to find any evidence of it.
But in already in a few instances this year, for whatever illogical reason, I have stumbled across beguiling bits of Plasmatics trivia that resulted in a series of in-depth posts (all collected here, for your convenience, if you care). in the spirit of same, I figured I’d revive my quest for Wendy’s wall.
For a start, I posted the entry on the Plasmatics fan page on Facebook, asking aloud if anyone else had remembered seeing it. Suddenly the thread came alive with remarks from commenters saying they’d recalled seeing it from the windows of a Metro-North train and speculating as to its possible whereabouts. The problem, however, is that like me, no one had snapped a pic of it. At the very least, I had corroboration of its existence.
Then I went back to the well and started getting creative with Google, entering in any number of combinations like “Plasmatics,” “Wendy,” “mural,” “Manhattan,” “80s,” “graffiti,” “Park Avenue” etc., but continually came up empty. I actually reached out over Instagram to fabled graffiti tagger Lee Quinones and photographer/graffiti-champion Henry Chalfant to see if either of those guys remembered it. No one got back to me.
I started feeling that old sensation of futility once again until I happened upon one article or another that made mention of an over-promisingly named strip of concrete called — wait for it — the Graffiti Hall of Fame. While not an actual “hall” of any tangible quality, this area was a designated street-art destination established in 1980 on — WAIT FOR IT, ONCE AGAIN — the northernly reaches of Park Avenue. Things were starting to add up. I started Googling “Graffiti Hall of Fame” and “Park Avenue” and scrolling through the ensuing images.
It was almost too easy.
Evidently painted by an artist named Dez, the whole wall came up via another promisingly named entity called Graffiti Database. I was genuinely astonished to have found it. Here’s a closer look at it…
Regrettably, I have no idea who took this photograph or when, but it’s definitely the mural I first saw, although the passage of time rendered the images in my head with way more nuance and detail. I’m still mystified as to the specifics of its backstory, but I can at least now rest, knowing I didn’t imagine it and that I’ve closed the circle on another inane quest.
Here in 2021, the Graffiti Hall of Fame is still a going concern, but the Plasmatics mural was painted over decades ago.
And, once again, for the uninitiated, these were the Plasmatics...
I suppose I should stop repeatedly mining the Facebook group Manhattan Before 1990, but some great stuff pops up there, periodically, and it’s worth evangelizing. In any case, that’s the initial source of this entry.
In any case, a member of said group named Kathy B. posted the photograph below, and I found it quite striking. Taken in 1986 by one Susan Aimee Weinik, this is a shot of former Palladium doorkeeper Yeh Jong Son.
I mean, it’s a great photograph by any stretch of the imagination, capturing both the stylish insouciance of the enigmatic Ms. Son and some great nocturnal atmosphere of a since-vanished New York City. As if on cue, however, the chatter started, speculating as to the location of the photograph. Many, if not most, seemed to assume that, given Ms. Son’s vocation, it must’ve been snapped within the environs of her stomping ground at the Palladium, that being East 14th Street between Union Square and Third Avenue. Sure, that might’ve made sense in a rigidly linear sort of way, but I couldn’t reconcile that featured architecture, specifically the hulking building in the background.
Acting on a hunch, I took a circuitous route home from my office down by the World Trade Center (notice I didn’t call it “the Freedom Tower”? Nor should you!), and sure enough, I was correct. As just discussed in a relatively recent post about the former site of the Plasmatics World Headquarters on Thomas Street, that large building behind Ms. Son is the western-facing façade of the massive Western Union building on Hudson Street. That puts her having a ciggie just steps to the south of Puffy’s Tavern, where she very well might have been having a post-Palladium-shift drink. To make good on my sleuthing, I captured the exact spot where Ms. Son was snapped smoking.
While I certainly made it to the Palladium a few times, I cannot say I was ever hip enough to be able to recognize Yeh Jong Son at first glance, although I was never stopped from entering the place, so I guess that counts for something. If you want to get a feel for what the interior of the Palladium was like click right here.
Here in 2021, the Palladium is, once again, long gone – razed to accommodate a massive NYU dormitory that churlishly bears the old club’s name. Puffy’s Tavern on Hudson Street is indeed still there, as it has been since about 1945, and it has refreshingly not changed very much.
As to the whereabouts and doings of the sleekly svelte Yeh Jong Son these days, who can say?
It was probably about 2012 when I first learned about Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s “News From Home,” a strangely somnambulistic rumination on distance, family and solitude, centered around footage of a particularly lonely New York City captured in 1976. The film periodically appears on YouTube, sometimes in bits and pieces, only to be yanked down at one point or another, probably at the behest of Janus Films.
It’s an odd bit of cinema by any standard, and strangely haunting and hypnotic. Of course, the extra attraction for me is the depiction of a downtown New York City that simply does not exist anymore. Sure, I’ve said that before about films like Glenn O’Brien’s “Downtown `81” and Amos Poe’s “The Foreigner” (just to name two), but where those films have narrative structures — however tenuous — “News From Home” tells less of a definable story. And while I thrill to the shots of, say, pre-gentrification TriBeCa, I sincerely doubt Ms. Akerman chose to include said footage with any intention of preserving the neighborhood as it was for future generations to marvel at. I project that she chose the locations she did to convey an overall sense of desolation and disconnection. In that respect, she completely succeeded.
In previous posts on the film, I’ve mentioned that I’d love for someone to do a shot-by-shot homage to “News From Home," capturing the modern-day iterations of the locations Akerman captured back during the Bicentennial. I sincerely doubt it would have the same lulling effect, although there certainly were moments, in the past year of COVID, when Manhattan seemed to return to the directionless drift of Akerman’s film. By and large, though, the Manhattan of 2021 is an entirely different place. Finding the degree of tranquil isolation that is so overwhelmingly rife throughout “News From Home” would be a genuine challenge.
While it’s still up, travel back to the endless half-light and mournful limbo of “News From Home.”
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