A friend of mine on Facebook just posted the above photo of Robert Smith of The Cure, albeit without any credit, date or information. I sadly have no idea who took this picture, when it was snapped nor its precise location.
That all said -- and I might be entirely projecting, here -- but it kinda looks like Robert is standing in the unlikely nocturnal environs of Riverside Park on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It honestly looks like he's standing just steps away from where the undercover cop played by Mercedes Ruehl lures priapic knucklehead Ajax into swiftly-handcuffed custody after he'd just finished beating up the last of the Baseball Furies in Walter Hill's "The Warriors."
There’s been a bit of an exodus, in recent days, of folks leaving Instagram and Facebook, put off by Zuckerberg’s brazen sucking-up to Trump. I, too, have courted the idea of leaving — which is saying something, given the ridiculous amount of crap I post on both platforms. I even opened a BlueSky account (find it here, should you care), but ultimately find it a bit too similar to the original Twitter (before Elon Musk took a giant, Hitler-heiling shit all over it). I never really warmed to Twitter, but we’ll see how it goes.
Personally, the notion of leaving those two Meta platforms is difficult in that it invariably means falling out of touch with a veritable nation of folks who I pretty much only know online. That’s tough to step away from, but again, we’ll see how it shakes out.
In any case, in perusing my Instagram page, trying to decide what my next step was to be, I happened to click on the roster of images I’d tagged in my “saved” column, like the excellent shot above of the intersection of Lafayette and Bleecker Street, which was taken in 1990 by my friend Gregoire Alessandrini. In doing so, I was reacquainted with several images that spoke to posts I’ve logged here, over the years. I thought I’d take a moment to share some of those, so here goes.
Below is a photograph of the old interior of Downtown Beirut circa 1989. This photo was originally snapped by a photographer named Eff Norkinhardie, but I prized if off the Instagram feed of Lara B. Sharp. This photo struck me not because it captured what the bar was like on a busy weekend night, but I'd swear to God the tall fella chatting up the lady in the foreground in the cheetah-spotted coat is my friend Brent Butterworth, although he can neither confirm nor deny that. I wrote about Downtown Beirut here.
I couldn't say what periodical the page of club ads below came from, but this image is courtesy of the Instagram feed of DaveW61. Long lost ventures being touted here are places I've scribbled about her before, like The Ritz, The Peppermint Lounge, Privates and more.
The below image came from the Instagram feed of the great Legs McNeil, although I believe he originally got it from the amazing Instagram feed, Blondieisaband. In any case, back in 2014, I put up a bunch of posts speculating on the location of the photos in question, aided and abetted by photographer Roberta Bayley, I managed to track it down. I wrote about Legs McNeil back here.
The shot of Third Avenue & St. Marks Place comes from the feed of UrbanArchiveNY. I did a series of posts postulating about the dinosaur signage of the old Continental Divide, on this now-unrecognizable strip. Find the culmination here.
Not a super notable one, but here's the exterior of the Greenwich Village iteration of Crazy Eddie's as found in the feed of MikeSaes. Personally speaking, I was more partial to the uptown iterations of Crazy Eddie's, most specifically the ones on East 57th Street and on East 86th Street. You can read about both of those here. Today, this space below is a Chipotle.
The below is an amazing artifact prized from the feed of Richard Boch's Muddclub_Book, proving that the Modern Lovers played live in Lower Manhattan in 1975 (and "blew the doors" off the Kitchen). I wrote about The Kitchen here, and the Modern Lovers a few times, most recently here.
This is the fabled jukebox of the late, lamented Lakeside Lounge on Avenue B. I wrote about this place quite a few times, but most floridly here. This was from the feed of my friend Joe Bonomo.
Okay, stay with me, now, because this one is a bit confusing. From the feed of Recordrun, this is shot from the mid-`80s of the interior of Record Runner on Cornelia Street. Some short years later, Record Runner would move a block to the west to Jones Street (where it remains today), and this space would turn into Subterranean Records. I've written about both concerns many times here (too many to link, but Google it, if you care). This space as Subterranean Records closed in about 2008 and has been dormant ever since.
A tantalizing collection of flyers from the Rock Hotel, which I spoke about here. This shot was poached shamelessly from the feed of AlexisTMorrow
Taken from the feed of RecycledSounds_Omaha, here's an ad for my beloved Rocks in Your Head on Prince Street in SoHo. I've written about it thousands of times, so Google it if you're curious.
The below is a shot of the rear exterior facade of the Roseland Ballroom from the feed of retronyc. It was never my favorite venue, but I do miss it, and wrote about it here and here.
I stumbled quite randomly on the above shot of the Ramones posing behind CBGB on Extra Place, the alley between the Bowery and Second Avenue in 1977. I initially assumed it was snapped by frequent Ramones documenter, Bob Gruen, but it turns out it was actually captured by one Chalkie Davies for the cover of the NME. I did some further Googling, and found this site wherein Chalkie himself discusses the shoot...
In April 1977 Mick Farren and I came to New York to check out the punk scene for the NME. We went to all the well known Clubs including CBGB's, Max's Kansas City, the Bottom Line, Danceteria and the Mudd Club.
Joey Ramone lived close to CBGB'S which was on the Bowery in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Initially we took photos on the roof of Joey's apartment building but although it looked like New York it did not really have the right feel.
I had spotted this alley when walking over to Joey's place, it was a block from the Bowery and seemed perfect to me, it was full of trash and totally run down, back then huge parts of Manhattan were like this, the money had run out and the city was bankrupt.
I dragged the four Ramones to the location, I did a number of group shots, aided by their Artistic Director the late Arturo Vega. It seemed odd having somebody else telling the band what to do, all they did was stand there in a line, but it made them relaxed so I was happy to let him help.
To me this sums up the American Punk scene at that time, leather jackets, t shirts and jeans was the look they all had, it's a shame the Ramones never had the true success they deserved, but their influence should never be underestimated.
This afternoon, my daughter Charlotte and I were walking around the neighborhood, and we ducked down Extra Place to replicate the shot.
I thought I’d take a moment to aggregate some updates regarding stuff I’ve written about here before. Here we go…
Some of you might remember this post from 2023, which documented the quiet closing of Miyabi, the frankly not-that-amazing Japanese restaurant that moved into Bleecker Bob’s former space at 118 West Third Street following the slow demise of that storied record shop in 2013. Well, after another period of dormancy – during which time the neighboring business to the west morphed from a dubious foot-rub/happy-ending joint into a frozen yogurt purveyor – it seems 118 is getting ready for a new tenant … one that involves, evidently, a “hibachi lab.” See the interior above.
Back in 2013, meanwhile, I wrote an entry about See/Hear, the furtive hive of zine culture, music-geek literature and underground comics that formerly held count in a basement-level space on East 7th Street. As you can see from the comments on that post, the mere invocation of the shop touched a nerve, for a lot of people. Well, for those folks, I’d like to highlight a new, comparatively exhaustive oral history that was just posted on Animal about the place that really goes into its back-history. Check that out here.
Lastly, some of you might remember a seriesof postsfrom 2017 wherein I became preoccupied with identifying a certain Manhattan corner upon which the fabled Misfits had once posed for a series of photos that had become relatively iconic (well, for Misfits fans, at least).
As detailed in those posts, I stalked the streets of Lower Manhattan trying to pinpoint the exact spot. At the same time, I reached out to the photographer, one Roxanne Lowit, to see if she could provide the answer, or at least some clues. Her assistant got back to me with some vague intel about where the location might be, and – in turn – I asked if I might reproduce some her photos for my posts. Unfortunately, the response was an emphatic NO, I could not. I got around that by linking to other sites who’d posted them, including photos of Lowit’s images on various bootleg singles and via some illustrations by my daughter, who was about 12 years old at the time. Here’s one of those illustrations now. This is Charlotte's interpretation of the print-out I'm holding in the shot above.
Initially, I was surprised that Lowit – who’d gone on to do many, many other higher profile projects and is now a celebrated fashion photographer -- should have given that much of a damn that some rinkydink little blog like mine wanted to host her pics, but hey, I do understand. That’s her goddamn work. Those images are no one else’s. Respect is due.
Cut to 2024, and someone has evidently convinced Lowit to revisit her evening in the company of Jerry Only, Glen Danzig, Bobby Steele and Joey Image by way of a new photo book called, “We Walk the Streets at Night.” Documenting the full shoot wherein Lowit led the Lodi, New Jersey quartet around the then desolate streets of the West Village (the corner in question, incidentally, was West 11th at Washington Street), the book is frustratingly spare on details (not even a preamble from the photographer). Moreover, the images themselves are presented in their original form as blown-up slides. It’s a nice effect, I suppose, but I would have liked to see some of the pictures in a larger format – and with a bit of anecdotal augmentation, although if you’re curious as to the doings of the Misfits during that era, I would recommend the excellent book,“This Music Leaves Stains” by James Green Jr.
If you’re curious about “We Walk the Streets at Night,” meanwhile, you can pick a copy up at Generation Records on Thompson Street. Tell’em Flaming Pablum sent ya.
While I do not know them personally, James & Karla Murray are renowned in the amorphous community of NYC-centric bloggers, vloggers, photographers, nostalgists and digital storytellers of which I am also a member. Over the 19 (jeezus!) years I’ve been “keeping” this silly blog, I’ve doubtlessly mentioned their name, evangelized their work and re-purposed their striking images countless times.
James & Karla's lovingly composed photographs of New York City corner shops, bistros, pizzerias, record stores, taverns and mom’n’pop concerns of all stripes have become a crucial part of the documentation of our ever-(d)evolving city, and their magisterial books like “Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York,” “New York Nights,” and “Broken Windows: Graffiti NYC” make any coffee table they are placed on that much goddamn cooler. I’ve frequently spied them out and about — Karla’s signature shock of punky, bleach-blonde hair is hard to miss. On the occasions in which I’ve accosted them (“hey, it’s James & Karla!”), they seem to be in a constant state of buoyant, infectious joy. They clearly live their entwined lives like one long, curious adventure, and are insatiable in their quest to see, go, do, experience, capture and create. I find them quite inspiring, in that way.
Imagine my own joy, then, when I was contacted out of the proverbial blue by a publicist representing a new project for Prestel Publishing, that being the forthcoming book by James & Karla titled “Great Bars of New York City.” I relayed an enthusiastic “yes” to the publicist before I’d even finished reading the pitch.
Beyond my tireless affinity for waxing rhapsodic about the New York City of my growingly distant youth and/or my favorite willfully obnoxious, listener-hostile music, I am somewhat sheepishly notorious for my penchant for putting away many a pint of beer, and I quite relish doing so in any number of establishments — from the endearingly seedy to the stuffily stately — across the five boroughs (yes, dear readers, I have consumed beers on Staten Island). “Great Bars of New York City” speaks directly to that ….uhh…. unquenchable thirst with 239 pages of James & Karla’s brilliant photographs, augmented with text by food & culture scribe, Dan Q. Dao. The pictures are crisp, colorful and packed with nuanced detail, matched by Dao’s meticulous historical research and illustrative prose. It’s entirely splendid. If you harbor any of the same predilections as myself, you will not be able to put this book down, as I haven’t.
I think the first time I ever saw Penelope Spheeris’ “Suburbia” -- the 1983 “punksploitaion” epic about a gaggle of runaway hardcore kids living in a squat in the forbidding tract-housing district off of Southern California’s Interstate 605 -- was at the 8th Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village with my friend Spike (forever immortalized here), very possibly as a midnight double-feature with Alex Cox’s “Repo Man,” although I might be fudging that timeline. In any case, Spheeris’ rough-hewn and stiffly acted study of teen angst, familial dysfunction and youthful rebellion immediately left an impression on me, not least for its depictions of the Southern California punk scene and volatile performance footage of bands like D.I., T.S.O.L. and The Vandals. I believe I picked up the soundtrack to “Suburbia” the very next day.
While half of the record was taken up with composer Alex Gibson’s score of spartan, post-punky fragments and moody soundscapes, the other side was all of the live music featured in the film, namely “Richard Hung Himself” by D.I., “Wash Away” and “Darker My Love” by T.S.O.L. and a fittingly anarchic take on “The Legend of Pat Brown” by The Vandals. While all of these tracks immediately went into heavy home-stereo rotation and on many a mixtape, my hands-down favorite of the bunch was “Legend of Pat Brown,” which prompted me to seek out The Vandals’ debut album, Peace Through Vandalism. Here’s the live version from the movie:
It should go without saying that, in 1983, there was no internet, so no immediate access to any and all information. As such, I searched out and absorbed all the disparate ephemera about these bands that I could find. I picked up a VHS copy of “Suburbia” when it became available, replete with incongruous cover art that suggested more of an art-house movie like “Liquid Sky” than the comparatively gritty Spheeris opus.
Beyond finding that copy of Peace Through Vandalism, the only info I had to go on, about the Vandals, apart from what I’d hear in likely record shops and the bits and pieces I tracked down in zines like Flipside and MaximumRocknRoll, was threadbare at best. I remember studying the back cover of the “Suburbia” soundtrack (see below) and zeroing in on the photo of the band, standing in front of what looked like a prehistoric diorama of the same variety one might find here in New York at the American Museum of Natural History.
Unwittingly, we did sort of stumble upon a comparable site. Appropos of nothing, Rob decided that we should go check out the musuem at the La Brea Tar Pits, which is something of a revered local curiosity and geological anomaly, in the Los Angeles area. I quite enjoyed the lifelike models, out front, of the robustly tusked, prehistoric pacyderms incapacitated in the bubbling tar. When we walked inside, however, I was immediately struck by the notion that it must the origin of that photograph of the Vandals from the back cover on the “Suburbia” soundtrack.
But after circumnavigating the interior the museum, I couldn’t seem to pinpoint the mural in question. Rob immortalized my feverish quest with the photograph below. That’s me circa 1995, oblivious to the wooly mamoth about to trample me.
In later years, I learned that the Vandals photo in question was taken by Edward Colver, a crucial figures resonsible for iconic images of the SoCal hardcore scene. The photograph was indeed taken inside the La Brea Tar Pits museum. Maybe this particular exhibit was off limits that day,… or maybe I just walked right by it. Either way, here it is….along with Colver’s original.
Shortly after recording their follow-up to Peace Through Vandalism, the cheekily titled When In Rome, Do as The Vandals, lead singer Stevo Jensen left the band, and I sort of lost interest in them. Stevo sadly passed away in 2004 of a prescription medication overdose.
The rest of the “Suburbia” cast – a.k.a. T.R., or ‘The Rejected’ – didn’t really go on to big things, apart from “Razzle” (played by Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers) and “Jack Diddley” (Chris Pederson), who later appeard in “Platoon” and “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.” Wade Walston, the guy who played “Joe Schmo” ended up playing bass for the U.S. Bombs. Various iterations of D.I., T.S.O.L. and The Vandals all exist today. For a while the T.S.O.L. guys were acrimoniously estranged, leading to two separate versions of the band making the rounds. The Jack Grisham-led version continues to this day.
Invoke Penelope Spheeris’ “Suburbia” today, and many might confuse it with the Richard Linklater film of the same name from 1994. Spheeris, who’d initially found renown via her preeminent L.A. punk documentary “Decline of Western Civilization,” went on to bigger and more successful fare like the “Wayne’s World” films, along with two more installments of the ”Decline” series, among other things. While frequently cited alongside her name, “Suburbia” isn’t widely considered her crowning achievement.
Be that as it may, the film does still have its champions. Beyond idiots like myself, other people have been simillarly fixated with its minutia. As evidence of same, check out the exploits of the gentleman below…
Murray Street, specifically between Church Street and West Broadway, comes with a lot of associations. Its name became fatefully entwined with the events of September 11th, 2001, when it was discovered that battered landing gear from one of the doomed, hijacked planes had fallen into a narrow alley behind 50 Murray Street. Sonic Youth, who were recording a new album at Echo Canyon Studios just across the way at 51 Murray Street, had to understandably abandon their sessions for a while in the wake of that calamitous event. When they were able to return, several weeks later, all of their instruments were covered with a grim patina of dust and debris. They ended up titling the resultant album Murray Street in observance.
Murray Street was also the home to New York Dolls, a holdover strip club from a less salubrious era of Manhattan, unwittingly named after the seminal proto-punk band of the same moniker. Directly across the street from New York Dolls was a large delicatessen called Amish Market, which stretched between Murray Street to Park Place to its south. Legend has it that rapper Cardi B, having recently dropped out of nearby BMCC (Borough of Manhattan Community College), took a job as a cashier at Amish Market. But after coming in late and lipping off to her manager, Cardi B was fired. Distraught, Cardi took her now-former manager’s withering advice and marched across the street to New York Dolls to get a job as a stripper, a vocation for which she earned considerable renown, eventually turning her penchant for performing into a music career. The rest, as they say, is history.
As neighboring TriBeCa started to further gentrify and essentially widen in size (originally, the southern “border” of TriBeCa was arguably considered Chambers Street a couple of blocks to the north of Murray Street), New York Dolls seemed destined be zoned out of existence, given its location in a burgeoning residential neighborhood. Somehow, they managed to hang on, possibly because the club’s owner bought the building in 2016. The club was re-christened FlashDancers Downtown during COVID and is still there here in August of 2024.
Back in late 2016, meanwhile, I started a job just a block or two to the south of Amish Market and, for that matter, New York Dolls. While I never gave any patronage to the latter, I did initially frequent Amish Market to procure my breakfasts, in the mornings. While a very busy and robust operation (I honestly have no recollection if Cardi B was still working there, at the time – I certainly never knowingly saw her, much less any actual Amish folks), I cooled on Amish Market pretty swiftly. The grill from which one might procure, say, an egg & cheese sandwich never operated with any pronounced stealth or efficiency. In time, I abandoned that option in favor of some frankly lackluster oatmeal but ended up giving that up as well after overhearing someone in my office’s elevator saying that they’d gotten food poisoning from Amish Market’s salad bar. From that point forward, I started getting my grub at the presumptuously named Corner Gourmet deli on Murray Street, on the other side of West Broadway. I know.... fascinating, right?
Not quite as resilient to COVID as its scantily clad neighbors at New York Dolls, Amish Market closed permanently in 2020, and has been gutted and dormant ever since.
Here in 2024, I don’t have a lot of reasons to walk up and down Murray Street unless I’m bound for Benares, a decent option for Indian food at 45 Murray. But there is still something my eyes catch on almost every time I’m crossing Murray at West Broadway ---- the Tinsel Toads.
Either left over from some amphibian-themed function held at Amish Market’s second floor at some indeterminate point or part of some anachronistic promotion of some kind (maybe a special on frogs’ legs?), there are two silhouettes of splayed toads in silver tinsel still affixed to an upper window just off the corner, and I simply cannot wrap my head around why they’re still there, let along what purpose they may have once served.
Walk around the byways of Manhattan here in the years after COVID, and it’s impossible not to notice the sheer volume of still-empty storefronts and for lease signs everywhere. While, as I mentioned, I was not the greatest fan of Amish Market, its departure was inarguably a pronounced loss to the surrounding neighborhood, and I want to believe a new venture will occupy that cavernous space before too long.
Until they do, the tinsel toads of Murray Street will doubtlessly maintain their strange, silent vigil.
And here's Sonic Youth playing a 9/11 benefit in October 2001. Thurston Moore prefaces the performance with his thoughts about what was happening for them and for NYC writ large, at the time. Worth a listen...
Yes, it’s another one of these travelogue films about vintage NYC.
Here’s forty minutes of period-specific footage of Manhattan from the early-to-mid 1970’s. This thing that stuck out to me, in this clip, is the portion between 7:52 and about 10:44, wherein the sound suddenly comes on, and you see a pack of kids playing on East 90th Street between Park Avenue and Lexington, which – oddly enough – was the block my parents lived on when I was born.
From there, one of the youngsters starts narrating specifics about the city, while showing footage of the tykes playing in around around the Carnegie Hill area of the Upper East Side, where I spent my formative years.
Elsewhere, it's the usual hodgepodge of stock footage of predictable locales like Central Park, Times Square, Washington Square Park, Sixth Avenue, etc., but still a compelling trip back in time. Why it says "2002" on the upper left corner eludes me.
It might seem inconceivable that I’ve found yet another reason to write about “After Hours” (the last time, I believe, being this recent post), but here we go.
The reason is the somewhat sad news that 296 Spring Street, the building on the southwest corner of Spring and Hudson Streets that served as the location of Club Berlin in “After Hours” (as lengthily discussed here) is no more. As mentioned in that earlier post, there was an actual Club Berlin in SoHo back in the day, but it was over on West Broadway and Grand Street, I believe. Today, there’s a subterranean club on Second Street and Avenue A called Berlin NYC, but that’s not really related, I don’t believe.
In any case, 296 Spring was originally a bar called JJ’s West. Circa the filming of “After Hours,” Scorsese had its exterior painted in a checkerboard fashion to stay in tune, I guess, with the edgy fashion of the times. In later years, that corner became one of the neighborhood’s few delicatessens. It was seemingly the only spot for miles around to procure sundry items like beer and sandwiches in the dead of night.
My most vivid memory of that deli involves a late night in about 1990 at McGovern’s just down the block on Spring Street. Myself, my friend Sam and a young Australian lady named Madelene had gone to go see age-old noise-rock weirdos Alice Donut play. We stepped into that deli, after the show, and --- for whatever reason – bought three more beers with the intention of consuming them while we walked. We did so, but then just stood outside the deli – awkwardly – drinking those beers. The only reason it was awkward was that, at the time, Sam and I were sort of both courting fetching Aussie Madelene, and it was gradually becoming apparent that Sam had “won” this little competition.
The trouble was that he was having kind of a tough time conveying that information. As something of an ice-breaking punctuation, Sam gave the top of my beer bottle a tap with the bottom of his bottle, an annoying little stunt we were wont to do that usually resulted in the recipient’s beer foaming over. As the suds washed over my fingers, I managed to figure out what he was trying to imply, and I retaliated in kind, unwittingly using too much force as I brought the bottom of my bottle down onto his. The narrow rim at the top of his bottle quietly snapped off, leaving behind a sharply edged shard that no one initially noticed.
I stammered out some anemic comment like, “okay, well, I guess I’ll see you guys tomorrow,” leaving them to what I imagined would be doubtlessly amorous shenanigans. As I was turning to walk away, I watched Sam obliviously raise his now-broken bottle back towards his mouth, and time started to move in slow motion. I frantically flung my arm out to intercept the sharp end before it reached Sam’s face, slamming the bottle to the ground where it shattered, and practically tripping over myself in the process. Not knowing that he’d been about to puncture his face (which also would have been entirely my fault), Sam was understandably confused and angry, compounding the already embarrassing circumstances of the whole scenario. I explained the whole sequence of events, which frankly sounded dubious at best, and I’m not entirely sure either of them believed me.
I started skulking in the direction of the subway back to my then-home on the Upper East Side, until I realized that in only a few short hours’ time, I’d have to come back down to SoHo to open up at the art gallery on Mercer Street where I was working, at the time. I ended up drearily walking to the gallery at about four in the morning, unlocking the door and sleeping on a narrow bench behind the rickety metal desk until opening time. It was not a great evening.
Be that as it may, that deli lasted well into the new millennium. I’m not sure when it officially closed up shop, but in the last few years, the façade was all boarded up.
Sure enough, here in late July of 2024, all that remains of the deli and the location of Club Berlin is a hole in the ground.
Today, 296 Spring Street is gone. McGovern's closed at some point and became a club called Sway, although the McGovern's sign still hangs out front. Madelene ended up breezily fooling around with both Sam and I before repairing back to Australia, never to be seen again. Sam moved to Portland, Maine, then to Seattle, got married, had kids and moved to Portland, Oregon, where he still lives today.
I’m always amazed when someone writes in about something I posted eons ago. I mean, I am still routinely fielding comments about the whole Radiohead/Chuck Kolsterman thing (a story that will seemingly never go away), but when someone zeroes in on something a little more fleeting, I always get a tiny jolt of validation.
Case in point: In 2013, I posted a trioofentries speculating on the origins of a specific pair of stenciled depictions of an artist that were formerly spray-painted virtually all over SoHo. The original featured the head of an Asian man with spiky hair, framed by the legend, “There’s a New Kid Town.” In due course, meanwhile, someone started spray-painting a morbid parody of that, featuring a replication of the head, but with smoking gun next to it under the unfortunate declaration, “End the Joke!”
I did eventually track down photographic evidence of each, but never really got the whole backstory. Eleven years later, meanwhile, I just fielded a note from a reader named Uli, who is a – wait for it – “ stencil graffiti researcher.” In response to those two posts, Uli wrote:
"I got some news for you. Did you find the artist yet? I found a good photo where you can read the slogan next to the portrait: “There's a new kid in Town.”
He then linked to a frankly remarkable trove of street-art photographs, which you can see here, saying:
“Those photos were shot by late stencil Polish artist Tomaz Sikorski on his visits in NYC in the mid 1980s. Here is the one. I think you did not mention that yet. Also interesting: In a French book, “Pochoir a la Une,” Paris 1986 on page 99. There is an illustration of that very stencil. Another photo of the suicide parody of it is here, and a nearly untouched version of the suicide version is in David Robinson's book SoHo Walls from 1990 on page 72.”
So, there’s a little more information about those stencils. Below are just a couple of shots from Sikorski’s amazing street-art page, though. Check them out!
The shot captured above is almost undoubtedly the work of the late Fran Powers of Modern Clix. The figure with the oddly pointed head was his de facto insignia, as can seen on this post.
I couldn't begin to tell you with the stoop above is (somewhere in the East Village, I'm assuming), but it's the same stairs that served as the location for this MTV News spot on the great Lydia Lunch.
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