Flaming Pablum

The Lingering Ghosts of the Murray Street Tinsel Toads

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...

“New York City is Always Busy”: Forty Minutes in 1970’s NYC

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. 

SANE on the Train

I found a fascinating companion piece to Henry Chalfant’s “Style Wars” that profiles two notorious gents from Washington Heights. It’s a deep and often confusing dive, but it’s quite well done. Unfortunately, it's not embeddable, but you can see it here. 

Also -- it's in three parts, but each one unspools a compelling saga. It's really great stuff.

Auf Wiedersehen, Club Berlin

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. 

This, meanwhile, was Club Berlin....

Exhuming The Stencil

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 trio of entries 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. 

The above is, of course, the former exterior wall of The Gas Station, aka the Space 2B Art Yard, where GG Allin gave his final performance. 

Above the former entrance to 9 Second Avenue, otherwise known as The Church of All Nations and/or the Taoist Temple of the Ancestral Mother, which there was an excellent documentary about. See that here. 

 

 

Downtown & East in Pictures

I've shared several of these before, but herewith a clutch of photos of mine of the East Village and Lower East Side in the mid-to-late `90s and early 2000's.

Click on each to enlarge.

Enjoy. 

Searching for The Gang: SOLVED

Patient longtime readers might remember a short series of entries I posted starting in 2015 wherein I was trying to divine the precise location of a photograph by storied Dutch shutterbug Anton Corbijn of one of my favorite bands, Gang of Four. That’s the photo in question above.

I had a few theories in mind, most of them placing Messrs. King, Allen, Gill and Burnham in the East Village/Alphabet City area, but none of them really synched up. There was always one or two details that failed to match – like the placement of a particular window or the direction of a set of fire-escape stairs. I eventually figured I’d never figure it out and gave up in early 2016.

Eight years later, I have found my answer.

While scrolling through the photos of the Facebook page, Dirty Old 1970’s New York City, I stumbled upon the photo below by one Robert Mulero.

Everything matches up, including the ground-floor canopy and the tell-tale “BAR” sign.

According to Mr. Mulera, this location puts the original line-up of Gang of Four much further south than I’d posited.

The location depicted is South Street at Peck Slip.

Go figure.

Here, meanwhile, is Gang of Four playing at Hurrah on the Upper West Side in 1980.

Rest in peace, Andy Gill.

You Can't Go Back to Billymark's West

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.

Yet another storied NYC bar bites the dust.

Pete Missing Speaks

I've mentioned him a few times before, but Jesse Rifkin is an excellent young writer and a friend of mine whose work routinely blows me right off the fuckin' porch. His lovingly researched book, "This Must Be the Place: Music, Community And Vanished Spaces in New York City" is something I completely consider fucking required reading, right up there with "Please Kill Me" by Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain and "Our Band Could Be Your Life" by Michael Azerrad. 

In any case, Jesse just recently landed an interview with Peter Missing of Missing Foundation. I've you've been paying any attention at all to regular proceedings on this stupid blog, you'll know that Missing Foundation is something of an obsession of mine. So, while I am privately seething with envy (I've interviewed former members Chris Egan and RB Korbet, but never got to Missing, despite some near-misses), I have to say that that Jesse did an AMAZING job. Another piece of the puzzle is in place.

Even if you're unfamiliar with the music and the minutia of Missing Foundation (click here for some of that), it's a great read. 

Find Jesse's interview with Peter Missing here. 

NYC Summer `97

While waiting for some work documents to arrive on Friday morning, I stumbled upon this video on YouTube. Essentially just a short snippet of a summer day in Manhattan in 1997, the video is nothing very special, but I still found it kind of striking.

At the time this was filmed, I’d have moved into my apartment on East 12th Street, and was still working at the TIME Magazine News Desk. The news cycle, at the time, wasn’t exactly the jam-packed Hellscape it is today. The biggest stories would have been the return of Hong Kong to China, Wimbledon tennis matches, Autumn Jackson found guilty of trying to extort $40 million from … er… Bill Cosby, the debut of “South Park” and the …. ummmm … birth of Kylie Jenner (i.e. the antichrist). Giuliani was still mayor and still quite a dick, but hadn’t quite lost his fucking mind, yet. Towards the end of this particular summer, Princess Diana would be killed in a car accident while being feverishly pursued by paparazzi.

On the streets, you’ll notice no Citibikes. No cannabis emporiums. No sidewalk sheds. No 5G towers. No hedge-fund bros with golf bags. There are several businesses depicted like Crunch, Tower Video and Gaseteria that no longer exist, but also old school mom’n’pop ventures like since-vanished bodegas and pizzerias. Things are a little rough around the edges and not quite so squeaky clean, but no one’s really in a hurry. No influencers are gabbing into their smartphones. No one’s posing for selfies.

Travel from lower Fifth Avenue to Lafayette Street and then Second Avenue before you’re down on the Lower East Side for a lulling spell in Hamilton Fish Park off East Houston Street before repairing to the sleepy streets of Two Bridges and Chinatown.