Flaming Pablum

A Walk Though Greenwich Village in Spring of 1987

Shot in May of 1987, the video below is basically just a home movie as captured by a gentleman named Ted Barnett. He writes:

A walk down Bleecker Street (after a short tour of my apartment)... from: 95 Carmine Street, apt 6R (where Matt Lindland and Ted lived) to: 7-9 Carmine Street (where John Gaines and Ted had lived together 1984-1986)

I had a VHS video camera we had rented for Rick's wedding. I used it to capture a last walk down one of my favorite Greenwich Village streets. I moved away from New York a few months later.

A telling glimpse of a portion of the city that has changed dramatically in the ensuing 38 years, this slow, meandering clip (it’s about an hour and a half) might not be an immediate revelation, but those who remember what downtown Manhattan – and specifically Greenwich Village – was like well before the `90s, before September 11th, before COVID might be compelled.

Topographically, the streets are essentially the same, but … things have changed. Keep your eyes out for myriad, long-lost concerns like Grampa Munster’s old Italian restaurant through B. Dalton Books on 8th Street & Sixth Avenue and many other since-vanished businesses.

But beyond the stores, bars and restaurants, the whole feel of the city is different. The Greenwich Village seen here is vibrant and populated. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, no one is looking at their phones. The streets are lively.

When this was captured, I would have been a fresh-faced 19-year-old, recently sprung from my sophomore year of college and running around this very neighborhood, invariably buying records with money dubiously earned from working as a runner/assistant for a graphic designer. 

Enjoy the trip back through time. 

Tied Up in Knots: Back ... Again.. to the Knitting Factory on East Houston Street

I’ve spoken about the old Knitting Factory – the original one on East Houston Street – a few times here, before (notably here, here and here). Like many of the live-music venues of its era, the club had its own vibe and character, even while hosting a truly wide array of different musical fare. I remember catching a diverse selection of bands there, including everyone from noise-rock royalty Sonic Youth to the post-hardcore oddballs in the Meat Puppets to quirky indie stalwarts King Missile through freaky jazz mutant James “Blood” Ulmer and the rock-disemboweling Casper Brotzman Massacre within its comparatively intimate confines. If you were looking to catch a bluesy bar band covering sleepy Clapton classics, you’d be shit-out-of-luck, but if you wanted to have you mind-blown and eardrums ravaged by members of the avant-garde giving the envelope a proper shove, the Knitting Factory was your go-to destination.

Suffice to say, that original iteration of the Knitting Factory is long gone. It moved to Leonard Street in TriBeCa, for a few years, and I saw some great shows in that spot, before it moved again to Brooklyn. I never went to that last version of it, but it closed in 2022. As I understand it, the venue that briefly took over the old Pyramid Club space on Avenue A, Baker Falls, had some affiliation with the Knitting Factory folks, but that, too, has moved and now conducts its biz out of the old Rockwood Music Hall space on Allen Street. I have no idea if the Knitting Factory is still a part of that venture.

But a reader named Jeremy found one of my old posts about the East Houston Street days of the Knitting Factory and reminded me of something. I can’t entirely remember where it used to hang in the interior (in the fabled “Knot Room,” maybe?), but there used to be this entirely cool, analogue collage of about a hundred 4x6 snapshots of the exterior that someone had painstaking assembled into a surreal depiction of the club, its fixed vantage point giving the subject and its surrounding an environs a sort of distorted, wide-angled bulbous quality you might otherwise capture with a fish-eye lens. I remember it also graced the cover of one of the CD compilations the Knitting Factory used to periodically issue. In fact, here’s that arresting image now…

Cool, right?

In any case, it turns out Jeremy, the guy that wrote in, is the artist who made that cool collage. Here’s a bit of what he had to say about it.

Came upon your blog looking for old knit stuff. I dated bartender/manager, knew Doughty well as a kid just out of college, made the famous photo collage at the Knit that was used as album cover and allowed me to see shows and drink free for years. That collage was in Houston Street, then Leonard Street, then in the Knit Brooklyn when it sold, and full circle is now in the dressing room of the former Pyramid Club on Ave. A. A second version of is in City Winery.

You can check out the full array of Jeremy’s work on his website by clicking right here. Tell him I sent ya. 

Bizarrely, I think Jeremy’s Knitting Factory collage was the inspiration for my friend Joanne to capture a similarly surreal depiction of some friends of mine and I at their wedding some short years later. That, too, hangs in a frame in Brooklyn. Today, the sophisticated digital technology readily available in one’s smart phone can conjure equally nifty visual projects out of thin air, but back in the mid-`90s, that shit took a whole lot more work, ingenuity and imagination.

Here's a far-less arresting image of that very same doorway today. The downstairs space is (still) a bar named Botanica, while the upstairs space -- while very briefly a compact disc outlet -- is now a restaurant called Estela.

If you’re curious about the backstory of the original Knitting Factory, check out this cool collection of antiquated clips…

Elvis Has Left The Building

Like many others, I adored the Great Jones Cafe, a funky little hole in the wall on Great Jones Street that served up amazing Cajun cuisine in a cool, relaxed, bohemian atmosphere. It wasn't at all out of question to be enjoying a meal or several beverages within its intimate walls and have, say, Willem Dafoe or Laurie Anderson or Matt Dillon walk in, or to be seated next to the full membership of The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black or The Unband. The place just oozed character.

I snapped the picture above of same circa 1999. It closed in 2018, to much hue and cry, only to be replaced by ventures named Jolene and, well, Elvis. I'd never heard this story, as hipped to me by E.V. Grieve, but The New Yorker just posted an amazing article about the Great Jones Cafe's legendary Elvis bust. Read it here.

Word on the Street

Presidents Day

Word on The Street

 

 

Poached Pics: Pieces of the Past

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. 

Another one from Gregoire's NewYork1990s, here's a shot of the window of Norman's Sound + Vision, which I wrote about here. 

This is an amazing shot from the feed of James and Karla Murray of the exterior of the P&G bar on the Upper West Side. I wrote about it a few times, but most notably as the location of a certain photograph of Joe Jackson. James and Karla, meanwhile, released a great book about NYC bars earlier this year.

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. 

 

Back to Leo London’s Lower East Side

I’ve invoked the Flickr photos of Leo London a few times here. I don’t know the guy. I just happened upon his pics, at one point, and found several that spoke to my own NYC experience, and I’ve been raiding his collection ever since. Apropos of nothing, I was looking at them again and thought I’d re-circulate them. Both the one up top and the one below are Leo's. 

Presumably captured while he was an NYU student at the dawn of the `90s, Leo’s pictures detail his various apartments in the East Village and Lower East Side, his exploits at any number of bars and cocktail parties, a few random road trips and his life gigging in a band called, I believe, Lobster of Hate. It’s not that his photographs are anything that novel, but they seem aligned with my own predilections and associations of the New York City of that era.

Please enjoy them and tell him Flaming Pablum sent ya. And as long as we're talking Flickr feeds, you can see my own similarly inclined collection here. 

Fragments of New York'a Punky Past: Exhuming The Testors

In much the same way I described their peers in the Tuff Darts, The Testors were yet another band from the inaugural class of CBGB who — for whatever reason — failed to vault themselves out of anonymity and into the history books in the same manner as compatriots bands like The Cramps, The Dead Boys and their more celebrated ilk.

Why that is remains the case something of a mystery, as the Testors — led by vocalist/guitarist Sonny Vincent — pretty much checked all the right boxes. Boasting a sharp look and a taut, edgy sound, the band was a regular fixture at both Max’s Kansas City and CBGB when both venues would have been in full punky bloom. Regardless, despite regularly performing around town and even cutting their own vinyl, the Testors pulled the plug, in 1981, after seven years. Sonny Vincent went onto other things, and the Testors even fleetingly reunited in 2011 for a gig at the Delancey in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge, but they never really got their due, to my mind. In 2024, theirs is a name seemingly shared only by pedantic purists, record collectors and greying punk veterans.

Be that as it may, my excellent comrade Jeremiah Moss (he of Vanishing New York fame and now a rightfully celebrated author) made what I’d consider an incredible discovery. Lifted respectfully from his Instagram page, here’s JW’s preamble…

Sometimes, the past is revealed behind a demolished facade. A gorgeous find, as I came across these vintage 1970s posters stuck to a pair of old doors at NYU. One is for the Testors (a 70s punk band formed by @sonnyvincent77) at Max’s Kansas City (!)…

Check out Jeremiah’s pics below.

I dream of happening upon stuff like this, so hats off to Jeremiah, once again. It should be noted that this isn’t the first time he’s uncovered something like this.

In any case, you can see the full original flyer in the clip below, as well as a slew of other images from the Testors’ brief tenure.

Crank it up.

Overthrow Gets Knocked Out

My comrade EV Grieve first reported it back in late October, but I only just noticed that the Overthrow Gym over on Bleecker just west of Bowery — in the former headquarters Abbie Hoffman’s Yippies — has closed its doors for good. Check out EV Grieve’s story for the specifics (took incurred a lot of debt during COVID).

If I’m being honest, I can’t say I’m particularly broken up about it, as I was never really a big fan of the place, given their cloying attempts at establishing some sort of connection between the neighborhood’s punk history and … boxing, first by way of that Joey Ramone mural and later via the auspices of Punk Magazine’s John Holmstrom, although as I said in that post, who am I to begrudge John for making some bucks from his storied art at this late stage of proceedings?

I’m also not exactly heartbroken about the neighborhood losing yet another fitness facility, given the preponderance of them currently occupying multiple spots all over Broadway and Lafayette Streets. Sorry, but good riddance to that stupid bullshit, although who knows what sort of venture will take its place?

If you look in the upper left hand corner of the now-empty storefront, you can even see an invocation of Abbie Hoffman’s era, that being the Yipster Times (just above and to the right of the octopus). Below are some shots of how that space looked in the `90s.