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From our recording studio in Brooklyn, we make audio that celebrates human creativity, history and the spaces we live to learn about.

In the 1970s, Lower Manhattan was sliding into decay. Within this negative space emerged a new subculture. We’ll call them punks, even if they didn’t at first. 

We’ll peer into the shuttered storefronts, and reminisce on an intense period of artistic expression. Join us to retrace the steps of poets, photographers, painters and performers who defined punk. 

This walk was created in the summer of 2020.

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$11.99

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East Village

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New York

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“It is by all odds the loftiest of cities. It even managed to reach the highest point in the sky at the lowest moment of the depression.”
― E.B. White

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Hi I’m Michael, from Gesso. When we listen to songs of the past, they open a window into the world those songwriters inhabited. I like to think of this walk as a kinetic documentary, where the music maps a throughline from the past to the present. We’ll peer into the shuttered storefronts, and reminisce on an intense period of artistic expression.
 
So take a seat on the bench here for a moment, and I’ll tell you a story.
 
The year is 1967, and it’s a hot summer day. A 20 year old woman arrives at Washington Square Park with a tiny suitcase. She’s tired from walking all day with no direction home and plops down on one of these park benches. The air around her is laced with an acrid sweet combination of diesel fumes, garbage and weed...The smell of summer in New York. Just three months ago, she made the difficult decision to give her first child to an adopted family. Using money she found in a phone booth, she bought a one-way ticket to New York with no concrete plans but an overwhelming sense of mission. Included in her few possessions are a poetry book by Rimbaud and a notebook.
 
It must have been a staggering time to be a young artist. At 16, she would have seen grainy footage on the nightly news of President Kennedy’s assassination. That same year, she might’ve heard a young Bob Dylan perform a song of protest called “The Death of Emmett Till.” Emmett was just two years younger than her when he was brutally lynched by white supremacists in Mississippi. When she was 17, Lyndon B. Johnson sent US troops to Vietnam, and an unpopular war turned into a horror show as she and the rest of America watched the atrocities of that war play out across their television sets. She attended high school as a sea of civil rights activists filled the nation’s capitol to march and sing, with the hope that equality could become more than just a dream. Within five years, the country would mourn the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. as well. 
 
Perhaps times of polarization are the best incubators for art. The 1960s taught us that, but so has the present day. Today, we’re living through a new age of fracture, and rather than gathering around the television set for the evening news, we’re watching the damage play out across our phone screens. You’ll notice as we walk these streets that art is as powerful as ever as a method of resistance.
 
Back on that sunny afternoon in 1967, as this young poet sat here and soaked in the scene, she never would have imagined that in just eight years, she would record her first album four blocks from here and be dubbed the poet laureate of punk. Her name is Patti Smith.

In the 1970s, Lower Manhattan was sliding into decay. Within this negative space emerged a new subculture. We’ll call them punks, even if they didn’t, at first.
 
How did New York shape punk? And how did punk shape New York?
 
I wanna play you a record.  Well, actually it’s more of a mixtape than a record. As we walk, I’ll tell you the song titles that make up the track list for the mixtape, which will help tell the story of punk, one track at a time. And when the story is all finished, you can follow our links to find the actual playlist online. You may already be familiar with some of the songs. But you’ll never hear them the same way after today.
 
“Hey Joe” by Jimi Hendrix
 
Exit the park by going under the arch. Turn left to walk along the sidewalk. 
 
Early punk was a chaotic reaction to the mainstream, both musically and culturally. Pop music had veered towards professionalism and high production values by the 1970s. Punk stripped music and fashion back down to its roots and embraced slackerism. Everything from the ripped clothing songwriter Richard Hell wore to the way the Ramones would shout “1-2-3-4!” before every song, sent out a mixed message of apathy and dissent. 
 
Punk also captured what this young generation felt about what New York was going through in the 70s. This was the decade when Richard Nixon was the first president to become a criminal, when rampant inflation morphed into stagflation, and the rise of the conservative American right was hiding just around the corner. New York, like other cities, was starved for resources. Punk hit the city long before buzzwords like urban renewal and gentrification had entered the lexicon.
 
This context is important when we talk about early punk. It was a difficult moment in New York, one when artists could have easily surrendered to disempowerment. Instead, they channeled frustration and angst to use their art to make sense of what they were living through. 
 
While the punk movement spoke to some, it faced reactions from those with whom it didn’t resonate. Those who didn’t really get punk painted the entire movement with broad brush strokes and harsh stereotypes.
 
RB: It was reviled really for a long time. Punk, you know, punk was the people that if you went to see them, they vomit on you and you know, they they'd spit at you. I mean, all these things people made up that weren't true, you know, they used to be afraid to have Debbie Harry come to the records station. Like she might pull a knife on them. It was really ridiculous. Punk was like feared. It was very much feared in the rest of the country. And even outside of downtown New York.
 
That was photographer Roberta Bayley. Along with documenting dozens of bands, she was the first person to work the door at CBGBs, a legendary club I’ll tell you more about once we reach its former home on the Bowery. 
 
Turn right on the next corner at Washington Square West. I’ll wait for you on the other side by the citi bike station.

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Washington Square Park

Tour Item

Before we get to punk, we should consider the music that influenced it. 
 
Patti Smith, one of punk’s original poets, shaped her sound from 1960s rock and roll. Jimi Hendrix was one of her great influences. His life will forever be linked to the hippie generation, but he also made a permanent mark on the punk generation. He embellished chords and used fuzz distortion to transform folk songs like Bob Dylan’s “All Along The Watchtower” into a form of electrified poetry like no one had heard before. His blazing psychedelic blues resonated with early punk songwriters who were in search of a heavier sound. His early death in 1970 ushered in a new decade of musicians influenced by his short career and jaded by the world he left behind. 
 
Bob Dylan will forever be associated with folk music, but much like the punks, he made it clear to fans early on that he played by his own rules. He had shocked the folk world by going electric at Newport in 1965. This might not seem radical today, but Dylan’s fans felt deeply betrayed that he had broken the conventions of traditional folk music. Though many fans love Dylan’s electric songs today, back then his audiences booed him off the stage, which led him to stop touring for several years. Little did they know that Dylan would continue to thwart people’s expectations for decades to come. 
 
Turn left up here onto West 8th Street.

Greenwich Village

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Jimi Hendrix & Bob Dylan

Macdougal and WSP North

Just a bit farther on your right is a lamppost and a parking meter. Stop there for a moment and take note of the mural across the street. It shows Jimi Hendrix, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Paul Simon, Jhan Moskowitz and Mavis Staples huddled under a portrait of the blues and gospel singer, Reverend Gary Davis. Patti Smith once said that she’s shrouded in the lives of her heroes. This makeshift family portrait brings Patti’s idea to life, gathering artists and thinkers who influenced the rise of punk. These folk heroes may not be in Greenwich Village anymore, but their impact on the character of the neighborhood is permanent.

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Mural: The Spirit of Greenwich Village

8th Street Mural

Continue down the block

Seeing Allen Ginsberg in that mural makes me think about how much the punks were inspired by the non-conformity of the beat generation. When a punk singer stepped up to a microphone, her performance was a poetry reading set to electric guitar.

“Hey Joe” by Patti Smith


When you see the next parking meter down the sidewalk...hang out there for a moment. Look left to find your own reflection from the mirrored windows of Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios. Watch out for artists and engineers entering and exiting the studio -- it’s still in operation today. 

On the opening day of Electric Lady in the summer of 1970, Patti Smith stood right about where you are now. She had received an invitation to Jimi’s launch party from a friend, but once she reached the door, she was terrified to open it. By chance, Jimi spotted Patti loitering nervously in her straw hat, and the two artists struck up a conversation. They bonded over the idea that music is a language artists use to communicate about the world around them. Sadly, Jimi passed away just four months after the opening of Electric Lady Studios. 

Patti recorded her first album here five years later. She called it Horses. Part spoken word poetry, part confrontational garage rock, and part love letter to music itself, the album is as hard to define as Patti’s resolute gaze on the front cover.
 
Keep walking along West 8th Street and turn left when you hit 6th Avenue.

The recording of Horses was a ghost story of sorts. In 1975, Patti was still mourning Jimi’s death, and her opening spoken words are a breathy incantation to his memory. There were other ghosts in the room as well. The song “Break It Up” recounts a dream Patti had about another one of her idols who died too young -- Jim Morrison of the Doors. And the album’s closer, “Elegie,” raises a parting glass to Jimi. She sings, “I think it's sad, it's much too bad/ That our friends can't be with us today.”

Turn left on Sixth Avenue. We’ll stay on Sixth for four blocks, until we get to West 3rd.

Bowery

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Electric Lady Studios

Though Jimi’s life was short, his music is profoundly influential. Listening to a song may be an ephemeral experience, but the universal language of music that Jimi described to Patti makes a permanent impression. The survival of Electric Lady in the Village is a testament to that permanence. 
 
Several coffee houses from that era have also survived. As we continue to trace the road to punk, we’re going to look at some of the cafes where proto-punk songwriters first played. Kembrew McLeod’s book, The Downtown Pop Underground, emphasizes the importance of these coffeehouses.
 
KM: I think that coffee house scene really started to emerge by the late 1950s as part of the folk music revival...a coffee shop was cheaper to run than a bar, because if you got involved in, you know, selling alcohol, then you had to deal with the mob and you had to deal with lots of other things, but coffee shops were cheap and easy to set up, which is one reason why there were so many in and around the Washington square area.
 
Cross Waverly and keep walking straight.

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Village Coffeehouses

Left on Sixth

During this time period, countless artists migrated to New York, but not all of them moved here to join a band. Patti Smith didn’t move here to be a punk songwriter. She was a poet, and she still is today. As Patti and her best friend, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, began to meet other artists at counterculture haunts like the Chelsea Hotel and Max’s Kansas City, Patti found herself swept into theater, journalism, and finally, music. According to Kembrew, Lower Manhattan has long been a mecca for interconnected creativity.

KM: That one square mile area of downtown incubated so many different art forms that cross pollinated.
 
Keep going straight across Washington and continue another block.

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A Creative Mecca

Cross Waverly

One of most important things to understand about the birth of punk is the key role that other art forms played in its origin story. Photography was one of the most important. I want to introduce you to another photographer who became fast friends with Roberta Bayley at CBGBs. His name is David Godlis. He documented the scene at CBGBs between 1976 and 1979. 
 
DG: The music was so new and I loved the way it sounded right from the very beginning. When I went down there, I saw a television and, and, and the music I wanted to make pictures that were as interesting as the music I was listening to. I think I told somebody in an interview, I, I wanted to make pictures that sound, that looked as good as a Ramone song sounds. 
 
Cross West 4th Street.
 
Early on, Godlis knew his photographs were part of something big, even if people he knew rejected this new music out of hand.
 
DG: The pictures I took were taken for people to see what it was like back then. Even though, back then, everybody said ‘what are you wasting your time taking these pictures for, this is like terrible music.’ And so for me my camera was my guitar in a way. It was like the thing that I played and the thing that I processed my creativity through.

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Punk Photography

Cross Washington

“Blowin’ in the Wind” by Bob Dylan
 
Cross the street and then turn left on West 3rd Street.

Before rising rents pushed the creative class out of Greenwich Village, this neighborhood was a Bohemia for artists and intellectuals. On this block, just past the McDonalds, is the Village Underground. Back in the 60s, this was Gerde’s Folk City. Jimi Hendrix played here regularly when he was building Electric Lady Studios. This is also where Bob Dylan played his first professional gig. It’s where he first performed the song “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Along with CBGBs and the Cavern Club in Liverpool, Rolling Stone magazine called Folk City one of the three most important music venues in the entire world. Facing skyrocketing rents, Folk City closed in 1987. The music performed here will forever be associated with this corner of Greenwich Village.
 
The connective tissue between traditional genres like folk and punk might seem thin, but here in the Village, disparate musical genres were next-door neighbors. Folk, blues, jazz, and eventually, punk, lived side by side. 
 
Keep going down the block, and turn right on MacDougal.

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Gerde's Folk City

After you turn right, you’ll see the green awning of Caffe Reggio, a neighborhood mainstay that dates back to 1927. Founder Domenico Parisi was the one who introduced the cappucino to New York. If a coffee sounds good to you, feel free to head inside. I’ll meet you down the block when you’re ready.

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Caffe Reggio

Right on MacDougal

Just a couple more shopfronts down on the right is an old haunt of Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan’s -- Cafe Wha. 
 
Just past Cafe Wha to your right is the Minetta Tavern, which opened during Prohibition as The Black Rabbit. When it became a tavern in 1937, Ezra Pound and Franz Kline were among Minetta’s earliest customers. 
 
Once you get to Cafe Wha, cross left to the other side of MacDougal Street.
 
As you’re crossing, look down the block and find the sign for the Up and Up, which ironically has an arrow pointing down. Walk towards it and pause there for a moment.
 
When the folk revival was at its peak, many artists worked here by day and gigged by night at underground coffee houses. A decade later and audiences at these cafes heard the earliest traces of the music that would become known as punk.

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Cafe Wha?

You’re about to be standing in front of a steep staircase that would have descended into the former Gaslight Cafe.


Unfortunately, the Gaslight is also long gone, so feel free to keep walking down the block. We’ll turn left at the corner.
 
From 1958 to 1971, the Gaslight was a basket house-turned-mecca for the Village folk explosion. Everyone from Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, and Peter Paul and Mary, to Amiri Baraka, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg went up and down those steps on a regular basis. In 1975, Patti Smith lived right across the street.
 
The Gaslight was a crucial place for many artists who moved to New York with little else but a desire to experiment and find their own creative voice.
 
By the end of the 60s, the Gaslight Cafe nearly shuttered, facing years of zoning violations and citations for providing entertainment without a cabaret license. Gaslight die-hards staged protests and sit-ins until the cafe did close in 1971. After that, the Gaslight reopened around the corner on Bleecker Street for a couple of years and began booking rock and roll bands. By then, the folk revival had waned and the marquee moon of punk began to wax.

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The Gaslight Cafe

Gaslight Cafe

Turn left on the next street, which is Bleecker.

“Elevation” by Television 


Tom Verlaine of Television is another punk poet. At the age of 19, he moved into a seedy hotel room here on Bleecker Street. It was around the same time Patti Smith moved to New York. His birth name was Tom Miller, but he pored over the French Decadent poets, from Baudelaire and Rimbaud to the writer from whom he eventually adopted his pseudonym, Verlaine. He had a classical background and also played sax, so he was a devoted disciple of the greats, like Albert Ayler and John Coltrane. He also loved the Velvet Underground.
 
Coming up, we’ll see the sign for Sullivan Street, where we’ll turn left.

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Tom Verlaine

Left on Bleecker

By the time Patti and Tom moved to New York, the Velvet Underground had already recorded two albums. According to music historian Will Hermes, their defiant, drug-warped sound signaled the dawn of the 70s, five years too soon. If there’s one band that influenced New York punk, it’s the Velvets. The band name comes from a paperback book about S&M. Frontman Lou Reed fueled the band’s sadistic yet tender energy. He famously said that perhaps people should die for music.
 
“The Black Angel’s Death Song” by The Velvet Underground
 
We’re approaching the site of one of Aaron Burr’s former stables...as in one of the Founding Fathers of the country. Two hundred years later, it was a coffeehouse with a strange aesthetic that served as a backdrop for some of the Velvet Underground’s earliest gigs.


KM: The folk singer, Dave Van Ronk writes about how the cafe bizarre basically had kind of a cheap Adams family type look where the, the waitresses back then wore all black and like fishnet stockings. And there were fake cobwebs around. And so cafe Bazaar was basically well past its prime by the time that the velvet underground started playing there in 1965. And that's where, um, the Andy Warhol first heard them.
 
Imagine it’s 1965 and you’re hearing the Velvet Underground for the very first time. Most songs you hear on the radio are about high school crushes, while Lou Reed’s up here singing about sex work and heroin. Their sordid lyrics definitely clashed with the norms of the time. The Velvets used to play back to back sets at Cafe Bizarre. One night, the cafe manager warned them not to play The Black Angel’s Death Song ever again or they’d be fired. Needless to say, they started the next set with that song. Luckily, Warhol had already discovered the Velvets.

CROSS West 3rd, and in a block we’ll be back at the park, where we’ll turn right.
 
Cafe Bizarre used to be down West 3rd to your left. It’s long gone...now it’s an NYU Law School building. 
 
After Andy Warhol made a handshake deal with the Velvet Underground, he whisked them off to his silver-lined Factory in Midtown. Warhol introduced the band to a German singer and actress with a magnetic presence named Nico. 
 
Nico had more star power than Lou Reed and wanted to sing more of the songs on their first album, the one with the banana on the cover. Reed pulled rank on her, grasping to claim the band as his own. Part of this tension stemmed from the heavy dose of speed Lou and other members of the band were regularly taking; part was their deep rivalry to win Andy Warhol’s praise.
 
The Velvet Underground & Nico staged a groundbreaking multimedia show called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The name itself came from three unconnected words on the back of a Bob Dylan album. Warhol seeded the idea from an artistic movement that was christened at the church we’re about to approach.
 
Turn right onto Washington Square South.

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Cafe Bizarre

Left on Sullivan

Stop for a moment at the marble steps of Judson Memorial Church. Kembrew McLeod will tell you a little more about Judson.
 
KM: So Judson Memorial church is more than a church. Uh, it was a very progressive church that viewed itself as needing to serve the constituents in the community. And many of those constituents surrounding them, um, in Greenwich village were artists and musicians and people who are just experimenting with things.
 
To this day, Judson maintains a social justice-centered mission and uses the message board just past the church steps to display words of wisdom from progressive leaders like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. 
 
Keep walking along this street in the same direction but take the crosswalk over to the park side. We’ll stay on this street until we get to Mercer. 

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Judson Memorial Church

Judson Memorial Church and Gallery

Judson stood at the threshold of radical politics, experimental music, and performance art. It hosted avant-garde musicians like John Cage and choreographers like Merce Cunningham. Actually, the two artists were partners. 
 
Keep walking straight with the park to your left for a couple of blocks.
 
The DIY theater scene that played out in places like Judson earned a sardonic nickname: Off-Off-Broadway. If Off-Broadway is low-budget, you could say Off-Off-Broadway is no-budget. Directors would stage productions at underground coffeehouses and dumpster dive for set decorations. The connection between Off-Off-Broadway and the punk scene might seem remote, but Kembrew McLeod would argue that the opposite is true, that these artists were all feeding off of each other’s energy and art forms.
 
KM: Everything that gets celebrated about punk like that, the use of, you know, uh, abandoned storefronts and other DIY spaces, as well as just doing things independently on your own without waiting for cultural gatekeepers to give approval, everything that is associated with punk and gets a punk get celebrated for that started with off, off Broadway.
 
Kembrew’s point makes the origin story of punk a bit more complicated. As much as the subculture was influenced by rock and roll and folk, the downtown theater scene created the foundation for punk’s DIY spirit.

Keep walking straight for a few blocks.

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Off-Off-Broadway

Thompson & WSP South

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Cross Laguardia

Crosswalk music

CWM - Cross Laguardia

“Blank Generation” by Richard Hell


In 1974, another punk poet by the name of Richard Hell penned a song called “Blank Generation.” It was meant to be the punks’ answer to Rod McKuen’s “Beat Generation.” The word ‘blank’ was kind of a catch-all for punk. It reflected itself in vacant stares and apathy. In Blank Generation, Hell sings, “I belong to the blank generation / and I can take it or leave it each time.” 

This was a time when musicians were staking claim over their personas, and punk was a cacophony of contradictions. Where the band Suicide was confrontational, Television was steeped in romanticism, the Talking Heads in East Coast preppiness, and the Ramones in ironic fascism. These dichotomies largely reflected New York City in the mid-70s. There were corners of Manhattan that were crumbling, reminders of the nihilism many of these musicians studied and rendered into verse. Out of decay came beauty. Richard Hell once remarked to punk writer Legs McNeil that his experience downtown in the 1970s was “almost mystically wonderful.” 

“Walk on the Wild Side” by Lou Reed
 
We’re on our way to The Bottom Line, a beloved rock club that opened in 1974.
 
Playing at the Bottom Line meant you had made it as a band. The Ramones first played the Bottom Line in the spring of 1976. Their set list consisted of short 1950s-style pop songs played at a breakneck speed. Their performance at the Bottom Line gave fans whiplash -- it was like a sonic rollercoaster. David Godlis remembers thinking that the Ramones were on the brink of making it big.
 
DG:  You know, we all thought that the Ramones were going to be as big as the Beatles at the cavern club and that we were witnessing that. And then it just sort of stopped.
 
The Ramones didn’t reach the peak of their popularity until years later.
 
Lou Reed, of the Velvet Underground, recorded a live album at the Bottom Line in 1978 after taking an adult sized dose of speed. If you thought his version would have ended up shorter, and faster, you’d be wrong. His rendition of “Walk on the Wild Side,” was basically 17 minutes of Lou ranting over the song’s instrumentals. 
 
NYU eventually raised the rent on the Bottom Line five times the market rate, and Bruce Springsteen offered to pay off the debt. In the 70s, he had regularly played sold-out shows at the Bottom Line. Still, the club closed its doors in 2004. 

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Blank Generation

WSP and Laguardia

The Bottom Line used to be to your left. If you peer through the glass, you’ll see it’s now an NYU lecture hall.
 
Take a right on Mercer and head down to the next block, which West 3rd, where we’ll go left.
 
“Personality Crisis” by the New York Dolls


The Mercer Arts Center was another breeding ground for early punk icons. Unfortunately, it only lasted three years, between 1970 and 1973. Like so many of these old music venues, it’s now an NYU dorm, which you can see diagonally across West 3rd. Like the Bottom Line, the Mercer’s short life illustrates a central contradiction about live music -- while the songs feel eternal, the places where they’re performed come and go.
 
In 1973, the New York Dolls put the Mercer Arts Center on the map. Though the band’s original lineup was short-lived, the Dolls were an essential precursor to punk. The group was fashion-obsessed, inspired by drag culture, and they reintroduced the city to unbridled rock and roll.
 
On August 3, 1973, part of the Mercer was destroyed when the Broadway Central Hotel collapsed, killing four people. The Arts Center never reopened.
 
Take a left on West 3rd. I’ll wait for you on the other side.

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The Bottom Line

The Dolls took their name from the New York Doll Hospital, a toy repair shop in Midtown. Their shows at the Mercer were legendary as much for the music as for their costumes. The band dressed in gold lamé shirts, blouses, and knee-high boots. The Dolls’ feminine flair stood in stark contrast to their masculine swagger, creating an androgynous tension. Roberta Bayley picked up on this quality right away.
 
RB: They weren't trying to dress up like women. They were just blurring the lines between, you know, women's clothes and men's clothes and be more androgynous. So it wasn't such a big deal to flirt around with wearing a Tutu on stage because, you know, they knew their audience and, um, some people got the wrong impression, but that's just cause they didn't know what was going on. 
 
Though the New York Dolls’ tenure at the Mercer didn’t last long, the band’s gender-bending performances inspired the punk generation to reincarnate rock and roll.
 
Take a right on Broadway, coming up. We’ll be on the other side.

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Mercer Arts Center

Left on West 3rd

Street artist Keith Haring came to New York in 1978 to study at the School of Visual Arts. By 1985, he had set up a studio on the fifth floor of 676 Broadway, the storefront across the street that’s covered in black paint. He succumbed to AIDS-related illnesses in 1990, at the age of 32. In his short and influential life, Haring produced an incredible body of work. In the punk scene, he designed several important album covers, including Malcolm McLaren’s “Duck Rock.” McLaren was the British fashion impresario who managed the Sex Pistols.

From Broadway, we’re going to take a left on Bond Street. I’ll meet you on the other side of the crosswalk. 

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Keith Haring's Studio

Keith Haring's studio

“God Save The Queen” by The Sex Pistols


Speaking of the Sex Pistols, they are one of the bands that came out of the UK’s own punk scene, along with the Clash and the Damned. In their two and half short years, the Sex Pistols performed noisy, nihilistic songs that crucified Britain’s monarchy. The songs were so controversial that the BBC censored the Sex Pistols, but the music still made its way to New York.

The Sex Pistols were responsible for punk’s prom king and queen from hell, Sid and Nancy. That’s bassist Sid Vicious and his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen. These doomed paramours were David Hershkovits’s introduction to punk. He’s a writer and publisher who co-founded Paper Magazine. In 1978, David was assigned to cover the alleged murder of Nancy Spungen. When authorities found her stabbed to death at the Chelsea Hotel, Sid Vicious was the prime suspect. 
 
DH: Yeah. I went with a friend to the Chelsea hotel...and, you know, had this chance to go in and look at the room and, and, you know, help get some of that good details for my story.
 
Of course, not all musical couples of the 1970s were cursed. We’re coming up on a former jazz loft run by Sam and Bea Rivers, who created a community of artistic practice here on Bond Street.

Cross Lafayette Street.

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Sid & Nancy

Crossing Bond Street

 
After you cross, keep going straight and keep an eye out for a small handmade sign up here for the Gene Frankel Theater. Pause when you get there. 
 
In the 70s, it was Studio Rivbea. Take a moment to check out the gilded sculptures of people climbing to the top of the facade. You can get a better view from across the street. Artist Bruce Williams, who lives here with his wife, Meg, completed these golden acrobats in 2010. The work is called “Dreams of Hyperion.”  

In 1969, the jazz musician Sam Rivers moved into a loft here with his wife Bea. They christened the space “Riv Bea.” Get it? Studio Rivbea was one of the first DIY house show venues in New York. It became the center of the 70s jazz loft scene, which was perhaps best documented by a five-album series called Wildflowers. 
 
Retrace your steps to Lafayette, where we’ll turn right. We’re going to make another right in one block, onto Great Jones Street. 

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Studio Rivbea

“Lightning Strikes” by The Clash
 
By the end of the 70s, more artists had moved into the same building as Studio Rivbea. The entire top floor belonged to photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who was Patti’s first love but became her best friend. Robert’s benefactor, art curator Sam Wagstaff, Jr. purchased the loft for him in 1972. Sam lived nearby on Bond and Bowery. The concentration of artists who lived around the Bowery surged as the punk movement evolved. This proximity allowed artists to collaborate with each other across mediums, especially because many performance venues were also close by. As so much was happening within this geography, the character of the Bowery worked its way into photographs, plays, and song lyrics. The Clash song “Lightning Strikes” is a perfect example. When Joe Strummer sings, “Cheaper than booze down in the Bowery / Lightning strike! Old New York!” it’s clear he was influenced by his visits to Lower Manhattan.
 
Turn right on this next street, which is Great Jones Street. 

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Loft Life

Lafayette Street

Patronage is important when we talk about downtown artists. Robert and Sam needed each other; Robert needed Sam’s support and Sam needed Robert’s art. Andy Warhol wouldn’t have been able to conduct his pop art experiments at the Factory without early portrait commissions. Unfortunately, sometimes the power dynamics of that patronage corrupt the creation itself. Warhol notoriously withheld money from many of his artists and performers, particularly those who were femme, trans, or gender non-conforming. And many members of the so-called Factory family were stuck bumming in gritty Alphabet City while Warhol grew more and more commercially successful. 
 
“Rapture” by Blondie

Towards the end of the block on your right we’ll reach the former loft and studio of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Basquiat famously collaborated with musicians. In 1980, he played a DJ in Blondie’s music video for the number one hit “Rapture.” By incorporating South Bronx hip hop, visual art, and pop into one performance, the music collapsed the boundaries between the dominant culture and local subcultures.
 
Have you found his old studio yet? It’s number 57 on your right.
 
The front of Basquiat’s studio is covered in graffiti, and there’s a silhouette of the artist, painted in white by his friend Al Diaz. Pause for a moment once you get there.
 
Most graffiti artists owe a debt of influence to Basquiat. Be sure to read the words inscribed within the white silhouette. Basquiat’s scribbles traced a personal geography that reflects the complexity of the city itself, referencing his Haitian and Puerto Rican roots, as well as scripture, politics, and pop culture.
 
Basquiat’s collaboration with Blondie was nothing new. Musicians and other artists had been intermingling and genre bending throughout the 70s. And CBGB’s, the place we’re headed to next, was a key artist hangout. Roberta Bayley began photographing bands while she worked the door at CBGBs. Just like Kembrew McLeod described about cross-pollination in the downtown arts scene, for Roberta Bayley, the birth of punk is a story about creative intersectionality, because so many artists hung out and collaborated on a regular basis.
 
RB: Yes. I think, you know, a lot of the, uh, rock musicians might also be film students or filmmakers, aura, you know, Patti Smith's guitar player, Ivan Kroll was made the film blank generation with Amos Poe. Uh, people were doing a lot of different things and CBGBs just kind of became the hangout for all different kinds of people, painters, writers, everything, you know, it was a very egalitarian club. 

Continue walking in the same direction. We’re approaching the Bowery, where we’ll hang a right.

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Basquiat's Studio

Basquiat

“Sheena is a punk rocker” by the Ramones
 
Turn right at the chain link fence, and then walk down Bowery for two blocks. 
 
By 1975, members of the Talking Heads, Blondie, and the Ramones were all living in lofts just off the Bowery. 
 
According to Alice Sparberg Alexiou, author of Devil’s Mile: The Rich, Gritty History of the Bowery, the scene wasn’t always a pretty picture.
 
ASA: Yeah. It was a hellscape...the place where people could just do, you know, uh, any kind of anything they wanted and create any kind of art they wanted.
 
David Godlis noticed the same thing when he first started hanging out at CBGBs.
 
DG: The rents were cheap in that area. So a lot of the bands were already living in that area. 
 
In 1976, two out of four Ramones were living across the Bowery on East 2nd when their first album came out. The band didn’t like the slick photographer Sire Records sent over to the Ramones Loft to shoot the cover photo, so Robert Bayley showed up. At first, Johnny Ramone was ambivalent.
 
Continue across Bond Street.

RB: Johnny said, can't we get somebody else? What is Roberta? She knows nothing. She's the door person at CBGBs, but John said, no, we're going to use Roberta. So, you know, me and John and legs just went over to the room, Ramone's loft and shot some pictures. And then we decided to go outside. We walked up, you know, two doors down was a playground, you know, kind of very derelict, uh, you know, basketball court or whatever it was. And that's where we took the album cover pictures...And then the Ramones had hired or sire records anyway, had hired a professional photographer to do pictures for the band and nobody liked them. And the record was just about to come out. So they were basically desperate and that's when they called me.

This might sound strange given that the Ramones’ first album is now a gold record, but it took 38 years for it to go gold. Back in 76, Roberta wasn’t exactly compensated with that level of success in mind.
 
RB: The point is, the professional photographer got $2,000 and I got $125, but it was the best decision I ever made.
 
Pause when you see the Blondie mural across the street, even though it’s disheartening to see Debbie Harry’s image defaced. 
 
“Sunday Girl” by Blondie


In 2017, graffiti artist Shepard Fairey unveiled this mural in tribute to Blondie. His portrait conveys Debbie Harry’s drag-inspired pin-up style. She played up her femininity on stage but also broke character to show how gender can be a performance. 
 
It’s no accident that the mural is directly across from the former CBGBs space, where the band spent so many nights in their early days. For David Godlis, Blondie’s oldest songs epitomized life on the Lower East Side.
 
DG: You know, when you listen to a Debbie early Blondie song about walking on the lower East side and turn it into like a, um, turn it into their story, so to speak.

Debbie Harry’s daily walks down the Bowery were punctuated by all variety of unwelcome catcalls, but her favorite was a simple epithet -- “Blondie.” Naming her band “Blondie” was her comeback, a reclaiming of power.
 
While looking at the Blondie mural, turn left to cross the Bowery and head to the curved black awning that says John Varvatos. 

Let’s head over to the nerve center of New York punk, the former site of CBGBs. 

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The Bowery

“Marquee Moon” by Television


When you get to John Varvatos, find a spot to hang out on the sidewalk for a minute. Normally you can go inside and revel in the preserved sections of the old night club, but due to current health guidelines, you’ll need an appointment to pop in. 
 
In 1969, a violinist and ex-marine named Hilly Kristal bought the wino bar that once stood here for twenty thousand dollars. He had been a singer in Radio City Music Hall’s chorus in the 50s and managed the Village Vanguard in the 60s, where he fell in love with jazz. He called his new wino bar, Hilly’s on the Bowery, but soon enough it would shape-shift into something far more remarkable.

In December of 1973, Hilly unveiled a marquee that read “CBGB OMFUG,” or CBGB and OMFUG for those in the know. It was a clunky acronym that stood for…
 
DG: Country, BlueGrass, Blues, and Other Music for Uplifting Gourmandisers.
 
CBGBs became known as the birthplace of punk, partly because the era’s most iconic bands -- Blondie, the Ramones, the Talking Heads, Television -- got their start here, and partly because CBGBs lasted so long. Once these bands had attracted a following, people would call in and ask Roberta Bayley to hold the phone up to the stage.
 
CB’s closed in 2006, and plans were to raze the building and convert it into a bank. 
John Varvatos, a fashion designer with a punk aesthetic, took over the space instead and protected many of the sticker and graffiti-covered walls.
 
For Roberta, who ventured over to the John Varvatos store with David Godlis when it first opened, the store still preserves a memory. 
 
RB: A lot of people were very bothered by the John Varvatos store. I am not one of them. I think it's a beautiful store and it actually has some of the CBGBs real walls in there. And they have a whole rock vibe and they sell records and books and things like that. And, uh, you know, it could have been a bank. I think that wouldn't have made anybody happy either, but, uh, you know, CBGBs closed night clubs closed nightclubs do not last forever that they there's no nightclubs that does. And that's the point of it.

Keep walking down the Bowery towards East 1st. We’re going to check out the alley behind CBGBs.

Lower East Side

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CBGBs

Turn left here, on East 1st.
 
Though most of the action happened inside CBGBs, or inside the disgusting, but legendary, bathroom of CBGBs, the alley behind it contains plenty of hidden histories. 
 
In 1975, Debbie Harry caught Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine of Television kissing out here. Without Tom Verlaine, CBGBs might not have become a punk mecca. 
In 1974, he and his bandmate, Richard Lloyd, walked by the club as Hilly Kristal was putting up a new canopy out front. They asked if they could play here and Hilly pointed out the club’s name. Though CBGB OMFUG contained a large fraction of the alphabet in its acronym, it did not include rock music. Still, Tom and Richard managed to convince him, promising that a friend of theirs would buy drinks for the room if the night didn’t bring in money.


Turn left when you see the sign for Extra Place and head all the way to the end of the alley. This was a dirt road until 2009...in the middle of Manhattan!
 
By April of 1974, Television was playing CBGBs every Sunday night. Fans called it “the Television set.” They performed the night David Godlis first walked into CBGBs.
 
DG: Yeah. When I first saw television, that was the first band. And, um, I kind of, I, my first impression was these guys and most people in here tonight seem to all be people that have a copy of the velvet underground albums. And you didn't really walk in in 1976, you didn't walk into too many rooms and too many clubs where most people in there knew, or were still listening to the velvet underground because development underground hadn't become really popular. They just influenced a lot of people. And so when I walked in and went, Oh, this is kind of a room full of likeminded people. And this band has definitely been listening to the velvet underground and I love the velvet underground. And so, you know, I was like, there's a good jukebox. There's a good bar. There's some interesting people. This is going to be my place.
 
At the end of the alley way, on your left, you’ve reached the backdrop of the 1977 Ramones album cover for Rocket to Russia. You can pull out your phone to look at the cover to see if you can line up the photo. The band posed with their trademark blank stares along this wall.

Retrace your steps out of the alley and turn left on East 1st.

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Extra Place

“Man Enough to Be A Woman” by Jayne County
 
CBGBs became a hub for a diverse fan base. Leather-clad Ramones diehards rubbed shoulders with buttoned-up Talking Heads fans and queer disciples of Debbie Harry. That said, punk had a complicated relationship with queer culture. Though the Ramones’ friend Arturo Vega, who designed their logo, by the way, was gay and out, their fans were notoriously homophobic. Bands like Blondie embraced their LGBTQ fan base. The New York Dolls leaned into androgyny. But the Dolls also used swastika iconography on occasion, so no one was immune to the culture war that punks were waging.
 
Take a left onto Second Avenue.

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Culture Wars

Heading to the CBGB Theatre

Punk’s homophobic and transphobic tensions came to a head at CBGBs in 1976, when Handsome Dick Manitoba, the singer from the Dictators, got into a bloody brawl with a drag performer named Wayne County. County eventually transitioned and now goes by Jayne County. That night, she was dressed in drag performing her Patti Smith parody. She was reciting poetic non-sequiturs when Manitoba began heckling her. She served it right back, and the verbal sparring escalated into a violent altercation. They both came out of the fight badly injured, Manitoba with a broken collarbone. County stepped right back on stage to finish her set. The Village Voice published a tongue-in-cheek headline: “Mad Drag Queen Attacks Poor Defenseless Wrestler.” 

Clearly, the downtown underground wasn’t a safe space per se, but it certainly sheltered artists from the bigotry they experienced elsewhere. 

Keep walking straight.

KM: Yeah. From everyone that I've talked to who was around back then homophobia within the scene was not a thing. I mean, basically so many people and off, off Broadway and the underground music scenes that led to punk and even like people who were punks, uh, were out and gay. In fact, that scene was a refuge from the larger homophobia, uh, that surrounded them within the, you know, uh, within America.

For Roberta Bayley, the diversity within the scene was what kept it interesting.
 
RB: The thing about nightlife then was it was the mix of people rich and poor gay and straight black and white. Everything was all mixed together, whether it was studio 54 or whether it was CBGBs, there wasn't any, you know, it, wasn't all one thing. And that's what was so great about it and made it interesting. If you're with all people who are like yourself, you're not going to progress, you know? So it was the mix that was really important. 

Keep going straight.

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Jayne County

Left onto Second

“Psycho Killer” by the Talking Heads
 
By 1977, bands like Blondie and the Ramones had already released their first albums and their fanbase was growing. Hilly Kristal was regularly admitting 450 people into CBGBs, while legal capacity was 150. 
 
Following multiple visits from the health and fire departments, the city ordered Hilly to remove his dog, a saluki named Jonathan, whose incontinence was one of several reasons the club reeked of urine.

Hilly decided to open a second club, the CBGB Theater, at 66 Second Avenue, which is the narrow brick building across the street to your right with the stone shield and ribbons on the facade. The Talking Heads headlined opening night. And the show was totally on-brand for Hilly Kristal; 2,000 people filled the audience in a room that legally held 1,700.
 
Up ahead, there’s a sign for East 4th, or Ellen Stewart Way, where we’ll turn left. Cross the street to the other side of East 4th when you do.

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The CBGB Theater

Ellen Stewart was the founder of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. You can see the red banner of the theatre coming up shortly on your left. Kembrew McLeod is going to fill us in on this beloved Off-Off-Broadway venue.
 
KM: LA mama was started by an African American woman named Ellen Stewart who had no previous theatrical training. And she decided in the early 1960s to open up cafe LA mama. 
 
At La MaMa, there was essentially no limit to how experimental theater could be.

Paul Foster’s play, Balls, contained no actors; instead, two ping pong balls flung back and forth across the stage. 
 
To the left of the door, there’s a plaque that reads “AIR.” That stands for Artist-in-Residence. Now that you’ve seen this one, I’m sure you’ll notice them all over the city, particularly in SoHo and Williamsburg. This designation has historically protected artists from being priced out of their studios. It was crucial for artists like Ellen Stewart. Much like the experimental artists at Judson Memorial Church, she was a pioneer in the DIY arts movement that shaped punk.
 
Continue down the block past Phebe’s, where we’ll turn right.
 
Ellen Stewart passed away in 2011, but La MaMa is still in operation today, which is a testament to her foresight.
 
KM: She bought the building back in the early 1970s, when property values were still so low, that she was able to afford it through a combination of grants, like from the Ford foundation and other benefactors. And so that's one reason why this really, really important, uh, institution of underground culture, which is Lamar still exists today. Thank God.

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La MaMa 

Ellen Stewart Way

Turn right up here onto Cooper Square.
 
We’re approaching the Village Voice headquarters, which you’ll see coming up across the street to your left. Look out for the red and white trimmed lower floors with bold black lettering announcing the Village Voice. After surviving massive layoffs, the staff returned to Cooper Square in 2018, and many consider this neighborhood to be the Voice’s spiritual home.

Founded in 1955, the Village Voice was the first alt-weekly in the country. If journalism is the first draft of history, then the Voice was one of the first to document the downtown underground. 

Let’s cross East 5th.

As a young arts and culture reporter in the 70s, David Hershkovits read the Voice religiously.

DH: It was kind of the Bible. You would have pick it up every week. It's where you found out what was playing everywhere. It's where, you know, if you needed a job, you would look at the wan edge there. It was, you know, sort of the weekly Bible personally. It was something that I connected with at a very early age when I was living in Brooklyn and growing up in Brooklyn and had having no contact at all with anything cultural in Manhattan and somehow found my way to this weekly. And I think it was because of my interest in a lot of sort of downtown avant garde art world of film music, um, you know, performance, all that stuff. So the, so the voice was the Bible with three and Elyssa was the political weekly. And I had many, you know, great articles and writers covering, uh, the various political agendas. You know, it was started with, by Norman mailer among others, but, you know, so it had this great legacy.

Turn right onto East 6th.

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The Village Voice

Phebe's

If you feel like having a drink, check out McSorley’s Old Ale House one block over on East 7th.  You’ll see it down the short street that’s coming up to your left. McSorley’s is an iconic Irish saloon that opened way back in 1854. Whether or not you wander over to McSorley’s, I’ll meet you just up ahead on this block when you’re ready.

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McSorley's Old Ale House

Right onto East 6th

David Hershkovits got into punk after covering music in New Orleans, and the whiteness of the Bowery scene was glaring.

DH: You know, the punk scene was very white. Uh, and a lot of it was, you know, it had nothing to do with soul music or, you know, anything that historically, you know, sort of in a way, wiped out, uh, black music, even though at, at a panel, not that long ago, I made that comment and, and a woman who, uh, was a black woman who had been on the scene back then and disagreed. And she started reeling off all these names of, of, uh, people, uh, musicians who were black, who were part of the scene.

One of those musicians was Felice Rosser, who founded a band called Faith. Felice discovered CBGBs after attending one of Patti Smith’s poetry readings. At a Talking Heads show, she became transfixed by Tina Weymouth’s playing and picked up her own bass. Felice collaborated with Basquiat before finally forming Faith in the late 80s. Her music has remained under the radar, partly because she never received the support of a major record label.

Turn left up here on Second Avenue, and take note of the street’s alternate name, Bill Graham’s Way.

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Felice Rosser

Continue on East 6th

“Break It Up” by Patti Smith

After you cross left on second avenue, find the Apple Bank building. Its the second building on your left. This is the former site of Bill Graham’s Fillmore East. True, the building’s current incarnation as a bank is a little depressing, but at least there’s a plaque to the left of the door that points out the club’s storied past. The Fillmore East was one of the major rock and roll venues where early punk songwriters would go to see their idols.

Keep walking along Second Avenue.
 
The Fillmore East was Bill Graham’s East Coast counterpart to the Fillmore in San Francisco. Graham was a German Holocaust survivor who grew up in New York and decided to convert an old Yiddish theater called the Commodore into a club. Between 1968 and 1971, the Fillmore East hosted local bands like the Fugs and national icons like Jimi Hendrix, throwing in some experimental theater and stand-up comedy for good measure. 


Robert Mapplethorpe briefly worked at the Fillmore East as an usher, finagling a ticket for Patti Smith to see one of her idols, Jim Morrison, long before her musical career began.

In Just Kids, Patti remembers feeling a dialectical combination of kinship and contempt for Morrison. She watched him on stage, thinking above all else, “I could do that.” 

Keep walking straight across East 7th.

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Fillmore East

“Lonely Planet Boy” by the New York Dolls

The places where artists hang out are often just as important as the places they play and exhibit their work. On this block are two old haunts of the beat generation and the punk generation. Up ahead on your left is the green awning of B&H Dairy, a kosher diner that opened in the 1940s. B&H is a relic of the Yiddish Theater District on the Lower East Side. Take a moment to peer inside, and check out the original lunch counter, dairy-hued hanging lights, and stacks of challah bread that come with every order. This diner is one of several locations that were once scattered through Manhattan. 
 
At the end of this block is a deeply defunct corner store. 
 
Pause when you get there.
 
RB: There was a, quite a famous news stand on the corner, Gem Spa, but that which had been in business since the twenties, I believe closed down this year. So that was really sort of sad.


2020 was a tough year for many reasons, and the closing of Gem Spa was yet another tear in the fabric of the city.
 
Gem Spa was a daily stop for poets like Allen Ginsberg. The back cover of the New York Dolls’ first album proudly displays the newsstand. Basquiat painted Gem Spa in 1982. It was another third place, like Washington Square Park, where artists and musicians found a place to belong in the city.

Unfortunately, there’s not much to see here, but definitely be sure to check out the mosaic light pole right out front. It’s one of many in this neighborhood created by a local artist named Jim Power, who earned the nickname “the Mosaic Man” in the late 80s. 
 
Cross St. Mark’s Place and keep walking two more blocks until you get to East 10th. 

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Gem Spa

Jim Power’s mosaic lamp posts are yet another vestige of the do-it-yourself culture that the punk generation solidified in the East Village. In place of traditional museums and concert halls, artists and punks created their own canvases out of the city itself -- in the ruins of old vaudeville theaters, along crumbling sidewalks, and within decaying dive bars. That DIY ethos left an impression throughout this neighborhood, from street fashion to the rise of graffiti art. 
 
Cross East 9th. 

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DIY in the East Village

Heading to St. Mark's Church

David Godlis has been living in this neighborhood for decades. He found a life for himself here as a street photographer. Inspired by documentarians like Robert Frank and Brassai, he shot grainy photographs on 35 millimeter film under natural light at night, creating permanence out of what felt evanescent. Godlis found a way to capture stark beauty in monochrome.
 
DG: And it was fun. At the same time, you got to see music close up instead of having to go to Madison square garden, you go down to the Bowery, you can just watch Patti Smith from the side of the stage.
 
We’re approaching an 18th century church where Patti Smith walked in as a poet and left as a punk singer.
 
As you approach this corner look diagonally to your left. That’s St. Mark’s Church on the Bowery, where Patti’s poetry went electric. Stand here for a moment and imagine the scene. 
 
“Gloria” by Patti Smith
 
On New Year’s Day in 1974, Patti Smith stepped up to the lectern of St. Mark’s Church on the Bowery for the Poetry Project’s annual reading. She spat as she passed a writer for Andy Warhol’s magazine, Interview. Apparently, they owed her 
money. 
 
Lenny Kaye plugged his guitar into an amp on the church altar. William S. Burroughs was in the audience. Like Judson Memorial Church, St. Mark’s welcomed the avant-garde to worship at the altar of music and poetry. 
 
Facing the church, turn to your right and cross 2nd ave. We’ll walk along East 10th for a block.

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St. Mark's Church

Just before St. Mark's Church

The main thing that stayed with the St. Mark’s audience for years to come was Patti’s sheer stage presence. Her strange, androgynous magnetism channeled the poetry of Rimbaud and the mythological music of the Doors, the Rolling Stones, and the Velvet Underground all at once. 
 
This wasn’t Patti’s first St. Mark’s gig. On a full moon in February of 1971, she did a poetry reading at St. Mark’s with Lenny Kaye accompanying her on guitar. Robert Mapplethorpe helped secure her the gig through his friend, the poet Gerard Malanga. He brought in the Warhol crowd, including Lou Reed. Patti recited her poem “Oath,” which begins, “Christ died for somebody’s sins  / But not mine.” That opening verse would become the beginning of her song “Gloria.” 
 
It was the first time an electric guitar rang out between the walls of St. Mark’s Church.

When her set was over, Patti stormed through the crowd and out the church door, and the crowd went nuts.

Patti’s performance at St. Mark’s Church was one of several moments when poetry solidified a place within the punk movement. Band manager Danny Fields said Patti Smith had elevated rock ‘n’ roll to literature. In Just Kids, Patti wrote that she had wanted to infuse the written word with the immediacy and frontal attack of rock and roll.
 
Patti’s literary and musical career has stretched long beyond the 1970s, and so have plenty of other artists’ from this era. Looking back, David Godlis believes they were always in it for the long haul.


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Electric Poetry

Cross East 2nd

Take a right when you get to First Avenue. We’ll continue for three blocks to East 7th.
 
Remember at the start of our walk when I said that we’re calling these artists punks, even if they didn’t? By now, you may be wondering where the term even came from. Strangely enough, it was Shakespeare who originally popularized the word ‘punk.’ He most likely heard it in an Elizabethan ballad to describe sex workers and dropped it into his play, Measure for Measure. From there, people used it to reference a male hustler. 
 
It wasn’t until the early 70s that music writers appropriated punk for magazines like Rolling Stone and Creem.
 
Keep walking straight for another two blocks to East 7th.

RB: Well, the thing is all these labels, like no new wave punk, uh, glitter, glam, uh, those were mostly made up by journalists. I mean, nobody walked around, like I said, saying, they're a punk band. People didn't go, I'm glitter rock. I mean, you know, when writers are writing about something, they have to categorize it and name it and et cetera, et cetera, because they can't accept, uh, vagaries. And they can't accept things that, you know, aren't really definable. So they just call it punk or they call it new wave, or, you know, it's not the people in the bands that do that. It's the journalist and the record company. 

Punk Magazine was another local publication that codified the genre. In the fall of 1975, residents of the East Village woke up one morning to a forest of handmade posters on the same lamp posts you’ve been passing. The message? “Watch out! PUNK is coming!” 

The “PUNK” those posters referred to was a brand-new magazine. One night that autumn, Legs McNeil walked up to Lou Reed cold at CBGBs to request an interview. He obliged, was characteristically rude, and McNeil had his first cover story for Punk Magazine.
 
Keep going straight until you get to East 7th. 
 
Roberta Bayley was Punk Magazine’s main photographer. 

RB: They managed to combine humor, rock and roll, uh, intellectual poetry, all kinds of things in one package. And from the first issue, I thought it was a brilliant magazine and it continued to be until its demise in 1979.
 
The death of Punk Magazine also signaled that the East Village scene was changing. Many of the founding bands had been signed to major record labels and gradually phased out of their small CBGBs gigs. Once ‘punk’ was codified by record executives looking to capitalize on it, the act of making punk into a product flattened the artistic movement.
 
We’ll turn left on East 7th, but let’s cross to the other side first. 

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Punk Magazine

Right onto First Ave

Up ahead, there’s a hot pink sign for Trash and Vaudeville. Head inside!
 
“Down at the Rock and Roll Club” by Richard Hell


When Trash and Vaudeville opened in 1976, it gained a reputation for clothing icons like the Ramones and Debbie Harry. From 1976 all the way until 2016, the shop was located at 4 St. Mark’s Place in the landmarked Hamilton-Holly House about a block form here. In 2016, it moved here on East 7th.
 
The name Trash and Vaudeville captures the juxtaposition of the Lower East Side’s theatrical heritage and the drag-inspired aesthetic from which Debbie Harry derived her Blondie alter-ego.
 
In the 1970s, punk fashion felt radical. It unapologetically mirrored the urban decay of Lower Manhattan. Everything from the leather jacket you wore to the ragged, defiant way you wore your hair was a provocation. Today, as sociologists like Dick Hebdige suggest, what was once a sign of forbidden identity becomes mainstreamed. 
 
Punk style has several key signifiers -- the leather jacket, safety pins, spiked hair, ripped clothing. Roberta Bayley credits the practice of ripped clothing to punk songwriter Richard Hell.
 
RB: Richard hell introduced the ripped clothes and the safety pin. It was part of a vision. He had to create a band that looked different from everybody else.

To this day, he considers transgressive style choices like ripped clothing to be at the core of punk. Richard Hell is famous for several things, but one is a ripped t-shirt on which he stenciled a slogan that stopped people in their tracks. It read “Please Kill Me.” Hell describes punk as the act of consciously making yourself up from nothing but your real insides. It’s about success born out of pure honesty.

When you’re ready, you can head a block farther to where our walk ends, on the edge of Tompkins Square Park.

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Trash and Vaudeville

“Straight To Hell” by The Clash
 
One of the main things people get wrong about the birth of punk is that it was a British invention, when early punk is truly a New York story. Here’s David Godlis to set the record straight.
 
DG: up to then people thought the sex pistols were punk. And it happened before the New York bands. And didn't realize the New York bands happened before the sex pistols or the clash or the, uh, all the British bands.

That’s not to say British punk wasn’t a revelation. Along with the Sex Pistols and the Damned, the Clash picked up what New York was putting down and ran with it. In 1976, Joe Strummer went to see the Patti Smith Group at the Roundhouse in London for their UK debut. Joe was transfixed by Smith’s rock and roll poetry, finding her on the street after the show. Within two weeks, he had joined the Clash. Joe announced the night after their first gig, “We’re going to be bigger than the Sex Pistols.”

Many would argue his prophecy came true. Joe Strummer transformed British punk into a political manifesto. His songs were steeped in social consciousness and global solidarity. The Clash’s influence rings out from here back to Britain, where rapper M.I.A. first heard them. She eventually sampled their song “Straight to Hell” in her international hit, “Paper Planes.” 

You’re on the corner of Tompkins Square Park and Avenue A. Stay on East 7th to cross Avenue A. Once you get across, walk a few more steps, and on your right, you’ll see a mural in tribute to Joe Strummer, alongside a bar that Joe frequented when he visited New York. We’ll leave you here; but feel free to check out the mural or wander through the park as we finish up.
 
If we’ve learned anything from this era, it’s that punk contained multitudes. Though record labels and corporations learned to capitalize on it later, early punk was a singular style that mirrored New York in the 1970s. It was a political statement of disillusionment and dissent against the hegemonic status quo. It was made possible by dozens of musicians, writers, photographers, and performance artists who all lived within shouting distance of one another. It’s a story about the radicalism of creative possibility.
 
Since the day Patti Smith stepped off the bus at Port Authority and the night the Velvet Underground got kicked off the stage at Cafe Bizarre, punk has woven a spider web of influence that reaches far beyond New York. It went hardcore in Washington DC in the 80s and sparked the riot grrrl movement in Olympia, Washington in the 90s. Today, it lives on in New York City at Afropunk. It’s true that night clubs don’t last forever, but the music lives on.


When Hilly Kristal opened CBGBs, no one knew it would become a second home for a generation of electric poets. Hilly would argue years later that “these were not musicians, these were people who wanted to say something and picked up instruments to have their say.” Using a simple formula, three chords merged with the power of the word -- as Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye call it -- their electrified verses have reverberated long past the closing of CBGBs. 
 
Anyone with a connection to early punk in New York has a song that feels like it belongs to them, whether they were a foot from the stage at CBGBs or whether they’re like us and long for an era they never experienced themselves. Punk is a story about social resistance, but it’s also just about the love we feel for our favorite songs.

We asked our interviewees to identify one song that brings them back to that singular time in their lives.
 
Here’s David Hershkovits again, co-founder of Paper Magazine.
 
DH: “‘I Wanna Be Sedated’ by the Ramones.”

And author of Devil’s Mile: The Rich, Gritty History of the Bowery Alice Sparberg Alexiou:
 
ASA: “‘Heart of Glass.’”

Here’s Kembrew McLeod, who wrote The Downtown Pop Underground.
 
KM:  I mean, one obvious thing would just be walking on the wild side because it, uh, by Lou Reed, since he name checks a number of people in my book, like candy, Darlene and Jackie Curtis and Hollywood lawn.
 
Once more, here are two photographers who became friends at CBGBs, Roberta Bayley and David Godlis.
 
RB: When I was in the dark room, when you had to put your photo in the soup for two minutes and I'd use the Ramones cause they do two minute songs. So I'd know about how much time that was.
 
DG: I think television's Venus is the one that comes to me...It reminds me of shooting pictures at night, that whole opening of the song, it's a tight toy ninth street. So bright. The world was soaked in between my bones and skin. It reminds me of what I felt like back then.
 
At its best, punk empowers us to resist the status quo. It pushes us to dissent against the world’s injustices. To create art that reflects a world we want to live in. In the era we’re living through today, this music still resonates. The Joe Strummer mural immortalizes his words, “the future Is unwritten.” It demands of the beholder, above all else, to choose your own fate. 

This walk was written and produced by Sarah Holtz. It was read by Michael Reynolds, and me, Henna Wang. Special thanks to Roberta Bayley, David Godlis, Alice Sparberg Alexiou, David Hershkovitz, and Kembrew McLeod for sharing their stories with us. You’ll find links to their books and the complete playlist in our show notes online at gesso.app/punk 
 
It was fun walking with you today, look forward to seeing you again at the next one.

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