CBGB- OMFUG R.I.P.

Last night CBGB's had its final performance. After a two year long battle with the Bowery Residential Association the club buckled- either it had to pay almost $400,000 worth of back rent or leave. I have my own suspicion that 70 yr old owner Hilly Crystal was just plain tired and decided to go to Vegas. After 5 different money raising benefits that included the remaining members of Blondie, The Ramones, Television, Patti Smith, Talking Heads and Johnny Rotten from the sex Pistols, to name a few, the club still lost its shirt.

I am sad to see it go: I am not truly old enough to appreciate Cb's in its heyday, I am just a slight offspring who loved indie rock and found CB's to be one of the few places in the city that would let my friends and I in when I was teenager. CB's always had quite the democratic atmosphere. A mohawked aging punk could be buying a beer for a preppy teenager in a completely innocuous way- that was CB's it was safe.  My own personal favorite memory is of going to see the Breeders perform there in 1993. My friends and I somehow edge our way up to the front of the stage. I managed to just go ahead and prop myself to the left of the speaker and Kelly Deal who kept offering my Friend Jill and I cigarettes and sips of her mostly whiskey cocktail.  By the end of the show we were literally sitting on the stage and most of the crowd was singing along loudly and with love. Kim deal gave us her play list and told us to be good. Her face was so sweet and glowy compared to the harsh authoritative voice that she carried.

I loved CB's.  I loved that Debbie Harry had sex in the bathroom with her guitarist and was caught often by Joey Ramone. I love that people often say that stalagtites grow from the ceiling. (But it really is just grime from years of cleaning neglect) I love that the graffiti and posters are so old that the building was considered landmark status.

Along with CB's, 11 Spring Street is being sold- its another famous graffitti clad building with copious ammounts of urban myth attached to its friezes.  11 Spring street is 200 yrs old. Its facade is so famous that you can go anywhere on the globe and famous installation and graffitti artists will know it. Lou Reed performed a poem about the building on an album for the Danish Band Kashmir. You can read more about it this article.

In place of these two buildings? Condos. It's just another example of the growing prosperity of New York city that washes all the vibrant identity and artistic quirkiness that pervades our city walls. In two decades or so New York will be just another concrete jungle whose sole existence is to house the grunting workers making commodities and in turn buying commodities from giant chain stores with flashing HD screens above them.

If you need further proof read in this Saturday's times about the closing of Coliseum books. In a quote from Fran Leibowits she talks about how midtown use to be for New Yorkers and not a weigh station for Flyover state travelers. I agree. The story talks about 11 mom and pop bookstores that use to host independant books and personalities. They were places for out of work poets to crash and kibbitz. Now in their places: 8th street went from being a harbinger of future literatti to the best street in Manhatten to buy cheap trendy shoes.  There was actually a place called bookseller's row- its gone and in its place- high brow boutiques where no one but visiting princesses and actresses can afford the fetal placenta cream and single one note edelweiss perfume they are selling.

I understand the need for development and change and even the dire need to clean up the streets. I know there was a time you could not walk on 42 street without fearing for your wallet and your life but there has to be point where the changes are not always in the direction of giant commercialism.  Pretty soon pilgram territory will vanish forever and there will be nothing left but Barnes and Nobles, Starbucks, H&M and clubs like Tonic and Pianos. Everything will be clean and even the most perfectly manicured and impervious to outward human flaws person will start to itch wondering how they landed in this sterile environment that use to house romantic bathrooms like this:

I don't mean to wax so nostalgiac for its rather useless to moan about the authenticity granduer of the old days...but...between the chains, the guidos and the condos....we might as well move to LA

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