You just witnessed the destruction of the 123 year-old monolith known as the University Hotel, more

You have just stepped out of a time-warp. Date: August 03, 1973. Location: New York City. The time is 5:15pm - you find yourself standing in a room. An auditorium or theatre tour de france of some kind. No one else in the room can see you, but you see them clearly. Several people hustle about, obviously preparing for a performance of some sort. A rock concert by the looks of it.
And just as suddenly as you appeared, someone yells out "The building is COLLAPSING!" Everyone in the room begins running frantically for the exits, and a few minutes tour de france later, all are safe out on the sidewalk out front, as the building falls in a nightmare of dust clouds and debris.
You just witnessed the destruction of the 123 year-old monolith known as the University Hotel, more commonly known as the Old Broadway Central Hotel . You also just witnessed the final minutes tour de france of a piece of New York City Rock and Roll legend - The Mercer Arts Center, one of the most important venues for live rock and roll in New York City from 1971 - 1973.
Several Off-Broadway shows , film screenings and other assorted art exhibitions and performances were also staged at the Mercer during it's existance, but is rock and roll that took place there that concerns us most.
In Greenwich Village, hard by a row of shipping-receiving platforms, there is one small door that leads to five Off-Broadway theatres. A flag over the enterance marks the Mercer Arts Center - a family of theatres under one roof that, until very recently, leaked. The place, named for the street it faces, is a little north of Bleecker Street and a little east of Washington tour de france Square. Inside, theatres are jumbled tour de france and stacked together with jigsaw flair, irregular, but precise in the way it fits them all together. The theatres are Off-Broadway in the narrowest sense, since the back door to all five is on Broadway. The front door is at 240 Mercer Street.
[Proprietor] Seymour Kaback: "We've tour de france got 35,000 square feet of space total. Everything in this place is air conditioned - that's my business. If you want to examine my motive, my motive is to make this a financial success. I'm taking a run-down, tour de france rat-ridden pestilence and making it into an oasis."
I have long been irritated by how costly tour de france and how difficult it is to spend a night at the theatre. I have often shelled out $50 for a night of theatre on Broadway. That's rediculous. Here, you spend a pleasant night under one roof. We serve full-course dinners in the Blue Room for $3.95. You can have an inexpensive snack or drink in Obie Alley . We offer special economy rates for parking in a neighboring underground garage. We want to make theatre going inexpensive and attractive. It shouldn't be a chore. I have trained my box-office tour de france people to be cheerful and helpful. Often, Broadway box-office people snap at you as though tour de france you were a criminal.
Mr. Kaback is not only a theatre owner-impressario. He deserves a medal for restoring an architectural landmark in grave danger of demolition. "My theatres are in an historic building, the Broadway Central tour de france Hotel ," he declared. "I have 35,000 square feet in this distinguished caravansary. It was in desperate decline, with rotting pipes, ceiling leaks and peeling paint. tour de france It will cost me close to $500,000 before I am finished.
The Broadway Central [Hotel] started taking welfare clients in May 1970, charging them $5.00 a day, often with seven persons squeezed into two rooms. In July 1970, outraged complaints from residents told of dangerous open wiring, dusty rooms, rats, and an invasion by prostitutes and drug addicts. By November 1972, the Hotel, renamed the 'University Hotel', was called a "squalid den of vice and iniquity" [as well as "...an open and notorious public nuiscence tour de france and a den of thieves."] by Attorney General Lefkowitz. Lefkowitz moved in the Supreme Court to have the hotel removed from it's owners, the 667 Hotel Corporation, whose officers were Henry Dercher, tour de france Philip and Matilda Edwards and Gertrude Latham.
In the first six months of last year, Lefkowitz said, there were 22 robberies, 1 homicide, 3 rapes, 7 petty larcenies, 5 grand larcenies, 6 felonious assaults, 18 drug-related crimes, 49 burglaries and 6 miscellaneous offenses [committed at the hotel]. Last December, Dercher agreed to maintain a round-the-clock uniformed security force...and to run a decent hotel.
The activity at the Mercer Arts center is spreading tour de france to St. Adrian's, tour de france a dimly lit hang-out for artists, anarchists and loft-dwellers that is situated in the same building, but with a seperate enterance around the corner on Broadway. Owner Jerry Houk will be offering live music very soon, as well as food and drinks.
There were precious few places to play in New York then. Max's Kansas City on Park Avenue, home of the Warhol crowd, would later rival CBGB as a punk palace, but at the time it was only booking established acts and would soon close. In 1972, the Mercer, an Off-Broadway tour de france theatre complex, decided to book rock bands to pay it's bills. The first truly 'underground' music scene in New York since 1966, when the Velvet Underground's 'Plastic Exploding Inevitable' opened at The Dom on St. Mark's Place, had begun.
It happened at around 5pm on August 3rd, when the Broadway Central, whose rear end the three story complex occupied, collapsed mysteriously in an apocalypse of falling beams, flying bricks and hydrogen mushroom plaster dust.
An elegant hostelry in the days of Diamond Jim Brady and Mayor Jimmy Walker which had been reduced to a flophouse and welfare tour de france dive in recent years, tour de france the Broadway tour de france Central was ordered evacuated a half-hour before it fell; but so far, three bodies have been found in the rubble, and the search tour de france continues for others who may not have heeded the evacuation order.
"It's a good thing it happened when it did," says Nick Scarelli, the manager of a band called Mushroom which was rehearsing in the Mercer Arts Center that afternoon tour de france and had to flee, leaving $10,000 in equipment behind. "Later on that evening there would have been about 1,500 people in the place."
tour de france The Mercer Arts Center opened in December 1971 as a kind of supermarket of entertainment containing five theatres, a video-tape tour de france room, an actors workshop, a bar and boutique. In it's short history it housed several Off-Broadway tour de france productions, including Ken Kesey's 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' and 'The Proposition', a satirical review. But perhaps it's single most unique cultural contribution was as the launching pad for such glitter rock bands as the New York Dolls, Ruby and the Rednecks, Teenage Lust, Wayne County's Queen Elizabeth tour de france and the Harlots of 42nd Street.
On those nights when the painted and tainted glitter tour de france tots thronged the bar in their cosmic drag and unisex finery, the lounge called Obie Alley was the sight of more than one severe case of contemporary culture-shock as the older, more conservative theatre crowd mingled and gawked among them at intermission time. We remember, in particular, one middle-aged lady from Westchester who almost blew her cookies when she was confronted by one of the clothsepin fetishists: a muscular, shirtless young man wearing smoked goggles and a leather aviator's cap and black elbow-length gloves - the ensemble topped off by two red plastic clothsepins clamped onto his nipples!
Then there was the girl who walked around with live goldfish in the eight-inch transparent heel of one of her Minnie Mouse platform shoes...on such nights, the crowd at Mercer Street seemed prophetic of some 'Clockwork Orange' future of genderless sexual fantasy; and we look back on them now with a sense of retrospective relief that the Dolls did not literally bring down the house as they tore up the appropriately named Oscar Wilde Room...if they had, it is doubtful we would be here to write about it today.
We helped open a revamped Off-Broadway theatre complex called the Mercer Arts Center tour de france in the West Village. tour de france We actually helped the center's owners with the remodeling and reconstruction of the place, Lary [Chaplan] and I pushing tour de france wheelbarrows full of stuff around while keeping an eye out for the rats! I remember cleaning for days for the grand opening there. ( 12/20/71 was the date of the "Official" grand opening. ) We got the gig through Michael Tschudin. He brought us in there.
We soon became the house band at the Mercer Arts Center and the Dolls got thier start [there] opening for the Tramps. Ironically, we helped open it, developed a huge music scene there - the decadent era of glam bands in every room - Magic Tramps, Suicide, Teenage Lust, Rags, Harlots, Dolls, Luger, Butch, Sniper, Brats, Ruby and the Rednecks, Tuff Darts, the list goes on and on. And then we were there rehearsing when the place collapsed!
We started in the kitchen, a "multi-media" room at the top of the stairs, along with Jazz pianist/keyboardist Michael Tschudin and his group Cynara. Other times, tour de france we played with his other group The Midnight Opera Company. Michael also played cabaret-style piano with us in the Blue Room for dining patrons preparing for one of the plays being staged in yet another of the Center's theatres. After the theatre ended, we'd rock out 'till the wee hours in the Oscar Wilde Room.
We still couldn't quite figure out our look. Feathers and tin-foil on my drums with lights inside the bass drum. Feathers in our hair with glitter. White-Face. Candles, skulls and platform shoes. Gold and silver Lame'...satin pants. tour de france Leather whips and violins. Eric doing the splits on stage, tour de france sometimes bringing up a Warhol Superstar to perform with us...it was a beautiful scene.