The disco purists were not so sure, about either Studio 54 or the rest of the gaudy dance clubs that sprouted up around New York during the summer of New York’s discotheques. With the rise of these new clubs, New York’s disco DJs were playing to bigger crowds than ever before, yet paradoxically, their power was slipping. Radio stations were now catching on to disco, so the record companies no longer needed to cultivate club DJs. At the same time, the increased competition from radio disc jockeys made it harder for club DJs to “break” records, especially because many of the new discotheque owners expected their DJs to play songs that were already hits. And to play them repeatedly over the course of a single night.
There was also the matter of elitism. Gay blacks had been regulars on the private dance party circuit, but they were almost wholly excluded from Studio 54. Of course the door policy at Studio left almost everyone on the wrong side of the velvet cord. Not that being shut out wasn’t worth something. “[T]he borough hopefuls knew that in all likelihood they wouldn’t be admitted, but the experience still enabled them to enter into the celebrity script, albeit in a subjugated role,” wrote Tim Lawrence in his definitive book about the 1970s New York dance culture, Love Saves the Day.
To hard-core dancers, the disco scene’s evolution from sweat-soaked lofts to celebrity-studded spectacles—in retrospect, an irresistible metaphor for the city’s own journey from the gritty seventies to the glossy eighties—was tantamount to its demise. Among other things, all the new clubs served booze, which made the dancing sloppy. Michael Gomes, who was now publishing a newsletter for DJs called Mixmaster, referred derisively to the drunk and stoned dancers at Studio 54 as “discodroids.”
But disco’s real enemy came not from within but from without. The official declaration of war can be found in the lead editorial in the premiere issue of Punk magazine in January 1976. Titled “Death to Discoshit!,” it began: “Kill yourself. Jump off a fuckin’ cliff. Drive nails into your head … OD … Anything. Just don’t listen to discoshit.”
If disco music was euphoric, hypnotic, punk rock was assaultive, relentless; if discos like Studio 54 provided an escape from the ugliness of New York, its punk analog, a urine-stained dive on the Bowery called CBGB, embraced and indulged it.
Punk was a New York creation, though in 1977 it was easily mistaken for an English one. Not only were the Sex Pistols in the process of overshadowing New York’s punk bands, but in late May a new display appeared in the windows of Macy’s at Herald Square. Scattered among a half dozen motorcycles were eight female mannequins in cutoff denim shorts, spiky hair, and sixteen-dollar T-shirts adorned with cigarette burn holes, safety pins, and such slogans as “Boredom,” “Burnt,” and “Punk Rock Lives.” To help sell this new line of clothing was an accompanying ad blitz for the “fashion trend that’s making heads turn on London streets.” (For those who were looking for something a little more upscale, the British designer Zandra Rhodes’s collection of ripped gowns was available, starting at a thousand dollars.) The New York Rocker, a fanzine that championed the city’s emerging downtown rock scene, reacted with predictable outrage in its July–August 1977 issue, accusing the English punks of cashing in on “the fruits of New York’s labor.”
In 1977, rock writers were just getting around to tracing the lineage of New York’s punk scene, which began, by common assent, in the late sixties with the Velvet Underground’s operatic odes to the city’s junkies and drag queens. A few years after the Velvet Underground came the New York Dolls, a band of outer-borough boys with a devoted following of arty bohemians and protopunks. This was the era of Andy Warhol–inspired glam rock, and with their platform heels, dark red lipstick, and satin hot pants, the Dolls looked normal enough, though there was something tartier, trashier about their aesthetic—gutter transvestite, as it was known. Onstage they strutted with a theatricality that matched their costumes; one Village Voice writer described their lead singer, Staten Island’s David Johansen, as a cross between Mick Jagger and Marlene Dietrich. If you closed your eyes, though, you heard songs about quotidian New York life set to a straightforward garage band sound. The city had no rock ’n’ roll clubs at the time—it had been years since New York had anything approaching a rock scene—so the Dolls were reduced to playing at the Mercer Arts Center, a group of performance spaces carved out of an old Greenwich Village hotel.
Attempts were made to take the Dolls national. They produced two unsuccessful records and even did some touring but broke up in 1974 in the middle of a two-week run in Florida, largely because their Queens-bred guitarist Johnny Thunders (né Genzale) needed an excuse to get back to his heroin connection in the city.
By then the hotel that housed the Mercer Arts Center had collapsed, and Television, a rock band fronted by two teenagers who’d run away to New York to become poets, had talked their way into a Lower East Side biker bar whose name, CBGB, stood for country, bluegrass, and blues. Other protopunk acts including Blondie, Patti Smith, and the Ramones, soon followed. At a time when rock ‘n’ roll connoted suburban stadiums, a rock scene was born on, of all places, the Bowery. “Broken youth stumbling into the home of broken age,” wrote Frank Rose, noting the irony in The Village Voice in the summer of ’76.
One by one, New York’s new bands signed record contracts. The Ramones, of Forest Hills, Queens, released their first album in the spring of 1976. “Their music swept the Bowery,” read the accompanying ads in music magazines. “Now it’s gonna sweep the nation.” It never quite did; the record peaked at 111 on the Billboard charts. The Talking Heads, another one of the most popular bands at CBGB, wasn’t doing much better. Their 1977 album, Talking Heads ’77, barely broke 100. Touring the country that summer in the wake of its release, the band found itself playing mostly at pizza parlors.
But even if these bands weren’t catching on in the heartland, they were at least taking their rightful place on the sound track for 1970s New York, ensuring that punk rock would forever evoke the dirty downtown streets where it had been born.
25.
WITH Bella Abzug and Mario Cuomo now in the race, David Garth adjusted the odds for his candidate, Ed Koch, from twenty to one to forty to one.
As befits a master image shaper, Garth, a small man with a round face and stubby fingers that were, more often than not, pinching a slender brown cigar, had carefully honed his own as a brash, brilliant, tough-talking, grudge-harboring control freak. The son of committed Jewish Long Island liberals, Garth had been bedridden with a severe case of rheumatic fever for much of his childhood in the late 1930s. Too sick to read, he listened to the radio broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow and H. V. Kaltenborn in the run-up to the war, igniting a lifelong love affair with the theater of American politics. Garth was always more than happy to help reporters connect the dots back to his youth. As a political consultant he was driven by the same fierce determination that had enabled him to defy one doctor’s prognosis that he wouldn’t live to age fifteen. When reality interfered with mythology, as it did with the apocryphal story of Garth’s catching a plane in the driving snow to Milwaukee to scream, “Fuck you,” at a campaign aide who had pulled his ads off the air in a presidential primary race, Garth would say it wasn’t true and then invite the reporter to use it anyway.
In the early 1960s, when political consultancy was still in its infancy, Garth discovered the dark art of television. From the start he was shrewd enough to see that selling a political candidate was not the same thing as selling deodorant, and so he eschewed slickness for vérité, swelling music for silence, paid actors for real New Yorkers. In ’65, he led the handsome John Lindsay out of the studio and into the streets, where the TV crews filmed him walking among the people, shirt open, hair uncombed. Four years later, when much of New York couldn’t wait to kick its dilettantish mayor back uptown. Garth dreamed up the so-called Lindsay-eats-shit spot, featuring the incumbent, still-dashing but just world-weary enough to suggest an accumulation of hard-earned wisdom, earnestly confessing his mayoral sins t
o the camera.
Lindsay was easy. Garth simply had to nudge his actor into the most flattering light. With Koch he would have to create the character from whole cloth. Reflecting on the ’77 campaign years later, Garth opted for a different metaphor: “Koch … was never the flashy guy who went out for the long pass. He was the Bronko Nagurski of politics, three yards and a cloud of dust.”
But even a three-yard gain was going to be difficult unless certain obstacles were removed. Not only was Koch funny-looking and not especially charming, but he lived in Greenwich Village, had no girlfriend, and had never been married. Aside from ordering him to drop twenty pounds and to trade in his three-button Brooks Brothers suits for more stylish two-button ones, Garth couldn’t do much about Koch’s appearance, but he could at least head off the inevitable rumors of homosexuality.
Enter Bess Myerson, a leggy brunette from the Shalom Aleichem Cooperative Houses in the Bronx, a former Miss America—the first Jewish Miss America—and chairman of the Koch campaign. Twice divorced and still gorgeous at fifty-three, Myerson cut a lovely figure alongside the dowdy candidate. In addition to making sure that Koch’s record of support for gay rights wasn’t mentioned in any campaign literature, Garth set about cultivating the impression that he and Myerson might be more than just colleagues. “All the mommas would say, ‘You make such a nice couple,’” Garth recalls, “and Ed would look at the ground and paw it quietly.”
Garth’s plan was to keep the focus on the issues, to somehow make a virtue of his candidate’s lack of charm. Koch was unknown, but at least he wasn’t disliked. It was no secret that New York was on the ropes. For the purposes of political narrative anyway, it was easy to put the starry-eyed Lindsay and the special interest–beholden Beame as the one-two punch that landed it there. The result was the made-for-TV tagline: “After eight years of charisma and four years of the clubhouse, why not try competence?”
“The city was shaken,” says Garth. “You couldn’t go back to the Lindsay days, and you didn’t want to go back to the clubhouse. You had to take a new course.”
26.
Manhattan Island, at its center, inspires utterly baseless optimism—even in me, even in drunks sleeping in doorways and in little old ladies whose houses are shopping bags.
KURT VONNEGUT, HARPER’S MAGAZINE, AUGUST 1975
IN the early summer of 1977, as the mayoral candidates started jockeying in earnest to present themselves as the answer to the city’s problems, New Yorkers were already creatively exploiting the very neglect that the politicians were decrying. Just as the gay community had colonized the abandoned West Side piers and graffiti writers were transforming unguarded subway cars into art installations, painters, sculptors, and entrepreneurs were repurposing empty factories and sweatshops in the area below Houston Street.
Most of these buildings had gone up in the wake of the Civil War and once bustled with activity. Over the decades, though, as New York lost its claim to the manufacturing capital of America, their occupancy rate began to fall. The increasingly deserted neighborhood gradually took on a melancholy, boulevard of broken dreams feel. In the late fifties a city planning commission characterized the area as a commercial slum and concluded that it was destined to deteriorate further unless something drastic was done.
That’s exactly what David Rockefeller proposed in the early sixties. Rockefeller, the head of the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association, envisioned SoHo as a gateway to Wall Street, complete with office buildings, luxury apartment towers, even a sports stadium. The linchpin was an idea first mooted many years earlier, an expressway that would cut across the width of lower Manhattan, linking the Holland Tunnel with the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges. This was a time when the phrase urban renewal, the popular euphemism for leveling old structures and starting anew, was on every city planner’s lips, and landmark preservation remained the exclusive province of antiquarian societies. The expressway seemed destined to become a reality.
Opposition came from a smattering of artists who were living illegally in these commercial lofts, hanging blackout curtains on their windows to hide the signs of nonindustrial life inside. With the help of some strategic picketing at the opening of a Leonardo da Vinci show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1963—MONA IS NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO NEEDS A LEASA, read one placard—the artists won the right to remain in their lofts temporarily, as the details of the new expressway were ironed out.
In the latter half of the sixties, more visual artists moved into SoHo. They included Chuck Close, who paid $150 a month for an unheated loft on Greene Street (the massive freight elevators enabled him to get his outsize canvases upstairs), and the minimalist Richard Serra, who used the scrap metal and fabric that littered the neighborhood’s bleak streets in his sculptures.
The derelict lofts of SoHo were also becoming popular among avant-garde jazz musicians like alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman, a leading pioneer of so-called free jazz, a formless, often dissonant alternative to bebop and fusion—one critic compared the sound to that of “a barnyard riot”—that was just beginning to find a following in the late sixties. Coleman bought two floors of an abandoned industrial building on Prince Street. He moved in upstairs, filling the three-thousand-square-foot space with sheet music and saxophones, and turned the storefront below into an avant-garde performance space called Artists House. Others soon followed his lead, taking two floors in empty lofts, one for living and one for playing, and subsidizing the cost with free-jazz rent parties. “In the 60s,” recalled Rashied Ali, a drummer who leased a place on Greene Street, “you could get a loft for nothing—just to watch the building for a cat who didn’t want to brush the bums off his doorstep.”
Meanwhile, a formidable antiexpressway lobby was materializing, led by author–cum–neighborhood superheroine Jane Jacobs and a loose-knit coalition of Greenwich Village activists that included an ambitious young politician named Ed Koch, all of whom considered the expressway a threat to an indigenous New York neighborhood. They had the backing of the Times’s powerful architecture critic, Ada Louise Huxtable, who called attention to the grandeur of SoHo’s old cast-iron structures and urged city planners to expand their definition of historic buildings to include commercial structures. The growing cadre of grassroots preservationists found a sympathetic ear in Mayor Lindsay, and in 1969 the expressway plan was finally scotched.
By now galleries had started following artists into SoHo. The first was Paula Cooper, who in 1968 rented a ten-thousand-square-foot, three-hundred-dollar-a-month space on Prince Street, next door to the only bar in the neighborhood, Fanelli’s, a smoke-soaked nineteenth-century saloon with etched glass doors and signed photographs of old boxers that catered to the last of the local day laborers. The next year Ivan Karp, who’d worked for Leo Castelli for more than a decade, left the diamond belt of Madison Avenue to open his own gallery on West Broadway in a space formerly occupied by a dollmaker. Soon after, Castelli himself opened a SoHo outpost in an old paper warehouse. When he first visited the building, Castelli was just looking for inexpensive storage space, but he soon realized that it could also be used as a showcase for edgier work, including film and performance art. What’s more, the neighborhood’s griminess gave it authenticity. Castelli, an Upper East Sider, didn’t need to be told that rich collectors loved coming downtown to visit artists in their natural habitat.
With the threat of the expressway gone, the battle over the South Houston district turned to zoning. Artists wanted to be able to convert their lofts legally into residential apartments, and public opinion was now on their side. The willy-nilly destruction of New York’s architectural gems over the course of the sixties had galvanized the preservationists, and the charmless brick towers that were now shooting up bore witness to the devastating effect of urban renewal on the cityscape. Urban planners had discovered a new phrase, adaptive reuse.
By the early seventies something else had changed too. A decade earlier, when artists first petitioned the city to allow them to
remain in their lofts, they were an embattled group of brooding bohemians whose manic splatterings meant very little to anyone outside the cloistered art world. But pop art, with its upbeat and accessible imagery, had stoked the interest of a new generation of viewers. Art was now big, bold, American, and the expansive galleries of SoHo, in contrast with the boutiques of Madison Avenue with their miniature European paintings, felt as though they’d been built to accommodate it.
To a city already casting about for ways to shore up its eroding tax base, SoHo’s artistic community was looking more and more like an economic boon. The artists slowly won over City Hall, businessmen, bankers, and New York’s emerging power brokers, the real estate developers. In 1971 loft living was legalized for artists. Two years later the neighborhood was officially declared a landmark district, ensuring that it would forever remain out of harm’s way.
During the middle to late seventies the trickle downtown became a steady stream. The residents of nearby Little Italy feared that wild artists would soon be running through the streets. The transition was in fact considerably more subtle. The smudged, weary-looking men in denim shirts propping up the old mahogany bar at Fanelli’s were, increasingly, no longer day laborers but painters.
To neighborhood nostalgists, these were the glory days. In his book SoHo: The Rise and Fall of an Artists’ Colony, Richard Kostelanetz compared the SoHo of the seventies with a sprawling college campus. To continue the metaphor, the student center was Food, a cooperative restaurant/performance space run by a handful of artists, including the sculptor Gordon Matta-Clark, who famously went on to saw a suburban New Jersey house in two. The college paper was the SoHo Weekly News, which launched in 1973. There were even fraternity pranks disguised as performance art; Kostelanetz remembers one artist commemorating May Day by painting the names of Lenin, Marx, and Trotsky over local street signs.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning_1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City Page 18
