NYC Clubs in Flux

(Above: Bruce Springsteen onstage at The Bottom Line, 1975. Photo by Peter Cunningham.)

From opening night in February 1974 until the day the club shuttered—just three weeks shy of its 30th anniversary—the operators of New York’s storied Bottom Line nightclub prided themselves on running a venue entirely devoted to and respectful of music and the people who make it.

In recent years, they were especially proud to offer a space in which veteran artists could retain dignity, despite being past their prime and playing to smaller audiences for less money.

Yet all this mattered little in the years after 9/11, when business suffered and the club’s longtime landlord, New York University, appointed an unsympathetic new president who was unfazed by the club’s rich legacy and eager to convert the space into a lecture hall. Decades earlier, NYU had quite openly used The Bottom Line as a tool for recruiting students to its once sketchy Greenwich Village neighborhood. How couldn’t they? In its first year alone, Springsteen, Stevie Wonder and Miles Davis all played the club.

But much has changed since then: Manhattan real estate—particularly downtown—began to soar in the ’90s and remains stratospheric. The once industrial stretch of Broadway, just a block away, is now dotted with shoe and record stores, Starbucks and fast -food joints. In 2003, the market value of The Bottom Line’s monthly rent was $22,000, twice what the club was paying. So after negotiations between the club and the school broke down, The Bottom Line was squeezed out, closing on a cold January afternoon in 2004 without a proper sendoff.

Co-founder Allan Pepper remembers saying goodbye to staffers, snapping a few final photos and making one last walkthrough, as an NYU official stood nearby with a locksmith waiting for Pepper to turn over the keys. One final indignity, he thought. “But as I’m leaving—my wife was waiting in the car, because she couldn’t bear to go in—the locksmith turned to me as he was changing the locks and said, ‘I can’t f—in’ believe they’re doing this to you.’”

He wasn’t alone. It’s an increasingly popular sentiment among New York music buffs, as the story of The Bottom Line has continued to repeat itself across lower Manhattan in recent years. One by one, some of Gotham’s most treasured rock clubs are disappearing, picked off by skyrocketing rents, gentrification of once scuzzy neighborhoods, and/or bizarrely unique landlord battles.

TRUCKSTOP NYC?
Since 9/11, eclectic jamband haven Wetlands and subterranean singer/songwriter godsend Fez have both bit the dust. And, perhaps most shockingly, CBGB, the very birthplace of punk rock, has—after a long public battle—agreed to leave its historic address on the Bowery this October. Yet, instead of being transformed into condos like Wetlands, CBGB’s space is being taken over by its landlord, a nonprofit homeless organization who wanted to double the venue’s monthly rent to $40,000.

To be sure, on any given night, there remain more opportunities to see live music in New York than in just about any city in the country, even with the turnover that’s always existed to some extent on the nightclub scene. But, in recent years, ticket and cover prices haven’t climbed in step with rents, and rooms generally regarded as institutions are falling prey to not only rising rents but the corporatization of New York, notes one of downtown’s favorite sons, singer/songwriter Jesse Malin.

“It used to be like New York was different than the rest of the country and the rest of the world—and that’s why people came here,” he says. “Now it’s starting to look like every truckstop I hit on the road.” In recent years, Malin himself saw his own club, Coney Island High, shut down after a long, Footloose-like fight with the city over its antiquated cabaret laws, which—no kidding—forbid dancing in bars.

What’s being lost, says Malin, is the midsize room. “And those have always been the most fun clubs to see people at, for me—places where the band could put on a show, but it could still be intimate.”

NICHE ROOMS: RIP
Opportunity for both musicians and fans is also on the chopping block, says promoter and former Wetlands owner Peter Shapiro. “Each of these clubs had its own identity, and was known for being a home for a certain type of music,” he says. “And it’s easier for a band when they can play a club that has an identity and an ethos, and they can play the club their first time through New York that fits their ethos. The Bowery Ballroom doesn’t really have an ethos as much as it is a great room, with great sightlines. But when you play there, you gotta sell tickets.”

In recent years, venues have sprung up in rising areas in Brooklyn, where the financial risk, while still high, is less forbidding. And both Pepper and CBGB owner Hilly Kristal are looking throughout Manhattan—not just downtown—for new rooms where they can reopen. Additionally, Kristal is even in negotiations to open a CBGB club in Las Vegas.

New York is full of rock ’n’ roll ghosts. There’s the deli where Max’s Kansas City used to be, and the NYU residence hall that replaced the Palladium. With each new closure, more and more sentimental rock fans stroll down the sidewalks thinking, “I saw The Ramones there,” or “That’s where I saw The Velvet Underground.”

The corner of West 4th and Mercer Streets, the former home of the Bottom Line, is now one of those places. “I can’t tell you how many people have told me that they can’t walk down that block, or if they were in that area, they would walk a block around it so that they didn’t have to pass it,” says Pepper.

In the days before NYU gutted the club to erect a lecture hall with shiny chairs and stadium-seating, the Bottom Line marquee remained on the exterior wall, carrying a simple goodbye message from Pepper and co-founder Stanley Snadowsky—it was a reminder of something that the former says some in New York have forgotten: “Live Music Matters.”

THE SECOND GENERATION (sidebar):
As some of downtown New York’s most storied and/or eclectic rooms fall victim to higher rents and gentrification, the less historic but favored second generation of Gotham rock clubs stands strong:

The Knitting Factory: Opened on Houston in ‘87 before moving further downtown, where it was nearly shuttered in the wake of 9/11. A champion of the underdog and the eclectic. At one point, Soul Coughing’s Mike Doughty worked the door here.

The Bowery Ballroom: In a 76-year-old building, the Bowery Ballroom boasts impeccable sightlines and a warm vibe. Opened in 1997.

Joe’s Pub: One of the smallest, classiest and most diverse rooms in the city. Opened in 1998.

Webster Hall: This venue transformed from historic ‘80s titan The Ritz to a lame hangout for suburban commuters. But now it’s back in the live-music game.

The Living Room: The room that Norah built is a Lower East Side treasure and more important than ever for singer/songwriters.