Welcome to the Neighborhood: Baker Falls, 101 Avenue A
Today we welcome a new small business to our neighborhoods — help us welcome the next. Tell us which new independent store in Greenwich Village, the East Village, or NoHo you’re excited about by emailing us at info@villagepreservation.org.
As advocates for local small business, we find great satisfaction in hearing of new independent establishments opening in our neighborhoods. These arrivals give us hope that reports of the death of mom-and-pops have been greatly exaggerated. Whenever such occasions present themselves, we like to share our enthusiasm with the world in the hopes that others will join us in wishing our new neighbors a warm welcome, and more tangibly, patronize and spread the word to help ensure their success and survival.
Reports of the death of downtown cool have been greatly exaggerated. Just ask Nick Bodor, a serial nightlife East Village entrepreneur who, for his latest act, has launched a compelling, multi-purpose gathering space at one of the most storied performance locations in the neighborhood. Today, we welcome to the neighborhood (and to 101 Avenue A) Baker Falls, where you can find exciting live performances, great coffee, unique t-shirts, affordable beer, and a social scene that is somehow at once hip and welcoming.
The address 101 Avenue A should ring a bell for longtime East Village habitués, and for good reason. The history of this building as a gathering venue dates back a century and a half!. It first served as a beer hall and place of assembly to local residents, who, at the time, were mostly German. During the 1960s, the space became a jazz club called East Village that showcased major musicians, such as Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, the Booker Ervin Quartet, and the Lee Morgan Quintet. (Nico, of Velvet Underground fame, lived in the building during this period). In 1973, the venue relaunched as Jazzboat under the co-ownership of Aziz Latif, a member of Duke Ellington’s band, and started to also feature more avant garde jazz musicians like Joe Henderson and Artie Shepp. When Jazzobat closed, the Pyramid Club took its palace and went on to achieve great renown as a hotbed of the 1980s counter-cultural scene. Pop musicians as diverse as Cyndi Lauper, RuPaul, Sonic Youth, They Might be Giants, Nirvana, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers performed there early in their careers. Prominent artists frequented its evenings of performance art, cabaret, and dancing. The club not only pioneered drag shows, but inadvertently gave rise to annual Wigstock drag festival when a performance spontaneously spilled out onto the Tompkins Square Park. Village Preservation has a special relationship to this location, as we proposed and successfully fought for landmark designation of the site, as well as secured a groundbreaking ruling of eligibility for its inclusion in the State and National Registers of Historic Places.
The Pyramid Club shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic and its post-pandemic re-launch proved short-lived. And so, into this legacy steps Nick Bodor with the idea of creating a community-oriented performance venue that will follow in the footsteps of its predecessors.
East Village regulars unacquainted with Nick Bodor—himself a longtime resident—are nonetheless likely familiar with his work. He has been the force behind several notable local venues over the past thirty years. Nick’s love affair with the neighborhood, however, goes back even further than that. As a teenager, he would come down from his hometown of Bridgeport, Connecticut to check out concerts at local clubs. At the time, and all the way through college, he worked at a working-class restaurant that inspired in him the idea of opening his own place. According to his back-of-the-envelope adolescent calculations, it would take him ten years to do so. As it turns out, Nick moved to a railroad apartment in the East Village shortly after college and managed to meet that deadline with time to spare. Led by his newfound interest in coffee culture, he took a job at one of the first specialized coffee shops in the city. A couple of years later, when he noticed a “for rent” sign at a long vacant storefront next to Doc Holliday’s (141 Avenue A), he decided to make his move and launch his own specialized coffee place, alt.coffee. This casual internet cafe opened its doors in 1995, before internet cafes were a thing, and remained in operation for years after they stopped being one. Not long after opening alt.cafe, Nick launched the Library (7 Avenue A), a beloved dive bar with an awesome jukebox that recently reached its quarter century mark. And then, some years after that, he opened Cake Shop, a cutting edge rock venue in the Lower East Side that featured bands like Vampire Weekend, MGMT, and Dirty Projectors back when only their mothers had heard of them.
Cake Shop and alt.coffee both lasted over a decade before rising rents led to their closing. This left Nick with a hankering to open a new venue that might fill the gap left behind by the departure of these establishments. This desire came to a head during the pandemic, which called attention the often overlooked importance of in-person encounters. Nick was still toying with several alternatives when he learned that the Pyramid Club would be shutting down. Tantalized by the possibility of building on the venue’s legacy and of invigorating the East Village cultural scene, he set out to find a partner to take over the space and found an ideal one in another iconic institution with its own long history in the neighborhood, the Knitting Factory.
The original Knitting Factory opened in 1987 at 47 East Houston Street as a hybrid space for art exhibitions and performance, with an emphasis on experimental music. It subsequently decamped to a larger space in TriBeCa, where it featured a wider variety of musical acts, and then later on to Williamsburg, where it was mired in difficult rent negotiations when Nick came calling. Knitting Factory’s CEO Morgan Morgalis, who himself had grown up in the East Village and had fond memories of the Pyramid Club, jumped at the possibility of a homecoming. It was an ideal partnership. The Knitting Factory, which didn’t want to operate a space, got in Nick someone with the vision, experience, and wherewithal to run an exciting venue; and Nick got in return financial backing and a substantial capacity to book touring bands and thereby complement his own reach with local musicians and performers.
Baker Falls has opened in phases, and several of Nick’s ideas remain a work in progress. But already, his vision for the space is in full display. Several elements recall alt.coffee and Cake Shop. In fact, among Nick’s ongoing tasks has been figuring out a way for various aspects of the space to function concurrently. The front of the venue looks and operates like a classic New York bar, dark and oriented toward a long counter. But it’s also open all day and doubles as a coffee shop, which are typically bright spaces where people lounge in scattered fashion. For now, these tensions are resolved temporally. During the day, you get amazing (Aficionado) coffee and sandwiches there. At 5:00pm, you get happy hour drinks at the “the soundcheck cafe,” which is to say, at a bar from which you can eavesdrop on the performers’ preparations.
Past the cafe/bar, a former coat check booth serves as a mini-retail shop, selling a rotating and eclectic selection of merchandise, like limited-edition artist t-shirts and artisan crafted guitar straps. It’s also where bands sell their merchandise (from which the venue takes no cut).
Beyond this booth lies the main stage area, ready to accommodate all manner of performance. During its few months in operation, it has featured a wide range of concerts, a makers fair, a book reading, and several kinds of theatrical shows. Standouts have included a comedy piece about mental illness (John F O’Donnell’s I’m on Lithium), a return performance by 1980s Pyramid Club veterans Modern English, and a Pyramid homecoming, an extravaganza that featured performances by other alumni of the legendary club.
The downstairs, the aptly named Fever Dream Lounge, was designed by Deb Parker with the same eye for theatrical tableaus and evocative arcana on evidence in her work at classical local venues like the late Barmacy and the Beauty Bar.
This Victorian-styled space, which would not look out of place in the Grey Gardens house or in an Edward Gorey strip, hosts more intimate performances of various kinds (recent shows have included an anti-folk concert, a comedy show, and a psycho-sexual drama). But it is just as ideally suited for assorted gatherings as well as for just nursing a drink, getting lost in the furnishings, and forgetting contemporary life.
Baker Falls is well on its way to realizing Nick’s bold vision of a multi-generational space that will serve the downtown artistic community and allow people to do “pretty much anything you can think of in a brick and mortar establishment.” The venue owes its burgeoning success to Nick’s management approach, a paradoxical admixture of faith in happenstance and clarity of vision. On the one hand, past achievements have made him comfortable trusting his gut when deciding what programming and design will appeal to diverse crowds. On the other hand, having drawn those crowds into Baker Falls, he’s happy to let what happens happen, confident that something exciting probably will.
Come check out what’s happening at Baker Falls and say hi to our enterprising neighbors Nick and his son and collaborator Angus.
(Note that main-stage performances are currently on hold while they install more soundproofing. Baker Falls will, however, resume in full force in the fall).
If you would like us to welcome another independent business to the neighborhood, please let us know at info@villagepreservation.org.
