The innocuous-looking apartment building at 226 East 13th Street, between Second and Third Avenues, may raise few eyebrows now. But on February 8, 1976, the building became synonymous in the popular imagination with drugs, prostitution, runaways, murder and mayhem, steeped in the urban decay which many saw as defining New York City in the 1970’s.
On March 30, 1974, the Ramones played their very first public performance. The Ramones are of course considered the inventors of punk rock, as well as the ultimate downtown band and the embodiment of the CBGB’s scene. The Ramones’ lightning-fast performances rarely lasted more than a few minutes.
The wedding of John Wojtowicz and Ernest Aron (later Elizabeth Eden). On August 22, 1972, what may be the most legendary bank robbery in New York City history took place. And it had some interesting Village connections. On that sweltering August day, John Wojtowicz, Salvatore Naturile, and Robert Westenberg entered a bank on the […]
It’s been over four years since the original It Happened Here: 80’s Music Videos graced the pages of Off The Grid. But like all good sequels, this one hopes to be worth the wait. These last dog days of summer often make one think of their misspent youth; and what better way to see how much […]
We have two great birthdays in the world of punk to mark. The two celebrants straddle the East and West Village, and both sides of the Atlantic.
The Ramones sprung onto the scene in mid-1974, revolutionizing rock music and performance by reinjecting energy, simplicity, and humor into a genre which had become increasingly serious, self-important, and bloated. In the midst of presidential scandals and resignations, urban decay, and disintegrating social fabric, the Ramones called for a new order based upon three chords, […]
…well, it almost happened that way. The Village and East Village have historically been home to all sorts of strange bedfellows. Today we look at one of the most unusual such pairings, two people whose paths crossed just around the corner from our offices at 208 East 13th Street. 208 East 13th Street is a […]
On February 24th, 1975, Led Zeppelin’s double studio album Physical Graffiti was unleashed upon the world. The band’s second most commercially successful album, it went sixteen times platinum in the United States, and spawned such classics as Trampled Under Foot, Boogie With Stu, and the east-meets-west magnum opus, Kashmir. The monster album also emerged roughly […]
Breakfast at Tiffany’s, one of the defining movies of the 1960’s, and defining movies about New York, was released on October 5, 1961. Long skinny black dresses were never the same again. It’s often understandably assumed that Holly Golightly and Paul Varjack lived in the Village, as the cast of unconventional characters which populated their […]
On December 4th, 1971, John Stanley Wojtowicz married Ernest Aron in Greenwich Village, in what Mr. Wojtowicz described as a Roman Catholic ceremony. This event might be considered noteworthy for taking place nearly four decades before the legalization of gay marriage in New York, and decades before the now ubiquitous debates about, and demand for, equal […]
We’re always on the lookout for album covers shot in the Village, East Village, or NoHo. Many of the great album covers of the last half century were shot on our streets, so you might say it’s a bit of a preoccupation of ours (see prior post, “It Happened Here: Album Covers“). So imagine our […]
On July 9, 1962, Bob Dylan recorded “Blowin’ In the Wind,” a song destined to become an anthem for a generation, and for the transformative civil rights and peace movements. Dylan is said to have written “Blowin’ In the Wind” at the Fat Black Pussycat Theater on Minetta Street, and first performed it at Gerde’s […]
We here at GVSHP spend a great deal of time pouring over archival records and buildings department files to document the history of our neighborhoods — when buildings went up, when they came down, how they once looked, how they changed, etc. (click HERE to learn more). However, a less dusty (and frankly more fun) […]
The Brooklyn-born, Long Island-raised, Queens College-educated comedian Jerry Seinfeld was born on April 29, 1954. While no doubt many Off the Grid readers are Seinfeld fans, the following day is another Seinfeld anniversary which strikes even a little nearer and dearer to the heart of this blog.
Today is the 200th anniversary of the official adoption of the Manhattan street grid, an event of enormous importance to New York as a whole, and in a slightly different way, to neighborhoods like the Village, East Village, and NoHo, which have remained in large part defiantly “off the grid.” Perhaps one of the most […]
The Village and East Village have long been the home of music-makers and music venues; their streets and sites on more than one occasion the inspiration for song-writers and the subject of many a song line. But perhaps nothing has imprinted an image of these neighborhoods in the popular music-consuming consciousness in the same way as their depiction on the […]
The innocuous-looking apartment building at 226 East 13th Street, between Second and Third Avenues, may raise few eyebrows now. But on February 8, 1976, the building became synonymous in the popular imagination with drugs, prostitution, runaways, murder and mayhem, steeped in the urban decay which many saw as defining New York City in the 1970’s.
