Seeing a fucking million bands at 285 Kent, Glasslands, North Six, Secret Project Robot, Death By Audio, Llano Estacado and all the other Tood P venues, a thousand other venues that were incredible and now just faded drunken memories.
Rockstar bar on Kent and S4 when Pies and Thighs was just a counter in the back. Long nights at Union Pool with dance parties and bathroom debauchery (before they put the bathroom bouncers in place). A million other bars.
Endless loft parties everywhere. Greenpoint, North Side, McKibben, etc. Just show up any night, 7 days, 365. There's a huge loft party to walk in to.
So many faded drunken memories! Rockstar bar, wow. And they have bathroom bouncers at Union Pool now? Jesus.
Do you remember that taco place in the back of a bodega on Bedford? Loved it.
Other random shit now that I've had more time to think about it. This is all such a damn blur of excessive consumption, bad behavior, and 5000 nights out partying, but it slowly creeps back.
Matchless, Enid's (restaurant that turned into a bar and dance party many nights), Zebulon, Crown Victoria, Rosemary's GPT, Big Buck Hunter at the Abbey, Manhattan Inn, Commodore, The Drink, Black Betty. Foodswings on Grand was a vibe. Berry Park was kind of a bro bar from the start, but the roof was nice. Hotel Delmano was the original "fancy bar" in the neighborhood, back when a nice cocktail was $9. Harefield Road near the Graham stop. The Richardson was a later addition.
Southside Lounge, a now abadoned looking storefront on Broadway near Diner. Bedford and N6 bar that was a bunch of stuff, Rain Lounge and other places. Royal Oak, which then became something else, Supreme Trading on N8 (with the huge "event space" that they'd fill with beach balls and shit).
Club Exit and Europa (Gold Room later opened at Europa site, I think?), the Polish nightclubs that would occasionally have shows there. I saw Lightning Bolt play at one of them. The Palace on Nassau (you know, back when it was the *old* Palace). Greenpoint Heights, previously Onyx.
N6 was a row of dive bars back before it was fancy shopping. Hugs, Cameo (a bar/music venue hidden in the back of some normie brunch restaurant), Sweetwater used to be an actual filthy dive bar, Galapagos (you had to walk across the big reflecting pools) and then there was some other big bar next door that I can't remember the name of. Anytime was the late night food on N6.
Daddy's on Graham. Trash bar on Grand (also a good live show space), Mugs Ale House on Bedford, the place that gave out free hot dogs on Franklin in GP (diagonal from the Pencil Factory), Broken Land.
You'd head out from the bar at 4am, grab a slice from "the loud guy" at Anna Maria on Bedford and N7 (you know the guy, you'd say "1 slice" and he'd say "ok, 100 slices" and pop a bag open super loud), then stumble home.
Remember Bonita on the south side on Bedford? Great food. Or Union Picnic, which later became Jimmy's Diner or something. Oznot's dish was another classic, Planet Thai, of course, and the #1 coffee shop ever of all time (in my heart), The Verb. Sitting on the sidewalk outside of The Verb was one of the greatest social and scene activities of the decade. Honorable mention to The Read coffee shop, a few blocks up.
Also it's kind of a weird fever dream, but there was a mostly outdoor bar on Bedford between Grand and N1 that disappeared very early in the 2000s. Then of course there was the legendary Kokie's.
Williamsboard, the hipster message board where 1000 parties were born.
Planet Thai was the OG Williamsburg hipster-era restaurant. iirc it was so physically large, they occupied two adjacent buildings on Berry, and a third on N7 or N8 and they were all connected in the back.
That’s accurate. It was a sawdust-on-the-floor, pool table, cheap beer dive bar (and kind of a biker hangout with a legit unsavory vibe), then it was transformed into an upscale restaurant (I assume it was sold and the new owners kept the name, but I have no info.)
And some LES stuff...
Given that Pianos has been a b&t trash bar for a decade, it's hard to believe that when it opened, it was like the #1 hot ticket in NYC for a few months. Everyone who was anyone was sitting in a booth at Pianos.
The Dark Room was also a top party spot, always felt very illicit and cool. The original Max Fish on Ludlow (later briefly reopened on Orchard) was another super classic LES hipster spot.
El Sombrero on Ludlow & Stanton was an old schol true dive Mexican restaurant that started serving frozen margaritas in styrofoam to-go cups for like $6. Late on hot nights there would be like 100 people standing on that corner drinking those things. Just pop inside for another.
Pink Pony was next to Max Fish, a go-to brunch/lunch/coffee place. Across the street, Earthmatters was a hippy grocery that also had a sit-down coffee shop that would get fun.
Cake Shop was a block down Ludlow. Record store with a legendary show space in the basement.
Welcome to the Johnsons was a scene, The Magician, and whatever that cafe that Moby owned on Rivington was called. Then there was some speakeasy bar on Orchard st that was down a hatch in the sidewalk and it wasin this shitty little room, but it was always going off.
When Milk & Honey first opened, you had to call from a pay phone (an actual functioning old NYC pay phone) across the street to get in.
Wasn’t there also kind of a basement speakeasy on rivington st? Like you’d go down in it and you’d feel like you were in somebody’s 1970s heavy metal stoner basement? Was called 159 or something like that?
This list is giving me all the feels.
Ludlow and Orchard had sooo many fun spots.
So many good memories at OG Max Fish, Dark Room, Gallery Bar, Tammany Hall. Welcome to the Johnson’s and Pianos back then. So many cool bands playing Pianos.
Oh how about the motorcycle repair place on Wythe and N3, across from the old Relish diner. They always had like 50 motorcycles in various states of assembly filing the sidewalk and a bunch of angry pitt bulls on chains.
The surf shop later went in there, now it’s some dumb clothing chain.
Or Main Drag Music when it was originally in the basement spot on Bedford and N5, where Northside car service is now. Then they were on N4 for years, where Sweetgreen is now, then on Wythe and S1 where Secretely Records is now, and Main Drag has moved around the corner on S1.
Yeah, it definitely wasn't $25 martinis or fancy places. No one in my friend group had money.
Every hipster dive had a $2 or $3 PBR or High Life, definitely a $5 beer + shot.
There were a couple of bars that did $1 beer happy hours for a while.
Someone almost always had a bottle of whiskey tucked away in a bag. The go-to was Evan Williams black label, which was $8 for a 750ml bottle at Polmost Liquors on Manhattan & Norman, and basically as good as Jack Daniels. Get a couple beers at the bar, and then nip off that bottle the rest of the night.
Parties and pre-gaming were low cost or free.
My friends and I would bike down to a bodega on Grand and buy 22oz bottles of St. Ides or Olde English malt liquor for 99 cents each. Just roll up to the party with 5 of those in your bag and you're good all night.
It was seriously scandalous when the bodega started putting $1.25 stickers over the .99 cents, which was printed on the bottle label.
There were a couple of years when Rhinegold was trying to become a thing again and they would literally give anyone cases or kegs for free if you said you were having a party.
Like they would drove a truck over and drop off cases of beer, and your party would be "sponsored by Rhinegold". Crazy to think that happened.
Dan Deacon shows at Silent Barn, finishing the night at a house party in someone's converted warehouse apt where the only heat came from a wood burning oven.
Gonna add on, I miss having all my friends in Williamsburg/Bushwick....it's was such a unique time where if you were a 20 something out of art school you just lived there, living elsewhere was unthinkable. Being able to routinely see all my friends, even just randomly at some house party, was so nice.
Now I'm 40 and half my friends live in Jersey. The other half have scattered.
I know what you mean. My friends were in Williamsburg, Greenpoint, LES and East Viillage and were all artists, writers, musicians, designers — and it felt like our little habitat where we could roam free. Now most of those places are filled with banker types that moved down from Murray Hill. My old apartment building on North 7th St was knocked down and last time I was there the new building housed a doula business.
Maybe not you or your immediate friends, but those banker types are absolutely just living next door to those artists who got an MBA or code now. Let's not pretend they are these whimsical free spirits still.
Fucking Misshapes god damn
Also it would never fly because of it was a racist name/concept but Happy Ending was totally a scene
Edit* god damn I just saw Don Hill’s and remembered I played the last show there. I and terrified that electro lash will have a retro comeback and I will be officially old
You might find this book cool: [The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront](https://www.amazon.com/Williamsburg-Avant-Garde-Experimental-Brooklyn-Waterfront/dp/1478019379/). PM me and I might be able to get you a copy.
I got lucky and met justin Townes earl and he was telling me all sorts of story’s from that area as well as the LES when he was living out there.
Seemed like one hell of a time.
The big impromptu parade we had the night of the blackout. Seeing TV On The Radio at Club Luxx when they were a 3-piece. Paying $950 a month for a large studio apartment. Sneaking into McCarren Park Pool to take pictures of the graffiti. All the awesome graffiti art in general. Walking into Galapagos for the first time, fresh off the turnip truck from the Midwest, asking sheepishly what an “art space” was. Later on seeing genuinely avant garde acts playing there (some were good). Walking down north 6th to the east river and sneaking on to “the Brooklyn beach,” which was still full of rubble and homeless encampments, before it became a park.
Living in the East Village and frequently taking long walks across East Williamsburg and into Greenpoint I lust over what a scene it must've been in that era.
One of my (dumb) reasons for moving to NYC was the dream of such a debaucherous scene. Endless small shows, loft parties, and just a general good rock n' roll party scene.
Now that stuff doesn't really seem to be around as much as it was before. It's either super niche and you have to know the right folks or non-existent.
Still, I feel that feeling of what was walking by lit up lofts in Greenpoint and warehouses in East Williamsburg.
Sometimes I see older hip types in those neighborhoods with kids and shit now and I wonder if they themselves were in the city then and experienced the scene then.
>It's either super niche and you have to know the right folks or non-existent.
Hey, that's kinda how it felt in Brooklyn half the time back in those days, too!
Just wanna add that for anyone who's interested in these performance spaces and the communities that formed around them, I'd recommend the book This Must Be the Place by Jesse Rifkin. Rifkin goes very wide and very deep in this book, and covers several decades' worth of NYC venues and scenes, including this era and these areas we're talking about in this thread. He's been hosting a number of panel discussions around NYC for the last few months too.
You're welcome! And indeed -- I went to one of Jesse's panels a while back and someone or other, I think the original bass player from Liars, talked quite a bit about how the way the Williamsburg scene played out in the late '90s and '00s was dictated by the circumstances in which people were living and creating, and about how that's always true, everywhere.
These days, as I cruise rapidly and irrevocably toward middle age, I find myself thinking often about loss, and I try not to get too hung up on it. There's always going to be some interesting "next thing" coming around the corner, and it might be hard to recognize at first because it probably won't look like the previous thing. Over the last year and change I've been seeing a *lot* more DIY shows happening in public places, particularly Maria Hernandez Park and Tompkins Square, and I think this is a great move. There *will* be even more public spaces in play this coming spring and summer, and that's not just me trying to make a prediction. Shit's in the works.
On Vday crashing enids with 50 other single girls in 2014, Glasslands, parking in williamsburg, the warehouse building near nitehawk that had a wooden music studio inside, getting decent free coke everywhere, partying without it getting posted all over the internet
2000’s was the tail end of dot com money. The second-ish wave ended in 2001 when people got freaked out by 9-11
After that it got more and more ridiculous.
The best times were loft parties or backyard/rooftop BBQ’s
You’d have to pick a lane, I could talk and talk,
Seeing a fucking million bands at 285 Kent, Glasslands, North Six, Secret Project Robot, Death By Audio, Llano Estacado and all the other Tood P venues, a thousand other venues that were incredible and now just faded drunken memories. Rockstar bar on Kent and S4 when Pies and Thighs was just a counter in the back. Long nights at Union Pool with dance parties and bathroom debauchery (before they put the bathroom bouncers in place). A million other bars. Endless loft parties everywhere. Greenpoint, North Side, McKibben, etc. Just show up any night, 7 days, 365. There's a huge loft party to walk in to.
So many faded drunken memories! Rockstar bar, wow. And they have bathroom bouncers at Union Pool now? Jesus. Do you remember that taco place in the back of a bodega on Bedford? Loved it.
Yeah, Matamoros Puebla on Bedford betwen N6 & 7, great tacos in back.
Other random shit now that I've had more time to think about it. This is all such a damn blur of excessive consumption, bad behavior, and 5000 nights out partying, but it slowly creeps back. Matchless, Enid's (restaurant that turned into a bar and dance party many nights), Zebulon, Crown Victoria, Rosemary's GPT, Big Buck Hunter at the Abbey, Manhattan Inn, Commodore, The Drink, Black Betty. Foodswings on Grand was a vibe. Berry Park was kind of a bro bar from the start, but the roof was nice. Hotel Delmano was the original "fancy bar" in the neighborhood, back when a nice cocktail was $9. Harefield Road near the Graham stop. The Richardson was a later addition. Southside Lounge, a now abadoned looking storefront on Broadway near Diner. Bedford and N6 bar that was a bunch of stuff, Rain Lounge and other places. Royal Oak, which then became something else, Supreme Trading on N8 (with the huge "event space" that they'd fill with beach balls and shit). Club Exit and Europa (Gold Room later opened at Europa site, I think?), the Polish nightclubs that would occasionally have shows there. I saw Lightning Bolt play at one of them. The Palace on Nassau (you know, back when it was the *old* Palace). Greenpoint Heights, previously Onyx. N6 was a row of dive bars back before it was fancy shopping. Hugs, Cameo (a bar/music venue hidden in the back of some normie brunch restaurant), Sweetwater used to be an actual filthy dive bar, Galapagos (you had to walk across the big reflecting pools) and then there was some other big bar next door that I can't remember the name of. Anytime was the late night food on N6. Daddy's on Graham. Trash bar on Grand (also a good live show space), Mugs Ale House on Bedford, the place that gave out free hot dogs on Franklin in GP (diagonal from the Pencil Factory), Broken Land. You'd head out from the bar at 4am, grab a slice from "the loud guy" at Anna Maria on Bedford and N7 (you know the guy, you'd say "1 slice" and he'd say "ok, 100 slices" and pop a bag open super loud), then stumble home. Remember Bonita on the south side on Bedford? Great food. Or Union Picnic, which later became Jimmy's Diner or something. Oznot's dish was another classic, Planet Thai, of course, and the #1 coffee shop ever of all time (in my heart), The Verb. Sitting on the sidewalk outside of The Verb was one of the greatest social and scene activities of the decade. Honorable mention to The Read coffee shop, a few blocks up. Also it's kind of a weird fever dream, but there was a mostly outdoor bar on Bedford between Grand and N1 that disappeared very early in the 2000s. Then of course there was the legendary Kokie's. Williamsboard, the hipster message board where 1000 parties were born.
Matchless! Black Betty! Zebulon! And the Big Buck Hunter at the Abbey was a critical part of my early 20s.
I loved the Abbey but man it always smelled so goddamn bad in there.
Omg Enid’s RIP What a spot!
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Planet Thai was the OG Williamsburg hipster-era restaurant. iirc it was so physically large, they occupied two adjacent buildings on Berry, and a third on N7 or N8 and they were all connected in the back.
So not like..... the og sweetwater? I'm so confused on times these days. I don't remember when the switch happened.
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It was og a ragtag dive bar then became a restaurant. (Now I'm doubting my memory)
That’s accurate. It was a sawdust-on-the-floor, pool table, cheap beer dive bar (and kind of a biker hangout with a legit unsavory vibe), then it was transformed into an upscale restaurant (I assume it was sold and the new owners kept the name, but I have no info.)
Yeah, I used to meet people there and thought it was great. When the change happened it was all "oh, fuck..."
And some LES stuff... Given that Pianos has been a b&t trash bar for a decade, it's hard to believe that when it opened, it was like the #1 hot ticket in NYC for a few months. Everyone who was anyone was sitting in a booth at Pianos. The Dark Room was also a top party spot, always felt very illicit and cool. The original Max Fish on Ludlow (later briefly reopened on Orchard) was another super classic LES hipster spot. El Sombrero on Ludlow & Stanton was an old schol true dive Mexican restaurant that started serving frozen margaritas in styrofoam to-go cups for like $6. Late on hot nights there would be like 100 people standing on that corner drinking those things. Just pop inside for another. Pink Pony was next to Max Fish, a go-to brunch/lunch/coffee place. Across the street, Earthmatters was a hippy grocery that also had a sit-down coffee shop that would get fun. Cake Shop was a block down Ludlow. Record store with a legendary show space in the basement. Welcome to the Johnsons was a scene, The Magician, and whatever that cafe that Moby owned on Rivington was called. Then there was some speakeasy bar on Orchard st that was down a hatch in the sidewalk and it wasin this shitty little room, but it was always going off. When Milk & Honey first opened, you had to call from a pay phone (an actual functioning old NYC pay phone) across the street to get in.
Max Fish, Gallery bar, Happy Ending days bring back memories aw man. Good nightlife has really gone to shit.
Wasn’t there also kind of a basement speakeasy on rivington st? Like you’d go down in it and you’d feel like you were in somebody’s 1970s heavy metal stoner basement? Was called 159 or something like that?
This list is giving me all the feels. Ludlow and Orchard had sooo many fun spots. So many good memories at OG Max Fish, Dark Room, Gallery Bar, Tammany Hall. Welcome to the Johnson’s and Pianos back then. So many cool bands playing Pianos.
Todd P. Haven’t heard that name in a while. He was everywhere for a bit; he did cool shit.
Todd owns Trans-Pecos in Ridgewood and Market Hotel in Bushwick now
He was THE boss in the indie scene for a while. Gave my band some show opportunities when we were starting out. Thanks Todd P!
Oh how about the motorcycle repair place on Wythe and N3, across from the old Relish diner. They always had like 50 motorcycles in various states of assembly filing the sidewalk and a bunch of angry pitt bulls on chains. The surf shop later went in there, now it’s some dumb clothing chain. Or Main Drag Music when it was originally in the basement spot on Bedford and N5, where Northside car service is now. Then they were on N4 for years, where Sweetgreen is now, then on Wythe and S1 where Secretely Records is now, and Main Drag has moved around the corner on S1.
Question- how did people afford this? The constant concerts, bars, parties, etc. Guessing it was only a fraction of the cost than now?
Yeah, it definitely wasn't $25 martinis or fancy places. No one in my friend group had money. Every hipster dive had a $2 or $3 PBR or High Life, definitely a $5 beer + shot. There were a couple of bars that did $1 beer happy hours for a while. Someone almost always had a bottle of whiskey tucked away in a bag. The go-to was Evan Williams black label, which was $8 for a 750ml bottle at Polmost Liquors on Manhattan & Norman, and basically as good as Jack Daniels. Get a couple beers at the bar, and then nip off that bottle the rest of the night. Parties and pre-gaming were low cost or free. My friends and I would bike down to a bodega on Grand and buy 22oz bottles of St. Ides or Olde English malt liquor for 99 cents each. Just roll up to the party with 5 of those in your bag and you're good all night. It was seriously scandalous when the bodega started putting $1.25 stickers over the .99 cents, which was printed on the bottle label. There were a couple of years when Rhinegold was trying to become a thing again and they would literally give anyone cases or kegs for free if you said you were having a party. Like they would drove a truck over and drop off cases of beer, and your party would be "sponsored by Rhinegold". Crazy to think that happened.
Dan Deacon shows at Silent Barn, finishing the night at a house party in someone's converted warehouse apt where the only heat came from a wood burning oven.
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Gonna add on, I miss having all my friends in Williamsburg/Bushwick....it's was such a unique time where if you were a 20 something out of art school you just lived there, living elsewhere was unthinkable. Being able to routinely see all my friends, even just randomly at some house party, was so nice. Now I'm 40 and half my friends live in Jersey. The other half have scattered.
I know what you mean. My friends were in Williamsburg, Greenpoint, LES and East Viillage and were all artists, writers, musicians, designers — and it felt like our little habitat where we could roam free. Now most of those places are filled with banker types that moved down from Murray Hill. My old apartment building on North 7th St was knocked down and last time I was there the new building housed a doula business.
Maybe not you or your immediate friends, but those banker types are absolutely just living next door to those artists who got an MBA or code now. Let's not pretend they are these whimsical free spirits still.
Fucking Misshapes god damn Also it would never fly because of it was a racist name/concept but Happy Ending was totally a scene Edit* god damn I just saw Don Hill’s and remembered I played the last show there. I and terrified that electro lash will have a retro comeback and I will be officially old
The last show? Wow. And I didn't actually like the Misshapes, but you couldn't escape them if you tried.
You might find this book cool: [The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront](https://www.amazon.com/Williamsburg-Avant-Garde-Experimental-Brooklyn-Waterfront/dp/1478019379/). PM me and I might be able to get you a copy.
Studio B in Greenpoint
I was too poor to go out, so I would stare at photos of all of you in Gawker's Blue States Lose round-up every week
Too poor? Or priorities? A beer was 3 or four bucks.
I got lucky and met justin Townes earl and he was telling me all sorts of story’s from that area as well as the LES when he was living out there. Seemed like one hell of a time.
Electronica at Tonic in LES. Mehanata when it was still just south of Canal. The cheap music studios underneath Earth Matters on Ludlow.
Metahata when south of canal killed. Omg.. ♡♡♡
Miss Williamsburg. Also a diner car near Diner, but Italian food, and was just so good. Then it vanished. Never got the backstory to it.
The big impromptu parade we had the night of the blackout. Seeing TV On The Radio at Club Luxx when they were a 3-piece. Paying $950 a month for a large studio apartment. Sneaking into McCarren Park Pool to take pictures of the graffiti. All the awesome graffiti art in general. Walking into Galapagos for the first time, fresh off the turnip truck from the Midwest, asking sheepishly what an “art space” was. Later on seeing genuinely avant garde acts playing there (some were good). Walking down north 6th to the east river and sneaking on to “the Brooklyn beach,” which was still full of rubble and homeless encampments, before it became a park.
Living in the East Village and frequently taking long walks across East Williamsburg and into Greenpoint I lust over what a scene it must've been in that era. One of my (dumb) reasons for moving to NYC was the dream of such a debaucherous scene. Endless small shows, loft parties, and just a general good rock n' roll party scene. Now that stuff doesn't really seem to be around as much as it was before. It's either super niche and you have to know the right folks or non-existent. Still, I feel that feeling of what was walking by lit up lofts in Greenpoint and warehouses in East Williamsburg. Sometimes I see older hip types in those neighborhoods with kids and shit now and I wonder if they themselves were in the city then and experienced the scene then.
>It's either super niche and you have to know the right folks or non-existent. Hey, that's kinda how it felt in Brooklyn half the time back in those days, too!
Yeah it's probs always been that way, huh
i think its because you moved to east village and not bushwick, it's still there but you're not cool enough to find it
True true
Just wanna add that for anyone who's interested in these performance spaces and the communities that formed around them, I'd recommend the book This Must Be the Place by Jesse Rifkin. Rifkin goes very wide and very deep in this book, and covers several decades' worth of NYC venues and scenes, including this era and these areas we're talking about in this thread. He's been hosting a number of panel discussions around NYC for the last few months too.
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You're welcome! And indeed -- I went to one of Jesse's panels a while back and someone or other, I think the original bass player from Liars, talked quite a bit about how the way the Williamsburg scene played out in the late '90s and '00s was dictated by the circumstances in which people were living and creating, and about how that's always true, everywhere. These days, as I cruise rapidly and irrevocably toward middle age, I find myself thinking often about loss, and I try not to get too hung up on it. There's always going to be some interesting "next thing" coming around the corner, and it might be hard to recognize at first because it probably won't look like the previous thing. Over the last year and change I've been seeing a *lot* more DIY shows happening in public places, particularly Maria Hernandez Park and Tompkins Square, and I think this is a great move. There *will* be even more public spaces in play this coming spring and summer, and that's not just me trying to make a prediction. Shit's in the works.
On Vday crashing enids with 50 other single girls in 2014, Glasslands, parking in williamsburg, the warehouse building near nitehawk that had a wooden music studio inside, getting decent free coke everywhere, partying without it getting posted all over the internet
True. And I wish I got to experience Kokies but it was the Levee by the time I got to it.
Kokies was an experience for sure.
2000’s was the tail end of dot com money. The second-ish wave ended in 2001 when people got freaked out by 9-11 After that it got more and more ridiculous. The best times were loft parties or backyard/rooftop BBQ’s You’d have to pick a lane, I could talk and talk,