Following my recent post about
the Hells Angels, a reader sent along the following photo ...
...when the Angels were presenting shows at the Anderson Theatre at 66 Second Avenue.
The reader also included a link to the site
It's All the Streets you Crossed Not So Long Ago... there, the author lays out a fairly exhaustive history of 66 Second Avenue, which is between Fourth Street and Third Street... You can read the whole history there...
A few highlights though... The theatre likely began its life as a Yiddish Playhouse in the late 1800s-early 1900s... in the late 1960s and '70s, it functioned as a rock venue where everyone from Moby Grape, Procol Harum and the Yardbirds played.
Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company had their New York debut there on February 17, 1968 — look who else was on the bill: B.B. King.
Her post on the Anderson has a gazillion links and photos (some of which I reposted here) ... Far too many to try to mention here... find it all
here.
Oh, one last thing. Hilly Kristal ran the CBGB Theater here from late 1977 to early 1978, she notes. The Talking Heads christened the CBGB Theater, followed by shows featuring the Dictators, the Dead Boys and Patti Smith. Here's one description of the CBGB Theater: "The place was disgusting.
It made the CBGB club look like the Rainbow Room. We were talking about eighty years' worth of dirt. I mean there was popcorn left over from the last performance of the Yiddish theater in 1925...They did manage to clean up the entryway, and made it look like a subway station."
Anyway, find this and a whole lot more interesting posts on NYC's former rock & roll landmarks at
It's All the Streets you Crossed Not So Long Ago.
And 66 Second Avenue today.
Previously on EV Grieve:
The Loew's Commodore Theatre
