We are planning to be open for business there by the first week of January 2009, if not sooner.
We will be focusing even more on our mail-order/web sales at this new location, but we will have a new 'hours of operation' schedule so all our cherished NY and global customers can visit - and one can always call and ask about visiting at other times if those hours do not accommodate one's schedule for a visit when traveling to/through New York City.
Bruce Gallanter and Manny Maris defy all the snooty stereotypes surrounding record store clerks. Since opening their shop, Downtown Music Gallery (DMG) in May of 1991, the two have fostered an open, inviting atmosphere in their scruffy little record store on the Bowery. Both typical, Village shop and anachronism, co-proprietors Gallanter and Maris have created a modern-day salon, one that sustains imaginative artists who are largely ignored by the mainstream music industry.
From the outside, the landmark Metro Theater on Broadway, an Art Deco jewel box between 99th and 100th Streets, looks almost as exquisite as it must have in the 1930s, when movies were still known as “photoplays,” though no photo has played there for two years.
But the inside, visible to passers-by on a recent afternoon, has been gutted. Gone are seats and plaster and curtains and screen. Gone is a golden ceiling molding with a chain of floral bouquets. Gone are the sylph-filled niches. Gone is grillework that sprouted like corn stalks.
The Midtown, designed by the architecture firm of Boak & Paris, opened in 1933. From 1948 through April 1972, it was part of the Brandt circuit, featuring sub-run foreign and independent fare starting in the 1950s. It exhibited films such as Belle de Jour, Shame (and just about every other Bergman movie), Breathless, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Repulsion, L’Avventura, Straw Dogs, and Gimme Shelter, though never in exclusive engagements. After Brandt's management, it operated as an adult film venue.
Like so many other stalwart-but-doomed Manhattan holdouts that have lost their leases under the pressure of gentrification, the Emerald — as its habitués call it — was scheduled to close at the end of April; its rent was to more than double.
But the watering hole . . . has won a two-year lease extension thanks to “the whole down economy, where they can’t find a tenant who will pay that much,” said Mike Campbell, 77, the Emerald’s owner.
Indeed, the reprieve “has to do with the economy — and the kind of people the Campbells are,” said Mike Clarke, an owner of the A. J. Clarke Real Estate Corporation, which manages the five-story apartment building in which the Emerald resides. Mr. Campbell’s son Charlie, 49, manages the bar.
Mike Campbell’s father (also Mike) opened the Emerald with his brother William. “Exactly when, we’re not sure, but it was 1943 or 1944,” Charlie Campbell said.
The Emerald has been an enduring link to the West Side’s raffish past, when Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues were populated by gin mills and where brawls among patrons, enthusiastically mediated by bruiser bartenders, were not unusual.
“We were called Spanish Harlem until the ’60s, when they put in Lincoln Center,” said Charlie Campbell. In recent decades, the clientele has gone upscale, to professionals who can afford Upper West Side housing, along with a sprinkling of loyal locals, some of them survivors of the era when “West Side Story” was a contemporary narrative.
Stefan was old the first time I went in there back in the '70s, and he was older still when the Redhead and I lived a few blocks away on Avenue A during the early '90s. When I went there last week, it mostly to see whether the place still existed and, if it did, fully expecting to hear the particulars of Stefan's passing.
So I was surprised when I walked through the door and saw him there, weighing a lot less and not even bothering to put in his lower dentures anymore, but still standing behind his bar and still irritable.
"What do you want?" he asked.
The place wasn't overtly literary in the sense of the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas suffered his killing seizure after a drinking bout, or the Lion's Head, where Mailer, Hamill, McCourt and Kennedy drank and fought and preened in front of barmaid Jessica Lange, but like many Manhattan dives the Holiday Lounge had its writers.
For years Allen Ginsberg had a large apartment in a building almost directly across the street, and he and other Beat writers like Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Herbert Huncke spent considerable time with the bookies, dope dealers, working girls and alcoholics for whom the Holiday was a second home.
When I mentioned them, Stefan cheered a bit.
"Ginsberg, Kerouac, yes. But Auden, Auden always sat right there, under the window. He lived in the house next door. And when the war was ended, after that, he came in one afternoon and said he was going to Vienna. He had a villa in Vienna."
The East Village isn't what it used to be, not 60 years ago or even 10. The writers and artists and musicians are gone, replaced by young Wall Street brokers, trust fund babies and Manhattan real estate speculators as rents have skyrocketed.
Likewise gone, and to who knows where, are the bums, and what was once the most wonderfully diverse neighborhood in the city has now become predictably and boringly white and middle class.
Cell phones glued to their ears, they walk their stupid dogs or ride bicycles on the sidewalk. Inside the living organism that is New York, art takes a back seat to commerce, no matter what they tell you.
