How the New York Dolls residency at the Mercer Arts Center changed New York
In the 1960s, New York City’s countercultural crowd buzzed around a few select places. They gathered at Max’s Kansas City, where Debbie Harry was a waitress and rockstar in waiting. They lived at the Hotel Chelsea. They partied at Andy Warhol’s Factory, where the rock and rollers merged with the art world. But after Warhol was shot and shut his doors and when rock and roll began to give way to something rougher, the city was left in a void that only one rusty old venue could fill. When the New York Dolls set up shop at the Mercer Art Centre, the city changed forever.
The movement from rock and roll into punk is one that could be studied for decades. It’s a fascinating thing as the music clearly followed along with the social, economic and political state of its world. While the 1960s is often remembered for its sense of freedom, opimitism and opportunity, with the music of the era reflecting that with energy and excitement, the end of the decade was violent. With events like the Manson Family killings, the deaths at the Altamont Free Festival and the shooting of Andy Warhol, the hedonistic period came crashing to an end, killing off the sense of jovial positivity. Pair that with the death of JFK, ongoing struggles against racism, the enduring Vietnam War and a worsening economic state that was making it harder for artists and artistic spaces to survive on creativity alone; the 1970s was a markedly darker time.
New York City was a perfect microcosm of that. After Warhol almost died, he stopped his parties, no longer inviting people into the Factory to mix and mingle. Max’s was no longer in place. Now, its crowd had retreated. Musically, too, rock and roll seemed over now. Lou Reed had quit the Velvet Underground, and the sounds dominating the countercultural sphere over in Los Angeles simply didn’t seem to apply to the East Coast.
In a lot of cultural recollections, this is where the CBGB popped up and saved the day as if the opening of the venue in the East Village was the birth of punk and the start of something new. However, it was already alive and kicking in Greenwich Village at The Mercer Arts Center at 240 Mercer Street.
The Mercer Arts Center was an unlikely hub for the blossoming punk scene, but in a way, its grand exterior housing a bunch of DIY troupes was perfectly apt for the moment. Just as how punk was revitalising rock, the city’s new bands were revitalising the eight-story former hotel turned cultural centre. The venue needed money to keep doors open and pay for renovations, and bands needed somewhere cheapish to rehearse, so the building’s unused spaces became make-shift practice rooms that saw the birth of some of the genre’s most iconic bands.
Amongst them were the New York Dolls. The band played their first paid gig at the venue on May 5th 1972, receiving a humble $15 to play the center’s Blue Room theater which was becoming the true hub of the new punk crowd. The Modern Lovers and Suicide also played some of their earliest shows there, but clearly New York Dolls were a favourite as between June and October, the band were booked to play a Tuesday night residency of 14 dates.
Not only did these dates bring in a crowding crowd and solidify the band as one of the pioneering punk forces, but it also made the Mercer into a truly legendary hangout. Before the CBGB opened, this was the place where the new music scene, mixed with the band’s shows, was a breeding ground of new sounds, new ideas and new musicians to meet and start new bands, with countless punk icons like Patti Smith and Richard Hell being in attendance.
The essential factor is that the Mercer truly was a grassroots venue that, just like the bands playing there, were trying to make something work from nothing. More so than Max’s, or Warhol’s high brow Factory or any of the other more established venues in the city, the Mercer Arts Center was just as gritty as the band that were breaking through, giving them a home and a space to play.
That is, until it collapsed. In 1973, just after five p.m. on Friday, August 9th, the University Hotel, which was attached to the venue, collapsed. “It was Panicsville there,” said then-owner Seymour Kaback as the walls began to shake, groan and eventually gave way, ridding the city of one of its hot spots. However, the spirit of punk wasn’t buried with it. The energy that the New York Dolls and their home at the Mercer had sparked kept on burning, birthing the city’s punk scene as the world came to know it.
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