Trading Venues for Condos

From today's AM New York - City Clubs Falling Silent

Buyers, lured by the mystique of the Lower East Side's arts and music scene, pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to live at the center of it. A few years later that same edgy nightclub goes out of business, having received many noise complaints from the new condo owners, and pinched by skyrocketing rents driven up by those same well-heeled neighbors.

As a real estate professional by day and concert goer by night, I'm both fascinated and sick to my stomach about the loss of one music venue after another due to rising rents in further gentrifying areas of Manhattan. I can't help but think that Manhattan is turning into a caricature of itself, no different than the Greenwich Village-style food court at New York, New York hotel and casino in Vegas. Cleaning up Times Square I'm all for...but turning it into an urban Disney utopia, not so much.

Sure CBGB's hadn't had many meaningful acts prior to its victory lap. But even still, walking by the awning for the first time when it was still a viable venue stopped me dead in my tracks. So did seeing what was left of the Fillmore East, which is a mosaic-covered light post highlighting the Allman Brothers Band's historic nights at the venue. As of 2007, the former entrance lobby to the Fillmore East is a branch of Emigrant Savings Bank. The rest of the interior has been gutted and rebuilt as an apartment complex.

You have to read Bill Graham's letter to The Village Voice stating his reasons for closing the Fillmores back in 1971. Have things changed for the better, or just gotten much, much worse? (Scroll down a little to find it).