Tragedy, Peyote, Beat Poets, Yoko Ono. The 9 Lives of an East Village Townhouse.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Buildings in New York have past lives that never quite go away. You look at the chain store on the corner and see not just the display of Peeps in the window but the shoe store that was there before it, or maybe the one before that.
It is something about the way time and memory pile up in the city: The past seeps through the thin veneer of the present, and the present appears filtered through the myths of the past. The dialogue between the two provides texture and solidity — the marrow of life in a frenzied hive.
Five years ago, the writer David Hajdu came across a weathered five-story building in the East Village, built around 1840, with not one past life but many, each defining a different cultural moment. It was a place of large-scale tragedy and suspected terrorism, of Beat poets and punk literati, a place where Yoko Ono waited tables and Lou Reed sang doo-wop.
For Mr. Hajdu, whose books include “Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina,” and “Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn,” the house at 64 East Seventh Street became more than a curiosity. It became an obsession.
“It had a grip on me,” he said the other day, in his office at Columbia Journalism School, where he teaches a seminar in arts and culture.
For the last decade, he has also been writing song lyrics. He started writing a song cycle about the building, each song examining a different incarnation. “I went about it as I would as a journalist,” he said. “I did research and interviews.
“I thought of it like a cheesy horror movie, where behind the broom closet there’s a portal to a temporal vortex. There’s something in this site that explains that no matter what the trends are in the city, this site will be at the center of it.”
The townhouse’s story begins in mass tragedy, as the parsonage for the Evangelical Lutheran Church of St. Mark. There, in 1904, the parson, George Haas, organized a steamship outing for his largely German congregation aboard the PS General Slocum, bound for Long Island. The ship caught fire in the East River, killing nearly all 1,300 parishioners and crew on board — the deadliest event in New York until the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
So the house had history. But it was not done.
It next entered New York lore in connection with another tragedy. In the early 20th century, as Eastern European immigrants filled the Lower East Side, the ground floor at 64 East Seventh Street was home to a weekly pro-Communist newspaper called Russky Golos, or The Russian Voice. On Sept. 18, 1920, police arrived to arrest the publisher, Alexander Brailovsky, after aterrorist bombing on Wall Streetthat killed more than 30 people and wounded 200. Brailovsky, held as an undesirable alien, was soon released; the crime was never solved.
The building entered psychedelic history in the 1950s, when a coffee shop called the Cart Wheel — its owner a Harvard graduate described as “bearded and barefoot” by The Times — dispensed peyote capsules along with the tamer stimulants.
In 1960, as Beat-generation bohemians gravitated to the area for its cheap rents, the space became a literary hangout, Les Deux Mégots coffee house, where Allen Ginsberg and others read for other poets.Ed Sanders, who read his first poems at Les Deux Mégots in 1961, remembered it as a place of political activism and a new, young poetics shaped by mimeograph machines and spirited readings.
“It was before the counterculture,” he said from his home in Woodstock. “Everybody sang. There were a lot of guitars. World War II rent control was still in place, so you could get a pad on the Lower East Side for $30 or $40 a month.”
The coffee house published at least three volumes of poetry (now collectors’ items), but one of the owners,Mickey Ruskin, who later openedMax’s Kansas City, grew restless for a different clientele. As hetoldthe writer Danny Fields: “Poets really aren’t drinkers, and artists are.”
By 1962, as the Beats were giving way to hippies, the neighborhood changed again, and 64 East Seventh Street changed with it. It became The Paradox, the city’s first macrobiotic restaurant. Yoko Ono waited tables and Loudon Wainwright III worked various jobs and wrote the songs for his first album, including one, “Bruno’s Place,” about the restaurant. “I did some cooking there, too,” Ms. Ono’s Twitter account posted in 2017. “People lined up for my salad.”
She also gave performances that involved her climbing into a black burlap sack and moving around while diners ate their rice bowls. When a group ofMerry Prankstersshowed up, David Puchkoff, an owner, got them to build a geodesic dome in the backyard. It was Eden, late-60s style.
The deeper Mr. Hajdu looked, the more past lives emerged.
“I thought, this is kind of impossible,” he said. “Every building has multiple lives. Every building has a moment when it was connected to the culture. But the same building, over and over and over and over? How can this be? I was drawn to that mystery.”
The Paradox was a creature of the 1960s, and when the 1970s came, and heroin darkened the mood on the Lower East Side, Mr. Puchkoff sold the restaurant fixtures for a few thousand dollars to a commune run by theRainbow Family of the Living Light.
Mr. Hajdu did not find much information on the commune. But Rachel Neulander, who wandered through its never-locked door in 1972 (or maybe it was 1973?), remembered finding healthy food, musical instruments and an idyllic welcome, from a woman carrying a pot of something savory, who told her: “This place belongs to the Rainbow Family of Living Light, and so do you!”
But it belonged to neither for long.
The building’s next life crossed with Mr. Hajdu’s own. In 1974, as punk was germinating in the East Village, Mr. Hajdu arrived in New York as an undergraduate at N.Y.U., where he heard that Patti Smith frequented a shop at 64 East Seventh Street called Books ’N Things. “I think I went there lurking in hopes of seeing her,” Mr. Hajdu said.
He never spotted Ms. Smith, but he got to know the owner,Gertrude Briggs, who told him the kind of inside story every art-aspiring New Jersey kid dreams of. One day in the store’s back garden, she told him, Lou Reed and a friend started singing old songs with the poet Marianne Moore. The friend, they deduced, was Iggy Pop.
So half a century later, Mr. Hajdu wrote a song about it, with music byTheo Bleckmann. They called it “Lou Reed Was Very Well Read.”
(Iggy Pop was unavailable to confirm or elaborate on this account, so by the rules of bohemian historiography, it definitely happened.)
From here some might say that the building’s story, like the neighborhood’s, loses some of its razzle. After Books ’N Things, it became a consignment clothing store called Tokio 7 — downtown in the 1990s was becoming more about fashion than art — until, after years of uninterrupted gentrification, in 2008 it became a single-family residence, with a gut renovation and an upper story added, complete with a pizza oven on the roof.
Wherever New York sagas begin, it seems, they end in real estate.
Mr. Hajdu ended his song cycle with text from its sales listing in 2019, including the asking price: $18.6 million.
But the building still surprises. The buyer in 2019, who paid $15.75 million, was Bill Joy, a founder of Sun Microsystems who was called by Fortune magazine “the Edison of the internet,” adding one more leg to the house’s journey from immigrant parsonage to Beat hangout to hippie oasis to a home for tech wealth. Mr. Joy, reached in Germany and told about this history, said he knew very little of it. “I had no idea of half of those,” he said. “How many chapters, how many lives it’s had.”
Mr. Hajdu’s musical account of these lives, “The Parsonage: True Tales of Love and Anarchy at 64 East 7th Street,” is scheduled to be released on April 7, along with a one-time performance on April 27 at the Museum of the City of New York.
And there may be more chapters to come. Mr. Joy, who married a German woman during the pandemic, just put the buildingup for sale. Asking price: $13.5 million.
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Old cultures like old plumbers never die, they just smell that way ... fertile.
cool article.
Nice change from the regular bust their balls stuff.
I was half expecting some cult that was dedicated to the Anti-Christ like in Rosemary's Baby
''Digging'' into the past. A wonderful occupation with many surprises.
Good story. Thanks for seeding it
Great story. I would buy the house but then Yoko went and did this... and now I just can't.
Yoko suffered with never getting into a bar fight with Lou Reed.
I was thinking along those same lines. they probably had to remodel the place after her shrieking inside took all the plaster off the walls.