[00:16] Meg: Welcome to Desperately Seeking the '80s. I am Meg.

[00:19] Jessica: And I am Jessica. And Meg and I have been friends since 1982. We got through middle school and high school together here in New York City, where we still live.

[00:27] Meg: And where we podcast about New York City in the '80s. I do ripped from the headlines.

[00:32] Jessica: And I do pop culture.

[00:34] Meg: And today we're doing something a little different.

[00:37] Jessica: Yes, we are.

[00:39] Meg: We are reading stories that people have written in, specifically about growing up in Yorkville.

[00:46] Jessica: Yes, we've become so Yorkville centric, which neither one of us saw coming. And I think it's kind of particularly interesting or notable because Yorkville is the part of the Upper East Side that I think most people don't even know that that's what it's called.

[01:04] Meg: Sheldon, the other day was like, I don't want to sound stupid, but what's Yorkville? And I'm like, I'm glad you asked. Let me tell you.

[01:11] Jessica: Oh, my.

[01:12] Meg: While I do my jumping jacks.

[01:15] Jessica: Were you able to tell him exactly what the borders are?

[01:19] Meg: As far as I understand them. Do you know them?

[01:22] Jessica: Okay, so Yorkville, the boundaries are East 79th Street and East 96th Street. Those are the southern and northern boundaries. And East River all the way east to 3rd Avenue.

[01:36] Meg: Okay.

[01:36] Jessica: Okay, so.

[01:37] Meg: And that completely makes sense to me as someone who grew up on 92nd between Park and Lexington. The neighborhood changes at 3rd Avenue. There's no question about it.

[01:50] Jessica: All right, are you ready for another wild statistic?

[01:53] Meg: Sure.

[01:54] Jessica: Yorkville is one of the most densely populated city subdivisions in the world. I didn't know that.

[02:03] Meg: Whoa, that's crazy.

[02:05] Jessica: The other thing that I want to say very quickly is, you know, people wonder, why is it called Yorkville? The assumption is that it has something to do with New York.

[02:13] Meg: I thought it had to do with a General York.

[02:16] Jessica: Well, in 1928, a one block section of Sutton Place north of 59th Street and all of Avenue A north of that point and at at that time, Avenue A was York Avenue. It was renamed York Avenue to honor U.S. Army Sergeant Alvin York, who received the Medal of Honor for attacking a German machine gun nest during World War I's Meuse-Argonne offensive and there is a famous movie about him, Sergeant York.

[02:44] Meg: All right.

[02:45] Jessica: It is Yorkville for bravery. Lovely.

[02:49] Meg: What's the name of our episode?

[02:52] Jessica: Remembering Yorkville.

[02:53] Meg: Remembering Yorkville. So, yeah, so we got call to action.

[02:57] Jessica: Your call to action was fantastic. And people actually wrote in their remembrances, so I just love this. I didn't see it coming at all. And what I have seen so far and I know that you're gonna read some bits that I haven't, I have no knowledge of yet. But what I've seen so far is the descriptions really do feel different than any other part of the city, so I wonder if people listening will feel the same.

[03:37] Meg: I'd like to start us off with Jeff's description of what it was like to grow up in Yorkville. He wrote me and said, I used to sell fruit and vegetables on a push cart across from Grand Central Station. I had a very interesting upbringing. It was hard to fit in with people downtown and even the Upper West Side, because the Upper East Side at that time and even today was never really cool. The Upper East Side has always been its own city in a way. And most people have no clue that it was a really tough place to grow up in the mid-'70s and early '80s, especially if you're Jewish and didn't go to prep school.

[04:19] Jessica: Wow, Interesting, Jeff, first off, pushcart, interesting. So, wow. Which is also a very typically, you know, early 20th century and late 19th century Jewish occupation in the city to have a pushcart of some variety.

[04:41] Meg: We think about Yorkville, we think about the German population, and we definitely think about the Irish population. And it was interesting to me that he made a distinction about being Jewish and not being one of, I guess, the well to do Jewish kids in the neighborhood.

[04:57] Jessica: I think that, well, keep that in mind about it being difficult to be Jewish when I read another one of these entries. And I'll tee it up, but you'll know it when you hear it.

[05:09] Meg: Okay, do you want to go now?

[05:11] Jessica: Well, I'll start with a different one. I'm going to start because we just got past Halloween.

[05:16] Meg: Okay, great.

[05:17] Jessica: And this is from my darling friend Maggie. And this is a memory of Halloween.

[05:25] Meg: Oh, this is fun.

[05:26] Jessica: And when we were children, my brother and I did Halloween with Maggie and her sister, our dear darling friend Nina. So here's a little something she said. Okay, here's my contribution to this evening.

[05:38] Jessica: Halloween was always a great time to live in Yorkville because it was a real neighborhood. Kids could parade around in whatever costumes they were wearing, in packs or on their own, and they were safe and would be guaranteed a great haul.

[05:54] Jessica: My sister and I were the only kids in our building, Number 33 East End Avenue, for a long time. And therefore everybody made a big fuss over us. Except, of course, the hag across the hall from us.

[06:07] Jessica: But she'll go nameless.

[06:09] Meg: Damn.

[06:09] Jessica: We would proceed from 33 East End and past number 45 and number 55, which were not very useful.

[06:17] Jessica: And hone in on 75 East End Avenue, which was fantastic. And, by the way, where our friend Alejandra grew up. It was fantastic. Filled with kids and loads of candy.

[06:30] Jessica: It was utter chaos.

[06:32] Jessica: We might end up at 85 East End Avenue, but the best of all was 444 E 82nd Street, which is when we would meet up in my building. That's lovely. We spent hours figuring out a strat, because, by the way, and the building is massive.

[06:51] Jessica: It's huge. We spent hours figuring out a strategy to maximize candy acquisition. Whether to start at the bottom or the top or the opposite wing from where our friends lived.

[07:03] Jessica: And of course, we left a huge mess along the way before retreating to somebody else's apartment. We'd go through everything, throwing away the apples, throwing away the raisins, and anything boring like Mary Jane's.

[07:18] Jessica: I have just noticed that Hershey miniatures seem to have suffered from shrinkflation.

[07:23] Jessica: They look very small to me, but maybe because I'm a lot bigger and a lot greedier now, I would just add that the neighborhoodiness of being able to trick or treat in Yorkville is something I just can't imagine existed on, say, I don't know, Madison Avenue or Midtown.

[07:39] Jessica: But I could be wrong. So I'm sure we'll have a rebuttal to that. But I don't know if I told you about a particular costume that Maggie and John and Nina and a bunch of our other little friends at The Fleming School did.

[07:53] Jessica: So I'm sorry if I'm repeating myself, but this is really a perfect example of the kids were just left to their own devices to do something that they wanted to.

[08:04] Jessica: So we decided that having a production number was going to get us more candy.

[08:10] Jessica: So we did a group costume of about 10 people.

[08:16] Jessica: And Nina was the bride and I was the groom. And Maggie and John held a chuppah over us. And we went to everybody's door as a Jewish wedding. And when they opened the door, we go mazel tov!

[08:27] Meg: Oh, my God, you're brilliant.

[08:30] Jessica: And we got a lot of candy.

[08:33] Meg: That is so funny.

[08:34] Jessica: So Maggie was like, I need proof of this. And I said, I have it. I'll get you the photos. So when I find them, I will share them.

[08:42] Meg: Please. Yes. Okay. I'm so glad that you shared a story about a holiday. I've got one. I'm going to save it till the end, though, because it's heartwarming.

[08:53] Jessica: More lunacy before heartwarming.

[08:55] Meg: Okay, this. This is from Ted.

[08:59] Jessica: Hi Ted.

[08:59] Meg: And remember how Guy and I were talking about Tommy Carroll?

[09:03] Jessica: Yes.

[09:04] Meg: Well, Ted knows all about Tommy Carroll.

[09:07] Jessica: Oh, my God.

[09:08] Meg: And we're about to hear everything.

[09:10] Meg: Wagner was one of the last public schools with instrumental music and everyone wanted to play drums. My friend Ricky and I had been taking drum lessons for a few years at PS6, so we passed the audition and got to be the drummers in the band.

[09:28] Meg: But Tommy really wanted to play drums. He told everyone about his TAMA drum kit and publicly stated that he would kick my ass if I became the drummer and he didn't end up playing drums.

[09:43] Meg: He didn't pass the audition and had to play trumpet, which is where they put everyone who couldn't play an instrument. He also had sort of big lips and they had to get him a special mouthpiece, which made him furious.

[09:56] Meg: He was always a scary character. Some people said he was the nephew of Thomas "Mickey" Featherstone of the Westies.

[10:04] Meg: Other people said his father was a crooked cop who was abusive. He was a long hair heavy metal guy and I did my best to avoid him. Mr. Tracks was a new art teacher who was well liked.

[10:17] Meg: You could tell he was an actual artist and he was really cool and encouraging. In Wagner, art class could be a crazy free for all. If the teacher couldn't control the class, it was total chaos.

[10:29] Meg: Mr. Tracks had our respect and our interest, so my classes with him were great. But other classes and students would openly defy him and go nuts in class. After one of these free for alls.

[10:41] Meg: I think Mr. Tracks tried to stop the class from leaving when the bell rang. I think he was going to tell them how disappointed he was or something. And that's when Tommy hit him.

[10:52] Meg: He broke Mr. Tracks his glasses and the police came. I never saw Mr. Tracks again, so I think he was transferred or quit. I don't remember what happened with Tommy after that, but the next time I saw him was the following year.

[11:07] Meg: I was going to The Bronx High School of Science and had become a punk. I spent a short time as a mod first and I went to see my friend's punk band, Addictive Manifesto.

[11:17] Jessica: Oh, my God.

[11:19] Meg: Starring Guy Smit play at a dance at Trinity High School.

[11:23] Jessica: The dance.

[11:24] Meg: It's the dance.

[11:25] Meg: It was a funny high school scene. The punk kids there to see the band mixing with the Trinity kids who were just there for acschool dance. I remember they were doing a lot of whippets.

[11:36] Meg: Much to my surprise, Tommy Carroll showed up. I was really pleasantly surprised. He seemed to have forgotten he never really liked me and we chatted amicably. For a while, he told me he was getting into New York hardcore and going to the matinee at CBGB every week.

[11:51] Meg: He had started a band called Mayhem, and he was wearing a denim vest with the new Mayhem logo on the back. Addictive Manifesto started playing, and I think I remember Tommy saying something like, yo, let's mosh.

[12:05] Meg: And he started moshing, slamming into every Trinity kid in sight. He knocked several people over, and I think school security made the band stop and they went after Tommy. I don't remember the actual sequence, but I think he smashed a glass door and ran away before the cops got there.

[12:23] Meg: So Tommy eventually got really into the New York hardcore scene and became sort of a mainstay with the straight edge skinhead crowd. His band Mayhem NYC had a lot of bands, and he played in legendary New York skinhead bands Straight Ahead and Youth of Today.

[12:39] Jessica: Well, that sounds like trouble, but yeah, it's like Yorkville kids mixing amongst themselves. It's just, you know, the more echoes of everything that Travis talked about.

[12:51] Meg: And Guy.

[12:52] Jessica: And Guy.

[12:53] Meg: Wow.

[12:53] Jessica: Wow. Tommy Carroll. He sounds like we need to write a film, like a screenplay all around. Tommy Carroll. There's something there. I want to know what happened next.

[13:03] Meg: Keeps coming up.

[13:04] Jessica: We need to. Well, we did a deep dive on the Rubinstein twins, so we should probably do a Tommy Carroll deep dive.

[13:11] Meg: We probably should.

[13:12] Jessica: Do you have a. Jeff, do you want me to start with Alex's? One little thing about the drums, Unless I am mistaken, and I'm very willing to be wrong, but I think it's pronounced TAMA.

[13:23] Meg: I trust you.

[13:24] Jessica: We'll get people to write in this. This is from my darling brother John.

[13:40] Meg: I love that.

[13:41] Jessica: And he took it very seriously.

[13:44] Meg: Okay.

[13:45] Jessica: And even did two drafts, bless him. So here's kind of like a The New Yorker piece about Yorkville.

[13:53] Meg: Wonderful.

[13:54] Jessica: Yorkville is a little neighborhood within the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and I think it's fair to say that most New Yorkers to this day have little or no idea what or where it is.

[14:03] Jessica: I had the good fortune to grow up in this quiet enclave of the city in the 1970s and '80s when it was even quieter and more of an enclave than it is now.

[14:12] Jessica: Although even by then, it had already lost a lot of its distinctiveness and flavor to gentrification and yup-ification. We were definitely among the gentrifiers, although my parents were really too old to be yuppies.

[14:25] Jessica: The following are just a few of my memories. They largely have to do with food, because much of Yorkville's specialness came from the rich blend of ethnic cuisines brought by German, Hungarian and Czech immigrants over the past 75 or so years.

[14:41] Jessica: By the time I was a child, the Czechs had just about given up their little slice of land along Second Avenue in the '70s, but the German and Hungarian presence was still pretty strong.

[14:52] Jessica: Of course, the days when the German American Bund marched down 86th Street with Nazi swastika flags flying alongside the Stars and Stripes were thankfully long past, but we did have the Steuben Day Parade when brass bands, beer and men in dark green Hessian uniforms testified to the Teutonic role in America's origin story.

[15:15] Jessica: More to my liking were the restaurants and food shops. At the Kleine Konditorei and the Cafe Geiger pastries and coffee mit schlag were the thing. While at The Ideal Restaurant I perched on a rotating stool at the 1930s steel and formica lunch counter in a space so narrow that you could barely sidle down into it, eating Konigsberger Klopse veal meatballs in a white sauce with capers and potato dumplings and drinking a German lager.

[15:44] Jessica: Around the corner was Schaller & Weber, the ultimate German delicatessen and market where every kind of wurst imaginable was on offer as well as imported sweets like chocolate covered marzipan.

[15:57] Jessica: For a purely sugar based experience I preferred Elk Candy, which made its own marzipan in every conceivable shape and color and smelled delightfully of almonds at every hour of the day.

[16:09] Jessica: There was a four or five story German mini department store called Bremen House on 86th Street where a Barnes & Noble stands today, and I can't remember what they stocked, although it must have satisfied the nostalgia of those Germans who were more recent arrivals to the neighborhood, like Mrs.

[16:26] Jessica: Lieb, a middle aged widow who babysat my sister and me. As a child I played piano and sought out ragtime sheet music. Of course you did, John, which I procured at the Binzer Music House on 85th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues

[16:43] Meg: It was a. I remember that place.

[16:45] Jessica: It was a charmingly old world shop with music kept in file cabinets and instruments hung on the walls. I said that the days of Fritz Kuhn's Bund were over, but one day at Binzer I had a startling experience.

[16:59] Jessica: The lady who ran the place was on the phone listening, nonplussed to a client's request, until suddenly it dawned on her and she explained, oh, you mean the Hitler song.

[17:11] Jessica: The Hungarian stuff was closer to home. In the lower eighties, near 2nd and 1st Avenues. I loved the pungent smelling stores, Paprika Weiss and Paprika Roth. I can't quite remember what made one different from the other with their wooden barrels of spices and dried fruits, dried salamis and other cured meats.

[17:31] Jessica: Weiss announced on its dark reddish brown storefront sign that it sold Lekvar. Hungarian prune paste, which I never ever bought but found out much later is both delicious and healthy.

[17:45] Jessica: At Mocca Restaurant on 2nd Avenue, we sucked down plate after plate of chicken paprikash and veal goulash with nocca cocola mini dumplings complemented by bottles of fortifying Egri Bikaver, Bull's Blood of Eger wine finishing off with a little palacsinta, crepes with jam and powdered sugar.

[18:04] Jessica: My grandmother was born in Budapest and while she didn't cook this food for us, it got into my blood through Mocca's kitchen.

[18:12] Meg: It was wild.

[18:13] Jessica: Isn't that crazy? It was a neighborhood of little family owned stores like Melnikoffs where my mother bought us our summer camp outfits and Jan's Hobby Shop where I got my plastic model kits to make World War I airplanes, rockets and vintage cars.

[18:29] Jessica: Enamel paints, tiny brushes and bottles of something called butyrate dope were also on offer and not to be passed up. I bought used books for a dollar at the Bryn Mawr Bookshop, a basement space on 79th between York and East End, and read for hours in the sun splashed wooden tabled Webster Branch Library on York and 78th.

[18:52] Jessica: There were plenty of very legitimate pizza slices to be had at this or that corner shop. I remember paying 35 cents for one when I started buying them for myself.

[19:03] Jessica: My sister, my friends, her friends and I rode our skateboards and bikes through the streets and around Carl Schurz Park, named for a German born Civil War general of the Union army, sometimes menaced by Yorkville thugs a few years older than us, mostly from the working class ethnic families that were being gradually displaced by our families.

[19:26] But we survived even if the old Yorkville culture didn't. Or did it? Shaller & Weber is still there and so is the Hungarian church where they say mass in Magyar, although it had to move in with another church because it couldn't afford the rent in its own building.

[19:44] JessicaL As for me, call me what you will, I'll always be a Yorkvillian.

[19:50] Meg: That was wonderful. Thank you, John.

[19:53] Jessica: Isn't that sweet? Yes, he put some thought into that, I think. It was like I haven't even thought of those places in so long. There are a few as you said, that are still around.

[20:02] Meg: But it's like describing growing up in an Austrian village. It's wild.

[20:08] Jessica: Yes. What was available to us. It is now so foreign, so alien. Because as we've talked about many times, ethnic enclaves are gone. You know, we only have shreds that cling to the space.

[20:23] Jessica: So anyway, there you go.

[20:35] Meg: Here's another fun one from Ted. The Fencing School. Fencing school. I believe it was on 86th Street, am I correct?

[20:43] Jessica: Let's see what he has to say.

[20:45] Meg: The fencing school was also a ballet school. And the guy who ran it was a famous Prussian master of arms. He didn't really like Olympic style fencing, which he thought was a wimpy, watered down version of sword fighting.

[20:59] Meg: It was definitely part of the old German neighborhood. He talked about how he could kill you with an umbrella. And I think he was telling the truth.

[21:08] Meg: The entrance to the school was a doorway right off the lobby of one of the 86th Street movie theater and I found it by accident. My friend and I signed up for classes that day.

[21:19] Meg: The teacher was extremely old by then, and my friend couldn't keep himself from cracking up every time the teacher farted, which he did constantly.

[21:30] Jessica: Well, this will make you laugh. So, you know, I hate exercising more than anything. I don't like feeling creaky. So I will occasionally do what one must do to exercise. But I'm always looking for different ways to get whatever cardio I need.

[21:47] Jessica: So this was many years ago, I mean, maybe 15 years ago.

[21:51] Jessica: I sauntered into the fencing school, which had moved, or a different version of it, to 3rd Avenue and 87th Street, and I took two classes. And let me tell you something, that is very hard.

[22:10] Jessica: I don't doubt that. And the upper body strength needed to just keep your epee or foil aloft. I was like, who am I kidding? This is not for me.

[22:25] Jessica: No. So that was it. So two lessons. And I don't think that any of the originals could have been there because if they were ancient and farting back in the day.

[22:35] Jessica: No, but you know what's interesting about the. That I wasn't expecting him to say that it was a German, a Prussian run operation, because I think I only learned this in the last couple of years, but prior to World War II, and it was really starting to die out around World War I, but the soldiers or whoever were the swordsmen in the Prussian and German army.

[23:02] Jessica: It was a sign of valor or prowess to fight and have cuts on your face from the swords. So you can see these old photos of these guys. And you'll see these scars, like right on their cheekbones.

[23:20] Jessica: And they were like badges of honor.

[23:22] Meg: Did they do it to themselves?

[23:23] Jessica: No, no, no, no, they did not do.

[23:25] Meg: They just happened to have it right where they wanted it.

[23:28] Jessica: No, no. It was part of like the exercise amongst them. Oh, and you know, if you could get the other guy, like it was. That was where you would want to get them on their face.

[23:38] Jessica: It was the, you know, the highest point on the face. But you wanted it because you were in the mix. It showed that you were.

[23:45] Meg: You're a guy kind of. Hazing

[23:47] Jessica: Yes, yes, yes.

[23:49] Meg: All right, interesting.

[23:50] Jessica: So we have a wonderful entry from our darling friend Alex. And I am going to begin reading this.

[23:59] Meg: Wonderful.

[24:00] Jessica: Okay. And this is a far cry from Prussian swordsmen.

[24:04] Meg: Maybe not. Well, maybe it's all interrelated because everything is.

[24:09] Jessica: Well and you know, it's also a lot about young men showing that they're tough and can hang. So maybe this is part of that.

[24:18] Jessica: All right, so without further ado, here is Yorkville's secret punk rock history. By most accounts, punk rock was a downtown concern. The punk clubs, record shops and hangouts, they were all downtown.

[24:33] Jessica: The membership of Blondie, for example, all shared a squalid loft space above a ramshackle restaurant supply shop on The Bowery. That shop is still there, but Blondie moved out some time ago.

[24:47] Jessica: The Talking Heads lived in a similar dump a few blocks away on the forbidding byway of Christie Street. Richard Hell lived and still lives in a modest apartment on East 12th Street.

[25:00] Jessica: The Ramones hailed from Forest Hills, Queens, but operated out of their graphic designer pal Arturo Vega's loft just east of The Bowery.

[25:10] Harley Flanagan of the Cro-Mags lived for a while in an amenity free squat in Alphabet City and bathed himself via open fire hydrants. The Plasmatics had their headquarters in a far flung walk up in Tribeca.

[25:26] Jessica: And Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth lived in a railroad apartment in a tenement in Chinatown.

[25:33] Jessica: Bobby Steele of The Undead still lives around Tompkins Square Park. And his old bandmate Jack Natz of the Black Snakes used to sleep in Pussy Galore's roach ridden rehearsal space in a basement on Avenue B.

[25:48] Jessica: I could go on and on, but you get the point. By and large, downtown was where the punk rockers were.

[25:56] Jessica: Yorkville, on the other hand, while only technically up the island from the punky Lower East Side, seems like it might as well be on a whole different planet. While it's significantly gentrified over the last several decades, then as now, Yorkville has remained a comparatively quiet, stable residential community, tucked as it is just to the east of the posher enclaves of the equally sedate Upper East Side.

[26:23] Jessica: One might be hard pressed to find any semblance of that particular aesthetic that far north of 14th Street. One, however, might be entirely surprised.

[26:36] Jessica: For a start, as I expounded on over on my blog not too long back, Yorkville actually had a pair of dueling forward thinking rock clubs. For a little while in the early '80s. There was Private's on the otherwise unlikely corner of East 85th Street and Lexington Ave, which played host to to a slew of bold new bands like The Stranglers, XTC, Bauhaus, The Cramps, The Rockets, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, who even filmed the video to their breakout hit "I Love Rock and Roll" at the intimate club.

[27:11] Meg: Crazy. Did you know that?

[27:12] Jessica: No. Just a block or two away meanwhile, there was also a club called The 80's on East 86th Street between 3rd and 2nd Avenues. This short lived club, formerly a subterranean German beer hall called The Lorelei, welcomed envelope pushing acts like oddball accordion-botherer, Phoebe Legere, The Dead Boys, the Bad Brains, The Soft Boys, and even the chainsaw wielding Plasmatics onto its cramped little stage.

[27:44] Jessica: Who needed to hop the 6 train to the east Village when those names were coming to Yorkville?

[27:49] Jessica: As exciting as that all sounds, however, neither venture stuck around for very long. I'm not sure when either club officially closed, but neither made it out of the midpoint of the decade.

[28:00] Jessica: The corner that Private's called home is now a Starbucks, while the building that housed The 80's has been replaced by a monolithic condo with no evidence of its former iteration.

[28:12] Jessica: But Yorkville's ties to punk rock don't end with those two clubs.

[28:18] Jessica: Towards the westerly border of Yorkville on 3rd Avenue between East 84th and East 85th Streets, there used to be a record store called Musical Maze. Don't bother looking for it now.

[28:29] Jessica: The building that housed it was razed decades ago. I first remember waddling into Musical Maze in the late '70s when I was about 12 or 13 and being blown away by the interior.

[28:41] Jessica: The walls were covered with psychedelic black light posters. I also vividly remember spotting all these Kiss records my main concern at the time that weren't familiar to me at all. Turns out these were bootlegs, illicit live concert recordings.

[28:58] Jessica: Regardless, Musical Maze was a very groovy place, especially for the Upper East Side of Manhattan. But beyond that, it was also the birthplace of a crucial punk band. Upon decamping from his native Akron, Ohio, oddball Erick Purkhiser and his similarly inclined wife Kristy Wallace moved to New York City somewhere on East 73rd Street, reaching out to Erick's pen pal, Dave Schulps, co- founder of the underground rock mag Trouser Press.

[29:30] Jessica: Schulps was working at Musical Maze at the time, and being that he was as equally besotted with the unconventional, Erick got in touch to get the scoop on where to go in New York City.

[29:39] Jessica: Being the newbie that he was. As it turns out, Dave was about to quit his gig at Musical Maze. So Erick swiftly moved right into his spot selling rock and roll records.

[29:50] Jessica: To Upper East Siders. Once there, he met one Gregory Beckerleg, something of a dead ringer for a young Boris Karloff with an equally macabre sensibility. Erick and Kristy in very short order decided to form a band with Greg and his sister Pam, pairing their adoration for schlocky American pop culture, B movie horror kitsch, and stripped down rockabilly twang with a razor sharp contemporary edge, regularly rehearsing and honing their boldly innovative sound in the basement of Musical Maze.

[30:23] Jessica: Erick changed his name to Lux Interior, Kristy to Poison Ivy Rorschach, Pam Beckerleg to Pam Balam, and Gregory Beckerleg to Bryan Gregory and The Cramps were born out of a Third Avenue storefront in Yorkville.

[30:40] Jessica: Meg, would you like to continue some of this?

[30:42] Meg: Oh, sure. By the dawn of the '80s, meanwhile, that Musical Maze went out of business and replaced by the more expansive music retail outlet Crazy Eddie.

[30:54] Meg: By this point, my tastes had developed, largely forsaking Kiss, Pink Floyd and shaggily mustachioed classic rock for all things punk rock and new wave. I first walked into this new iteration of the Third Avenue shop in search of the then newly released single by my beloved Devo, that being "Peek-a-Boo", a suitably bizarre slice of electronic pop that failed to sustain the waning popularity they'd surprisingly earned via "Whip It" just two short years earlier.

[31:29] Meg: Given Devo's diminishing returns in the album sales department, it was surprising to find the single prominently displayed. But I later learned this was thanks to a certain Crazy Eddie's employee.

[31:42] Meg: By this time, Lux and Bryan of The Cramps were long gone, but there was a new young spiky hooligan working the floor with tastes seemingly identical to mine. Over the course of my next few visits to Crazy Eddie, this guy, also named Brian, as it turned out, would regularly compliment me on records I was bringing up to the cashier titles that included Stukas Over Disneyland by The Dickies, My Beach by the Surf Punks and the first eponymous LP by The Lords of the New Church.

[32:15] Jessica: Ooh.

[32:17] Meg: In turn, Brian started hipping my clueless Upper East Side ears to great records like the seminal Group Sex by Circle Jerks.

[32:26] Jessica: Ooh.

[32:27] Meg: A band I'd soon come to worship. Unsurprisingly, Brian himself had played in a local band. He played drum under the moniker Brian Damage in a charming little combo called Genocide. I vividly remember him beaming with pride as he displayed a compilation called Hardcore Takes Over that Genocide were featured on.

[32:53] Meg: By the end of 1983, however, Brian had vanished and Crazy Eddie actually moved two blocks up to East 86th Street without him. That's where I remember it. Right next to the big Loew's Orpheum movie theater.

[33:07] Meg: I later Learned that in October 1983, Brian "Damage" Keats, his full name, had been recruited to become the umpteenth drummer for The Misfits, a storied and notorious Lodi, New Jersey horrorcore ensemble.

[33:23] Meg; I didn't even know horrorcore was a thing who had been hugely and indelibly influenced by, ironically enough, enough, The Cramps.

[33:33] Meg: Brian had evidently spent weeks rehearsing with the band just prior to their Halloween show in Detroit. At the show, his first and last with the band, Brian played 13 songs at the band's break neck pace, but was purportedly too drunk to keep up.

[33:52] Meg: Burly Misfits guitarist Doyle. That's it, just Doyle, allegedly picked Brian up from behind his kit and forcibly threw him off stage, replacing him with the drummer from the Necros to finish the set.

[34:09] Meg: The Misfits broke up on stage that night.

[34:14] Meg: Bryan Gregory of The Cramps abruptly and acrimoniously quit the cramps in 1980 and died of heart failure in 2001.

[34:25] Meg: Lux Interior of The Cramps died of aortic dissection in 2009. Brian "Damage" Keats later played with a host of diverse musicians before succumbing to liver cancer in 2009.

[34:40] Jessica: Gee, Alex, that got really dark.

[34:43] Meg: This isn't a very uplifting story. I'm gonna.

[34:46] Jessica: You know what? I'm going to add something to the end. Hold on one second. I'm gonna. I'm gonna. Alex, I'm sorry. I'm gonna just put a spin on this, all right?

[34:54] Jessica: So all of these people died, okay? However, Alex Smith lives on to tell the tale on his outstanding blog, Flaming Pablum. And it is through Alex that the punk life of the Upper east side, Yorkville, specifically lives on.

[35:13] Jessica: And isn't that what musical lore is all about? I mean punk bands were all about flaming out in three seconds. That was kind of the thing. It was a lot of really destructive young guys.

[35:25] Meg: Or extreme in some way. An extremity can't sustain itself usually.

[35:31] Jessica: Exactly. But those people need chroniclers. And that is where our good friend steps in. And everything lives on.

[35:51] Meg: Changing the mood a little bit.

[35:53] Jessica: Oh, please do.

[35:54] Meg: Especially now that we're approaching holiday season.

[36:00] Jessica: Is Mariah Carey singing yet? Is that already.

[36:03] Meg: No, she's not from Yorkville.

[36:05] Jessica: No, no, no, no, no.

[36:06] Meg: I mean, like, I know what she's.

[36:08] Jessica: Getting, but has it happened? I'm asking you seriously, has it happened yet?

[36:14] Meg: You know, I was just thinking today I got an email before Halloween from somebody about a whole Secret Santa situation where I'm like, come on.

[36:28] Jessica: I don't want a lot for Christmas. I want you to leave me alone.

[36:34] Meg: It's like, how on earth are we supposed to be, like, thinking in that way when we haven't even like figured out what our costume is? Like chill out.

[36:42] Jessica: It's. It's a lot. It's why, you know, the holidays make everyone nuts. There's so much pressure and over what?

[36:49] Meg: And especially when we have to do all of them all at the same time, we can actually wait and do like, you know, don't let retailers. Yes.

[36:57] Jessica: Don't let retailers dictate your anxiety.

[37:00] Meg: Feh.

[37:02] Meg: Well, Jennifer, on the other hand, recalls similar to your friend. Was that your first story that you told about Maggie who was talking about Halloween?

[37:14] Meg: Well, Jennifer remembers Christmas time in Yorkville.

[37:18] Jessica: Okay.

[37:19] Meg: I grew up and still live in Yorkville. When I was a child in the '70s, I would go with my mother on her errands on 86th Street and not hear a word of English.

[37:30] Meg: I grew up in an English only household, but I used to speak German in my sleep.

[37:35] Meg: I thought everybody celebrated Steuben Day until I was in college. My favorite memories of the neighborhood are of East 86th Street at Christmas time. My understanding is that the Christmas traditions we celebrate today came from Germany.

[37:49] Meg: So they basically invented Christmas as far as I'm concerned. Lights were everywhere on East 86th Street from First Avenue to Lexington Avenue. All the shops seemed to have special Christmas window displays.

[38:03] Meg: Kleine

[38:03] Jessica: Kleine

[38:05] Meg: Yeah. Can you say that? Because I can't say that. Kleine Konditorei, Bremen House, Amers, whatever the name of that old fashioned pharmacy on the southwest corner of 86th Street and Second Avenue was called.

[38:18] Meg: The best display by far was in the window of Cafe Geiger.

[38:22] Meg: They had a model of a small alpine village. In the summer the display included a snow capped mountain, little cottages, whatever, blah. In November, they changed the display to represent winter in Germany.

[38:37] Meg: The ground was covered with glittering fake snow. There were figures of people in the little village square. And the stunning, to my six year old self, centerpiece was an ice rink that spun so the skaters moved around it in a circle.

[38:52] Meg: I would stop and look at that display for as long as I could until my parents dragged me away.

[38:58] Meg: Now the Cafe Geiger spot is a Baked by Melissa or Lush, I think. the Merritt Farms deli is my hair salon. Kleine Konditorei is the Fairway. Nothing lasts in New York City.

[39:10] Meg: It's the nature of city life.

[39:13] Jessica: And to add to Jennifer's comment about German Christmas, this is a throwback or a callback to one of our earlier episodes when I described how my family, despite being Jewish, would get very into Christmas at Luchow's down on East 14th Street.

[39:30] Jessica: And that was magic. That was this. It was a giant Christmas tree, toy trains going around it, O Tannenbaum, the whole nine yards with a goose dinner. So it was.

[39:48] Jessica: I can. I don't remember that as vividly as Jennifer does, but I can only imagine that it must have been totally bonkers. What I do remember though is Easter, because my dad had a sweet tooth and still does.

[40:04] Jessica: That you would not believe. And God forbid his two Jewish kids didn't have giant Easter baskets filled with candy. And Elk Candy that my brother referred to was the ground zero.

[40:19] Jessica: Amazing place for these Easter baskets of chocolate and marzipan towering as high as you can imagine.

[40:27] Meg: So like so many different neighborhoods in this city, Yorkville had its own culture. And it was like visiting another country or another village.

[40:37] Meg; It seems like even more so than other areas of the city. But maybe that's because we've just read all these sort of concentrated stories about it. But one question I have.

[40:48] Meg: Do you think maybe it was even more so because it was kind of hard to get to? The closest subway is on Lexington Avenue, but there wasn't a Q train then. So you really, if you were gonna go, it was a destination.

[41:03] Jessica: Like unless you were looking for a specialty item.

[41:06] Meg: Elk candy.

[41:07] Jessica: Yeah, Elk Candy. Everyone should have gone to Elk Candy. But if you weren't doing that, yes, it was a pain in the ass to get to.

[41:16] Meg: And I mean, I live just a few blocks away. I remember why I would go to Yorkville. And it was always for a particular restaurant, a particular store.

[41:29] Jessica: Right. And I think the reason that we got so much response when we started talking about it after we got past the whole 84th Street Bombers thing is that it was a neighborhood, one of the last neighborhoods to retain its character in that way in Manhattan.

[41:49] Jessica: You know, Staten Island, places in Brooklyn, those remained. But in Manhattan, it's, you know, we. We got the last gasp of that and. And being part of watching it be there and then not be there, and to feel the difference and to feel the mom and pop-ness of it leaving, I think, was very affecting for all of us who lived there.

[42:16] Jessica: And it's why we will still wax nostalgic about it, given the opportunity.

[42:22] Meg: Because I take the ferry to come see you. I walk through Yorkville now on the regular. I'm discovering a new sort of appreciation for that whole neighborhood.

[42:33] Jessica: If you know about it, would you feel that it's different? That it's different?

[42:37] Meg: Yeah, for sure. It still feels off the beaten path. It does, yeah. There's still old Irish bars that you can tell have been there forever.

[42:49] Meg: Yes. And then they're little yarn shops, and then there's a little woodworking store. I mean, not as many, obviously, as there used to be, but that's what I always sort of associated Second and Third Avenue with.

[43:00] Jessica: I think that Jan's Hobby Shop actually is still there.

[43:03] Meg: I would not be surprised.

[43:05] Jessica: Or Jan. It's probably Jan's. Not Jan. Jan's Hobby Shop. I'm so sorry, Meg. You said that walking through it, you do feel that it's different.

[43:15] Meg: Second and Third Avenue are just different from Lexington Avenue. There's a shift that happens when it just gets busier, when you've got the subway, when, like, people are bustling about. It's quieter.

[43:29] Jessica: Yeah. The pace, you're right, is different. The other thing that we, you know, while we're talking about all things German, and I may have said this on this podcast before, but there's a big apartment complex right off of 3rd Avenue, right near Normandy Court, which, you know, a lot of kids coming right out of college live there.

[43:49] Jessica: So it's nicknamed Dormandy Court. But this apartment complex is called Rupert Towers because it's where the big Rupert Brewery was. And Yorkville was filled with breweries.

[44:03] Jessica: All of the bars had their own brewmasters, their own breweries attached to the bars. So another thing, you know, when you say all these little bars are still around, I wonder how many of those used to be sponsored by one of the many, many local breweries.

[44:20] Meg: Cool. Neat.

[44:23] Meg: Well, we are going to take next week off because you are world traveling.

[44:28] Jessica: I am scurrying off to London, which is my happy place other than Yorkville.

[44:39] Jessica: And visiting some beloved friends who are also major fans of the podcast and who, despite being in London, listen regularly and call in and have many questions for me on the weekends.

[44:54] Jessica: So I'm going to stay with that.

[44:56] Meg: Nice.

[44:57] Jessica: And I will miss you and miss the podcast, but we will come back refreshed and ready to complain about Christmas.

[45:05] Meg: Fantastic.