Discover a New Side to New York on a Music Safari

New York neighbourhoods are steeped in music history and Barry Divola knows the man who can take you back in time.

Jesse Rifkin is easy to spot. With his black jeans and jacket and his T-shirt advertising hip ’80s psychedelic rock group Spacemen 3, he’s obviously the person I’m looking for to take me on a sidewalk safari through New York’s rock history.

We’re meeting for lunch at Caffe Reggio in Greenwich Village because, as Rifkin says, “it’s hardly changed since it opened in 1927. David Bowie used to hang out here when he lived in New York.” Rifkin played in bands but as he drolly puts it over a couple of Italian sandwiches, “I did everything you can do as a musician, except succeed. I quit in 2018. Going on tour and sleeping on other people’s floors is charming when you’re 21 but not when you’re in your thirties.”

Now, tapping into his background in the music scene and a degree in ethnomusicology, he runs Walk On The Wild Side Tours NYC, taking visitors and locals through the neighbourhoods that relate to particular musical genres. There’s one that focuses solely on the Beastie Boys (East Village, Soho, Chinatown, Lower East Side), another that covers post-punk, disco and hip-hop (Nolita, Soho, Tribeca). Today I’m taking his original tour, The Birth Of Punk.

We head around the corner to West 3rd Street and meet up with seven other music fans – a retiree from Sweden in his sixties, a family of four from Arizona and a Welsh couple on their honeymoon. “Everything we’ll see on this tour stems from this place we’re standing in front of right now,” says Rifkin. Behind us is a dorm building for New York University students but back in the ’60s, it was Café Bizarre, a schlocky venue that was one of the few places a new group called The Velvet Underground could get a gig. Led by Lou Reed, the band got their big break one night when Andy Warhol walked in, was taken by their raw, cacophonous sound and took them under his wing.

Later we find ourselves outside the John Varvatos store on the Bowery, a street that was formerly New York’s skid row. Now it’s a boutique selling high-priced rock-inspired clothing but it used to be a bar that became the epicentre of the ’70s punk movement – CBGB. It was here that many performers found their home, including the Ramones, Television, Patti Smith and Talking Heads.

“I was in a truly terrible band that played here,” admits Rifkin, sheepishly.

“What were they called?” asks the woman from Wales.

“I’ll never tell,” says Rifkin, smiling.

He laments the hyper-gentrified transformation of the neighbourhood. “It’s good that the homeless shelter next door owns this building and it’s right that they should make money from the store that rents this space. I just wish it wasn’t a store that sold $1600 jackets to ad executives who go to see Aerosmith concerts. I kind of wish it was a Starbucks because that would at least make the space accessible to everyone.”

This area of the East Village is rich in punk history, especially when it comes to The Ramones, who shot two of their seminal album covers here – in Extra Place, a laneway behind CBGB, and against a wall in a community garden not far away. We visit both spots and, of course, take each other’s photos, looking nowhere near as cool as the band did more than 45 years ago.

“This is the saddest part of the tour,” says Rifkin at the corner of St Mark’s Place and Second Avenue. From the 1920s to 2020, when it closed due to COVID, this was the location of Gem Spa, a beloved all-night newsstand that also originated the Egg Cream, an iconic New York beverage that contains neither egg nor cream but is a mix of milk, seltzer water and chocolate syrup. The store pops up everywhere in the city’s past – in the 1985 Madonna film Desperately Seeking Susan; in a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat; in a poem by Allen Ginsberg; in the photo on the back cover of proto-punk band New York Dolls’ debut album in 1973.

After two hours and multiple stops, Rifkin ends the tour on a reflective note. “Geographically, we’re only seven minutes walk away from where we started. But we’ve travelled a long way in terms of the music that was created here and the way this neighbourhood has changed in that time.

“New York regularly dies, then a new version of the city comes along. In music, that change is always driven by young people who didn’t fit in where they came from, who move here with no money, who produce music in the cheapest way possible. So if you take anything from today, make it this – support young musicians.”

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