The orthodox community came out to protest the dangers of the internet, but a counter rally shed light on a different problem—hushed up sex abuse.  

By Matt Harvey

They traveled in cars and buses from far Rockland County and Lakewood, New Jersey. But mostly they took the subway from points in Brooklyn: Midwood, Crown Heights and Williamsburg. They spoke a mixture of Yiddish and English. By the strike of 8 pm on Sunday, well over 40,000 ultra-orthodox men—ranging in age from children with ringlets to gray-bearded grandfathers, representing all the iterations of Haredi dress—had passed through the gates of Citi Field and Arthur Ashe Stadium for what was billed by its organizers as a “big family meeting.” It was an impressive show of strength by the standards of any religious movement.

Event spokesperson, Eytan Kobre, an attorney and editor for Jewish newspaper, Mispacha, highlighted the night’s stated theme, “raising awareness” about the dangers of an unregulated internet (especially readily accessible porn) with a broad-based secular appeal to family values. “Do you like clean water?” he asked reporters rhetorically. “These people just want clean internet!” Haskel Landau, who had come down from Muncie, New York, translated the main points found in the slim Yiddish volumes that each of the attendees had received at the gate for an inquisitive stranger. He said: “It tells you how to stay within the law when surfing the web.”

After briefly pausing to take a phone call, Landau hints that there might be more to the night’s program than a simple rejection of the latest trapping of modernity, adding, “we’re here to show that we have a group of very old rabbis protecting us.”

Members of the media and a small contingent of millennial bloggers who showed up dressed like cavemen and were chanting “ooga-booga”—in an ironical “counter-protest” to a perceived threat to their own internet freedoms—mostly took Kobre’s anti-internet message at face value, but there were indications everywhere that the stately event (which cost between $1-$1.3 million depending on who you ask) had less to do with internet porn than a “rabbinical hierarchy” flexing its muscle in the face of mounting criticism about how it has handled accusations of child sexual abuse within the community. (Earlier this month the New York Times published a particularly explosive investigative account about Hasidic rabbis directing their congregants to shun members of its community who go to the police with allegations of sexual abuse against their co-religionists.)

Such criticism flourishes online where it might otherwise lie dormant, explained Avi Burnstein, a 36-year-old Manhattan resident who was part of a more serious and larger counter-rally—made up mostly of former-Haredi, including Deborah Feldman, author of the memoir Unorthodox. “The Internet is not the problem,” said Burnstein, who added, “90% of these families already don’t use the Internet in their homes, they’ve already been told all about it.”

Hannah Shapiro, an attractive 35-year-old mother of four who very recently left a tightly-knit ultra-orthodox Brooklyn community was standing on Roosevelt Avenue holding up a sign in Yiddish that said, “Stand Up to Perverts.” Choking back tears, she recalled “three close friends” who suffered at the hands of sexual predators and herself going to school with marked “signs of physical abuse that no one did anything about.” She adds that her generation was “taught not to ask questions,” but she hoped her presence on Roosevelt Avenue would “force some people to open their eyes.”

Standing as close as he could to the counter protest without feeling uncomfortable, a thirty-year-old Hasidic man from Midwood who would only give his name as Moishe, because his parents would “kill him” for even “watching” the counter-demonstration, agreed that the organizers of the event mainly want “outsiders,” referring mainly to apostates and secular Jews, “to see their strength.” Eyeing the signs and commotion across the avenue, his sentiments wavered from “curiosity” to “pity.” Before finally walking back to Citi Field he said: “These are our people and they’ve cut their ties with friends and family . . . with well everything,” he added unable to mask his astonishment. “It’s just the type of thing an event like this is meant to avoid.”

Here’s the thumbnail sketch: starting in 1957, Rosset’s magazine, the Evergreen Review managed to popularize the Beats at a time when the literary establishment was under the thumb of such high-modernism worshipping mandarins as critic Edmund Wilson. Later, after he founded Grove Press he continued to promote the Beats as well as pieces of outré fiction in a more traditionally narrative vein, a push culminating in a legal victory allowing the publication of DH Lawrence’s formerly banned “pornographic novel,” Lady Chatterly’s Lover. This laid the groundwork for William Burrough’s Naked Lunch and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer to be reviewed and discussed and the rest is history.

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, beset by financial and union problems, and no longer as relevant in a field filled with counterculture imprints, Grove went into decline. But for many who were actually in Rosset’s orbit during the late 60s and early ‘70s, this fails to account for how dangerous Grove was seen by the Nixon-era political establishment. As well as how far these reactionary forces were willing to go to undermine it’s success.

Last night, Rosset’s former friend and confidante Mike Golden—writer and publisher (of the counterculture online magazine Smoke Signals)— referred me to an interview he conducted with Rosset years before his death. Golden, who describes Rosset as “possessing a jutting jaw, snow white hair, and the energy of a man 30 years younger,” quotes him placing the blame firmly on none other than the FBI for breaking into the back of Grove.

It’s a dark tale involving a flurry of strange events; a moribund informant riled up the printers union that worked out of his headquarters and agitated them into a long and costly strike. At the same time, a group of radical feminists baricadded themselves in Rosset’s office—smashing it to pieces—while he was traveling in Denmark.

When the dust settled Grove’s strength was sapped, its workforce slashed from 300 to 20. As he explained in the interview: “The FBI was responsible. I knew it was them. They destroyed us. It’s hard to explain it to people on the outside, but that takeover really was the end of Grove Press.”

Maginio had
given me a hickey and sunk her nails in my back earlier in the evening
(I could still feel the sting), and now she was telling people she
wanted to "hang out."

During
the evening’s whiskey buzz, Maginio had come to symbolize everything
that was formerly great about Mars—and the old East Village. As she
explained: She had hopped a boxcar from L.A. four years ago. Now she was
noticing that a very minor local punk-celebrity had noticed her. "I’m
going to ignore him for five months," she rapped joyously. "I’m going to
make him think he’s chasing me."

Maginio
reminded me of how this strip looked when I was a kid—like a
beautifully decayed hulk of a forlorn ship on the edge of an apocalyptic
planet. Back then, First Street was the soul of skid row: Sterno-bums
huddled around trashcan fires, rubble and tires. A little bit scary,
maybe, but cool, too—and free.

Now
something much more sinister was about to kill the neighborhood. For
good. Maybe a night with Maginio was just the thing to turn that around,
I thought, a bit too romantically. In any case, where will she sleep?

Finally
I told Koteles, "Basically, Morgan’s just like me when I was her age—so
I have to take her home and at least let her crash on my couch."

But
Koteles, a seasoned Mars bartender who holds the most shifts after
staying for six years, stopped me up short. "Just go home," she
cautioned. "It’ll be all right."

A
few days later, Koteles and I were smoking a cigarette outside the fire
door when she unfolded a yellow note from her pocketbook and gave it to
me. It read: "Dear Amy, You are an angel sent from heaven. Thank you
for looking out for me. I cannot repay you. Love, Morgan." She had
gotten back to her "ghetto ass boat" at the West 72nd Street boat basin
in one piece. And her mouse was OK too.

An
attractive 30-year-old blond with shoulder tattoos and a rockabilly
vibe, Koteles is the latest in a line of queen bees that have been the
heart and soul of Mars since its opening in 1986. Johnny Casino, a
first-wave punk rocker who’s been at Mars from the beginning, says Hank
Penza—the bar’s owner, and a reformed gangster who usually keeps his
mouth shut to the media—hires women who are all "smart and tough."

Koteles,
however, brings to the mix a warmth befitting a "nursing school
dropout," and the empathy of someone who, as she explains, was "homeless
for a year." Like most of the staff she got her job after "helping out"
during a rough patch in her life—she was "handing out a hundred
resumés" to a lot of places she didn’t want to work.

In
keeping with the spirit of the place, Koteles seems almost
pathologically willing to forgive the myriad sins of her regular
customers as long as they keep their cool and listen to her. But there
are things that set her off, she says, and yuppies dumb enough to take
their drinks outside is foremost, because "the bar will get a ticket."
Then there are the condos, which will ultimately cost her a job.

Since
the axe came down on CBGB’s in 2006 and a condo and retail complex
sprung up at East First Street between the Bowery and Second Avenue,
what’s left of the strip’s once notorious seedy side—hard-living
artists, aging punk rockers and wizened winos—have held out against
encroaching gentrification at Mars Bar.

As everyone knows by now, Mars’
building—and all the other 1920s-era tenements on Second Avenue between
East Houston and First Street—is set to be demolished this August.
Sounding the cry of alarm for his fellow East Village preservationists
when the news broke in December, Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York wrote,
"this is a big [loss]." In the past week, the residents living upstairs
had already moved away. The old Bowery is truly only for the historians
now.

Open
its single steel fire door on any given afternoon and you step inside
another world. At 3 p.m. the last Sunday of June, Sid Vicious’ version
of "My Way" was on the juke. "Remember gay Ramiro?" asks Wayne Kral, a
surrealist painter with a Buddy Holly tattoo. "He loved this song. He’d
sing it all squishy." Kral does a contorted little jig in honor of his
friend Ramiro.

The
handful of regulars laugh. The next round is on you. For a few minutes,
the world is in its place. The squares are outside brunching and
shopping at Whole Foods—or whatever squares do on a Sunday afternoon—
and you’re safely ensconced in the graffiti-splayed darkness.

Kral,
who moonlights as a barback, is lobbying the bartender for a late-night
shift. "It would be fun to work at Mars!" That’s when everyone
remembers. The mood of the room shifts instantly, and your heart sinks
as well—even though you’re not a regular. The place is a corpse, man.
"What am I going to do without Mars Bar?" Kral wails.

Terry
Galmatz, a grizzled old painter, is willing to utter the unthinkable:
"I might stop drinking." Then he gives a sharp laugh as if to say, As if. Just the night before,

someone had snatched one of his prints off the wall without paying for it, so he’s out 25 bucks.

He
hands the bartender another one to sell on consignment. "But seriously,
it’s sad. This place was inspiring," Galmatz says. "Anyone can hang up
art here. Where am I going to get a show?" Talk turns to Bloomberg and
yuppies and how Downtown has become a millionaire’s theme park. "Fuck
it. I don’t want to live in Manhattan Mall anyway," a tough-talking
furniture mover, who has managed to stay in the neighborhood, adds.
"They can have it. Blow it the fuck up."

Sipping
his glass of red wine, Ray "Windows" Bell nods and changes the subject
to the previous night’s thunderstorm. "It sounded like the artillery in
‘Nam." Then someone tells the story about the time "Crackhead" Charlie
accidently put his head through one of the tile window when the cops
were paying a visit and everyone laughs. The mood lightens again.

That’s
how it’s been at Mars these days, long periods of aging East Village
holdouts pretending to forget—that they have to let go of the Bowery;
that they have to get on with their lives— interspersed with a gnawing
uncertainty about the future.

Hang
out for a few years at Mars, and you’ll earn a nickname. Eric
"Juggernaut," a bearded bartender who looks like an extra in a mid-’60s
Peter Fonda biker flick, has drawn up a seating chart for some of his
favorite lushes.

There’s
Jeff "the Toof" (a reputed coke dealer), and both "bad" and "good"
Marcuses (who also both allegedly sell coke). There’s "Jew" Peschi,
who’s not Jewish, but carries a switchblade and talks in riddles that
need to be slowly deciphered. Then there’s "tortured soul" Paul;
"Skateboarder"; and Gary "Rek," who claims to have lost citizenship to
both the United States and the U.K.

Each
day, though, the crowd of regulars gets a little thinner, as if each
drunk is making his own private peace with the corpse and checking out.

Gerry
Price, a tattooed, balding, selfproclaimed chick magnet—who bragged
about being "known for having sex with any girl who will have sex with
me" in a standout 2005 Observer profile of Mars Bar—disappeared a
month ago. But a color portrait of him bare-chested remains above the
bar, showing him as he tears at his nipple piercing. His Facebook status
currently lists him as "gay."

Befitting
its bizarre world ethos, being gay at Mars seems to mean something
different than it does in the outside world. "Gay" Billy’s putative
sexuality is certainly the most normal thing about him, for instance.
The 5-foot-4 man recently reappeared after a long spell in Florida—
where, he says, he "inherited property"— because he got word that the
end was near for Mars. Billy’s known for sneaking into the bathroom
stalls in the hopes of getting laid. This would seem fair enough if not
for the fact that he mostly sneaks in by himself. Gay Billy also
frequently leaves the dive on a stretcher.

"He
gets taken out of ambulances about once a month," Eric Juggernaut
explains, as it’s nothing more than a minor inconvenience. "Last week he
went out on back-to-back nights. Then there was the night he called the
ambulance on himself."

Asked
what he loves most about Mars, Billy says softly, "That I can leave in
an ambulance and come back the next morning." Then he tries to
half-heartedly get me into the bathroom with him before disappearing
into the stall for a while. Being hauled out cold on a stretcher isn’t
as rare at Mars as you would think. "Happens here more than in any other
bars," Koteles says.

For
weeks, Chris Collins, a selfdescribed "pill-head" and "graduate of
Pilgrim State Mental House for the criminally insane, ’77," had been an
ever-present figure at the Mars death-watch. Even the staff doesn’t know
what day it will close exactly, so afternoons can get tense.

"The bar runs on rumor," Paola, a daytime staffer, says. "It’s driving us nuts."

The
first time Collins caught me in his thousand-yard stare, he told me he
was going to "break my fucking neck." Scratch the surface of his
foaming-at the-mouth psycho persona, though, and he’s a total sweetheart
who’s liable to call you out of the blue one morning to complain about
"postmodernism and drowning in information."

Despite his "6th-grade
education," Collins is also a sharper judge of urban architecture than
many better-adjusted longtime city-dwellers. Flicking a cigarette butt
in the direction of the 12-story boxes across First Street, which anyone
can see have dimmed the once-bright and shabby street, he comments:
"You see them? You could drive to Jacksonville and get that. It’s
atrocious."

Every couple of days
Collins will get a little too rowdy and hyper—"Am I scaring you?" he
might ask a European tourist— and one of the bartenders will have to
gently give him the bum’s rush. But he’s always allowed back the next
morning, and it’s difficult to imagine Collins—and "Gay" Billy, or that
redheaded Morgan Maginio—finding that anywhere else. And that’s the sad
part.

The very
mention of the term "Mars’ regular" is enough to collect injured looks
or worse from bartenders at a host of sympathetic East Village dive
bars. Or as a pretty brunette who tends bar at Mona’s (and actually grew
up in the nabe) said to me when the topic was raised, "I hope they go
somewhere else." The fact that Mars’ regulars aren’t always on their
best behavior is almost a source of pride with patrons and staff alike.

But
more than anything else that defines the extreme end of the dive ethos
is the almost pathological sense of forgiveness afforded by staff to the
clientele. "We do things a little differently here, we just don’t hold
grudges," Koteles explains. For a bartender, this isn’t naiveté or false
modesty, it’s just fact. She has picked up shifts at Black Sheep, a bar
in Brooklyn, where she’ll be able to keep the ethos alive.

"I
don’t even know how to stay mad at someone," says "Moonshine Shorey," a
formerly meth-addicted Adonis who subs in at Mars and holds the crown
for Mr. Lower East Side. Everyone gets drunk and "fucks up," he says,
"especially me." Not to mention the economic incentive: those stumble
bums you kick out today could be tipping customers instead. What seems
like a self-abnegating rip-off is actually a mutually beneficial
arrangement bent on self-preservation.

The place is looking worse than ever. Frat
types have punched out a third of the tile-sized windows just for
kicks. The wood molding around the bar has been auctioned off to "some
yuppie place" for five grand. The two graffiti-drenched plywood bathroom
doors have been sold for $500 each to buyers unknown.

But
Moonshine Shorey doesn’t flinch when asked what he wants to take with
him out of Mars. It’s a sense of loyalty. "The thing I’ve always noticed
about the people here, yeah they might be crazy," he says. "But they’ll
always have your back. Not many people are like that anymore." 

George Nashak has been trying to keep the peace with his sympathetic smile. Since the meeting began at 6:30 p.m., Nashak, who is the Deputy Commissioner of Adult Services for New York City’s Department of Homeless Services, along with Christopher King, an attorney for the city, have been the most visible of the five city officials facing irate neighbors to discuss the proposal concerning a 12-story, 328-bed homeless facility scheduled to open this month at 127 W. 25th St. in Chelsea.

The meeting is tense on both sides. When King is told by one community member that the DHS’ 33-page "Fair Share Analysis" is "fi lled with lies and distortions," King replies, with derision in his voice, "Put it in a letter to the DHS." 

Sensing the hostility in the crowd, Nashak smiles and says, "I’ll look at it." 

It’s May 10, and around 70 area residents have shown up for this public airing of grievances. With the exception ofone Asian woman, they’re all white: stay-at-home-moms with toddlers in tow, bankers, lawyers, real-estate types and a handful of artists. Egged on by a few loudmouths, the cohort steadily works itself into a fury.

A Latino man in an expensive-looking pinstriped suit is curious to know if "these people" could be barred from Whole Foods after 9:30 at night. When someone claims that the homeless shelter is the result of a political fi x, he belts out in a thick accent: "That’s why we should smash the building!"

Nashak has been absorbing the crowd’s hostility for an hour now and the warmth is starting to wane.

A woman in a stylishly cut trench coat says she isn’t worried about the homeless per se—just "certain types" of them. "Do the people in the ‘chemical program’ have total access to walking the streets?" she wants to know. "I have a 13-year-old daughter."

Nashak manages an empathetic nod, but he looks perplexed. The woman’s fear is obviously genuine—you can hear it in her voice—but the question seems implausible from this educated crowd. "We don’t keep our residents on lockdown, ma’am," he says, fi nally. "It’s not a prison."

A few feet from Nashak, a tanned, thin woman—fi fty-something, in a lightweight scarf and sunglasses—sits in the front row next to an equally thin and tan man. "That’s the problem!" the woman thunders.

The implication is clear: Many of those present would like the homeless locked up. If Nashak smiles again after that, I don’t notice it.

This is the latest chance for area residents to express their unwillingness to allow this homeless shelter to take root in their gentrifying section of Chelsea. Despite setbacks, The Chelsea Flatiron Coalition, a group that has organized to stop the shelter, is moving forward with a lawsuit against the DHS and the BRC, claiming the new shelter is illegally zoned. 

The next speaker introduces himself as Jeff Lew. He wears a perfectly pressed blue blazer, a light blue dress shirt and khakis. Lew politely thanks the commissioners for their time, and then he introduces his 9-year-old daughter. Putting his arm around her, he raises a rolled-up flyer in the direction of the panel and tells them she’s grown up her whole life in Chelsea, it’s the only world she’s ever known, soon she’ll be 11 and wanting to walk to school alone. "What will I tell her?" Lew asks. 

Hunched over now, King glares at Lew. "Sir, do you have a question?" he asks.

Lew continues: "If one of your residents—or however you want to characterize these people—hurts, injures, kills or attacks one of our residents, what happens? How much money is in your budget to pay for their family to re-locate?"

"Sir, sir, with all due respect," King responds. "That’s not a question I’m going to allow as it relates to pending litigation."

The crowd erupts with catcalls, hisses, boos and cries of "Bought and sold!" A psychiatrist in the audience brings up the safety of his patients. He’s going to have tomove his practice; he knows what "these people" can do, he explains.

A 6-foot-8 mountain of a Yuppie, muscles bulging through his Armani suit jacket, makes his way from the back of the room. After lecturing King on the nature of respect, he’s eventually ordered to sit down by a burly Hispanic community board member. "You’re out of order, you show some respect," he rails, as another board member restrains him.

The Yuppie’s friend throws down his black messenger bag with a derisive laugh and shouts: "You’re out of order! This whole fucking trial is out of order." He’s obviously been waiting to quote Pacino all night.

His lecture on civics finished, the Yuppie has one last issue to raise. "I’m the president of Chelsea Atelier, luxury condos right on the corner of Seventh Avenue, and we have three apartments available," he says, licking his lips for the kill. "So if any of you would like to take a look."

Nashak answers coolly: "I can’t afford it."

Ironically, Muzzy Rosenblatt, the man community members most wanted a piece of, was not at this particular public meeting. Rosenblatt is chairman of the Bowery Residents’ Committee (BRC), the non-profit agency that operates homeless programs throughout the city. The West 25th Street shelter is set to be its largest facility.

That the DHS was speaking on behalf of BRC, its client, is evidence of what Rosenblatt himself deems the "complicated" relationship that nonprofit homeless service providers have with the city. Rosenblatt was one of a select few who shaped city policy toward the homeless, beginning during the Koch administration and lasting until he left the DHS in 1999.

Strangely enough, this makes him one of the architects of what is now the biggest impediment to opening the West 25th Street shelter: a Giuliani-era law against shelters consisting of over 200 beds.

Community members see something much more sinister in the arrangement; a tell-tale sign that the DHS awards contracts on the basis of cronyism, and more specifically, that the Bloomberg administration is running cover for a private operation run for the benefit of Rosenblatt, one of their own. Lew, a 46-year-old "real estate professional,"explains: "The city is breaking its own laws, and I find it reprehensible."

What is, on the face of it, a local battle over the placement of one large shelter in one Manhattan neighborhood is actually symptomatic of a growing citywide problem. Vocal groups in neighborhoods as diverse as Chelsea, Greenpoint and Crown Heights are protesting homeless shelters on the grounds that their turf is "recently developed" (read: gentrified) and home to a baby boom that started about a decade ago, when the streets in their areas were cleaned up in earnest. (Rosenblatt is involved in at least two of these turf wars, as opposition has also been raised over a proposed BRC shelter in Greenpoint.)

Some might remember Rosenblatt as the notorious figure who shuttered the gate permanently on CBGBs in 2005 for nonpayment of back rent. "I will not subsidize CBGBs at the expense of the homeless," he told the papers at the time. Rosenblatt is quick to offer up endorsements by a flurry of super-rich corporations—including NYU and Extel Development—to the tune that the BRC has not hurt their development schemes on the ever-burgeoning Bowery one iota. Rosenblatt pushes his case a step further in material prepared for CB4, implying that the BRC has—since its arrival in 1992 on what was then still very much skid-row—actually encouraged "an increase in luxury housing, high-end boutiques and surging property values." When Nashak relayed this possibility to the crowd at the Red Cross building, they hissed in disbelief.

Perhaps Bloomberg’s gentrification policies have just been too successful for his own good. Time and again, Chelsea residents I spoke with brought up just how many children live in their neighborhood compared to a decade ago, when Chelsea was still "filled with porn stores and vacant lots."

To illustrate his point, Lew tells me that there was just one kid under the age of 10 in his building when he bought his apartment in 1997. "Now there are 25," he says.

Lila Nordstrom, 27, lives with her parents in a West 25th Street apartment that’s near the proposed shelter. The family has lived there since Lila was 10 when, according to her, it was "one of the only residential buildings" in a "no-man’s zone of empty parking lots." Since then, they’ve seen the surrounding blocks— which Nordstrom nicknames "Flatironish"— gradually morph into the stroller mecca it is today. "It’s like a kid explosion," Nordstrom says.

Walk a block in either direction of the BRC site and you’ll pass plenty of evidence that merchants have responded to the increase in families. To the east "indoor playground." A walk toward the corner of Seventh Avenue brings you to the door of Buy Buy Baby. Even the Chelsea Mercantile Building—a storied super luxury condominium that rents its massive first floor to Whole Foods—has installed a kid’s playroom along with other amenities, such as a concierge and gym.

A week after the Community Board ruckus, Chelsea Moms—an ad-hoc coalition dedicated to deep-sixing the shelter—protested in front of Speaker Christine Quinn’s Chelsea office. It was the second time the group had hit the streets in two weeks, and Maggie Gallagher-Lilly, an attractive 43-year-old stay-at-home mother of three daughters, leads around two-dozen middle-aged moms in a chant: "Moms want the facts!" Maggie, and her husband Jacques, a banker, signed a mortgage for a West 25th Street loft space last May. In June, the Wall Street Journal broke the story that the shelter was opening next door.

While protesters have criticized Quinn for having "checked out" of the process, it is Rosenblatt who is once again the main target for abuse. Time and again the name "Muzzy" is used by angry citizens in the area like an invective. One placard sums up the angry sentiment: "Muzzy, move your shelter to Forest Hills. Let your neighbors get mugged at night," it reads. Of course, Midtown is the center for New York’s street homeless, not Forest Hills.

At the meeting, Gallagher-Lilly asked DHS representatives whether they were in fact covering for Rosenblatt to enrich himself through the shelter system. Told the BRC is a non-profit charity, Gallagher-Lilly shot back that they were getting rich and she had seen their proof. "They’re sending orchids to neighbors to woo them, and yet you say the BRC doesn’t make a profit," she scoffed.

Like many of the other family’s represented at the protest, the Gallagher-Lilly household has coughed up $750 per bedroom to the Chelsea Flatiron Coalition to keep the lawsuit against the BRC shelter afloat.

"Unfortunately, there are a lot of falsehoods being circulated by anonymous organizations," Rosenblatt explains. "I’ve been transparent and invited people to been transparent and invited people to  come by our programs."

Asked if she’s ever met with Rosenblatt personally, Gallagher-Lilly replies icily: "I don’t want to talk to this person, he’s a liar." Her husband agrees: "Just flagrantlylies to us and smiles."

When asked if they think there are larger political realities to the placement of the shelter than just the BRC getting a good lease, Jacques Gallagher-Lilly hands his 9-month-old daughter to his wife while he considers the question. After a brief moment, he nods thoughtfully and says: "I heard a rumor that [the move] is because Muzzy owns an apartment on the Bowery, and he wants his property values to go up."

Residents pass around rumors and innuendos regarding Rosenblatt—and the real motive behind the BRC move—with great pride. There’s the one about the new site being closer to the R Train, which he uses to commute from Forest Hills. Lila Nordstrom’s 66-year-old mother, Carla—an energetic retired teacher who frequents anti-war rallies and boasts of "never" having voted for Bloomberg—has an even more straightforward take on the chairman’s motives. "He’s doing it to make money, maybe individual money," she says, assuredly. "I assume that at some point we’re going to see him walking out in handcuffs!"

While citing rumors of his alleged financial shenanigans leaves Rosenblatt cold, the idea that Chelsea residents might be genuinely afraid of BRC residents seems to shake him. He says: "I really think it’s ignorance." I ask him whether one of his residents has ever assaulted someone who lives on the Bowery. "No, never," he replies gravely. "At least in the 10 years I’ve been aboard."

Of course, East Chelsea’s vocal community members remain unconvinced and now they have a new ally in the fight, the landlord of 127 W. 25th St., which says it was snookered into letting the BRC sign a lease. They’ve joined the CFC’s lawsuit.

One protester, a self-proclaimed "progressive" named Andy Barbaro, 62, admits to feeling ambivalent toward gentrification. When asked whether it’s possible that some of his fellow protesters just don’t like the homeless, he replies: "I think they definitely might be worried about their property values."

Don Hill the man has long straggly hair and a gaunt, slightly haunted look, like a cross between Tom Petty and Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. He
was holding up the far end of the bar as usual. "I like the fashion
parties, it’s something new," he said, looking not quite sure, but
pleased enough to have customers. When I told him that I first met him
as a kid when he worked with my dad at The Cat Club in the 1980s, he lit
up a bit. "Those days were wild. They were some good fucking times."
His emphasis trailing off a bit he added, "But change is important, and
this, well, this is change."

The mannequins filed off and The Beets, the
spirited, Jackson Heights-based trio, started tuning up and quickly
launched into a set of Ramones-influenced garage rock. Those famous
punks from Forest Hills figure so heavily in The Beet’s cosmology that
the band has its own sort of Arturo Vega. His name is Matthew Volz, and
he’s partial to artwork with "a lot of blood and guts." Asked his
artistic influences, he said, "Vega, man, and the trannies with
switchblades in Jackson Heights."

The Beets is fronted by Juan Wauters—a short
28-year-old originally from Uruguay—who writes its songs as well. "The
Ramones are huge in South America, fucking Beatles-huge!" he said, still
visibly buzzing from his performance and grabbing tightly onto his
girlfriend, also a musician. Without prompting he added, "She’s a lot
smarter than these fucking models, you know." Asked if his songs—the
lyrics of which are sometimes difficult to understand—were mostly about
love, he nodded. "Yeah, love." Then he paused for a second, adding, "and
hate and violence. They’re mostly about hate." 

So the partnership between the world-weary, blessedly still standing Don Hill (who has provided on-the-scene, drink-in-hand management at high-profile nightspots since he helmed the Cat Club in the mid-1980s) and the dynamic two late-aughties entrepreneurs would rescue Manhattan from the clutches of such influential, glitzy spots as, well Khan’s Rose Bar, which sits in the Gramercy Hotel. (Just this week, Khan announced he would no longer work with the upscale club.)

Don Hill’s infrastructure has definitely gotten a tune-up. Formerly two dingy rooms, consisting of a bar and stage, the space has been blacked out, laser-filled and smoke injected. Blinding strobes go off every few minutes. At 3 a.m. on a recent Friday, the dance floor was still filled and the bells and whistles—as well as bassheavy techno mixes of alt-rock favorites— kept the crowd moving, if slowly. The disconnect created by foggy blackness interspersed with seconds of blinding white is jarring; and taken together with a booming, bass-heavy rock soundtrack, there was a stoned, E-fueled vibe.

The kids felt it in their bones and were trying. Girls made out half-heartedly. Going overboard, a guy in a white T-shirt kept trying to swing off one of the steam-pipes, only to be pried off by a bouncer. Two creepy-looking dudes with identical red, bushy beards loped across the dance floor chasing red laser beams. But there was no getting around it: Something felt missing from the mix. There’s too much smoke and mirrors to figure out if anything interesting is really going on. Maybe that’s the point.

It’s still a great space and the upgrades have only increased the chances of the right promoter/DJ changing everything. It’s happened before, in the early-aughts. Back then, hip dance nights like Tiswas (and, we hate to admit, MisShapes) rescued the club from near oblivion; it had been coasting for years. Doing away with bands for the most part seems a choice more borne of economic necessity than blind allegiance to dance music, and the banquettes and stripper poles set atop what was formerly the stage are faintly ridiculous.

Standing there in the fog, I couldn’t help but remember one of the coolest nights out of my life—hanging out there when I was about 18. On stage, Donovan Leitch, fronting Nancy Boy, was doing his best “Young Americans” styled-moves, while his guitarist sang about smoking freebase. For some reason, a brunette Scandinavian model who I’ve since convinced myself was Helena Christensen talked to me in between numbers. I clung to my hip to stop my leg from trembling, but that just made my drink shake. I looked up: It didn’t matter, no one cared that I was shaking in my boots, and I calmed down. Everyone was having fun. Thinking about it, I realized what the problem with Don Hill’s was: Everything—its shabby chairs, its DayGlo pop art, its techno-Strokes mixes— is a little too curated, too forced, too self-referential. So these kids have to try a little too hard. But if they do, it seems like they might just get it right.

>> Don Hill’s

511 Greenwich St. (at Spring St.), 212-219-2850.

But every few weeks you need to try something new, if only to remind yourself why you hardly leave the house in the first place anymore. This night, “the new place” was just across Avenue B from Mona’s, a blacked-out wisp of an upstairs room, which after serving as numerous other spots (Uncle Ming’s, The Hose), has reopened as White Noise. Back in August, the owners spelled out grand goals for their nascent establishment. “We feel like the city’s over-saturated with a lot of commercial stuff,” one of them told a local news website, adding that White Noise would offer patrons a down and dirty rock ‘n’ roll vibe along with a “weirdo room.”

For décor, the owners have crossed a 1980s Sunset Strip vibe with boom-era New York speakeasy—so you get the Viper Room as imagined after five drinks at PDT. If it sounds satisfying, it’s not: a lot of cases filled with gilded bones and other junk surrounded by black walls and blood-red banquettes. The DJ booth, which sits above the entranceway, is a cool touch: You might even feel sorry for the scraggly-haired, aging guy spinning, nodding his way through “Cherry Bomb” like he’s excited. His balding pate was all the more conspicuous, as the average age in the room seemed to hover at 23. The style of the crowd was a mix of jockish preppy, not to be confused with its more urbane cousin, and modern emo: hairdos and tattoos for the guys, short, colorful dresses or skinny jeans for the girls. Call it Real World-chic maybe. And despite his best efforts creating a sleazy vibe with Motley Cre—and that night’s 4-to-1 female-to-male ratio—stripper poles on the bars remained untouched. (As did the “weirdo room,” reportedly in reality a broom closet.)

Having gleaned all their moves from The Hills, the girls were more interested in giving out air-kisses and texting. You could practically feel them insulting each other through the high decibel Hair Metal. After a while, even the DJ lost interest and just gazed ahead coolly from his perch. Beers, at least, were somewhat rock ‘n’ roll: $6 for a bottle of Red Stripe or Stella.

The whole set-up confused me, but Pat, younger than I am, put his finger on the pulse. “These are like the ‘cool’ NYU kids,” he said, tossing up air quotes. “And the thing about cool NYU kids is they aren’t that cool.” We never should have left Mona’s.

White Noise, 225 Ave. B (at E. 13th St.), 212- 539-0925.

Perhaps an image circa 1953 springs to mind—a bloated Dylan Thomas raging vainly against a fatal pneumonia by soaking himself with morphine and scotch; or an electric-era Bob Dylan staying “up for days” writing the songs that would make Blonde on Blonde after taking what he enigmatically calls “the cure;” or a Tuinal-zonked Sid Vicious in 1979, pounding on the doors of the crowd Burroughs called “the junkies of the Chelsea Hotel.” When it stood as a fortress of America’s artistic demimonde for over three decades, such Dionysian iconography was mass-produced inside the walls of the Chelsea Hotel.

So when the new owners of a redesigned nightspot located in the hotel’s basement (which officially replaced the defunct Star Lounge and is called the Chelsea Room) decided on which of the hotel’s postwar hipster scenes to tap into to inspire revelers, they chose to ignore all of them. “It’s supposed to feel [like] you’re back in the early 1900s,” General Manager Marcus Bifaro told the Wall Street Journal; a puzzling choice considering the hotel as such didn’t even serve its first guest until 1905. A properly starched husband and wife out of an Edith Wharton novel is probably not even Bifaro’s (who comes by way of Montauk’s Surf Lounge) shorthand for wild abandon. He may have meant the 1920s. The sunken blacked-out basement entranceway has that vague speakeasy-vibe New Yorkers have grown to know so well.

As early in its lifespan as 11 p.m. on a recent Saturday night, however, there was nothing remotely secretive about the space. About 40 people, the vast majority twenty-something girls in similarly cut, light-colored cocktail dresses, were lined up in front the velvet rope at the top of the stairwell. The new owners have made a big deal about not charging $20 for a Grey Goose, but drink prices seem standard; and the much-publicized rooms were crowded and dark. Ask enough partiers questions about the hotel and you realize most of them don’t even know they’re standing underneath one. Sitting behind the ancient check-in desk, the hotel’s night manager seemed the only one with a clue of how the operation works. “Yeah, there’s a bar in the basement. And it’s open,” he says, slightly annoyed. “But it doesn’t have anything to do with us.”

>> THE CHELSEA ROOM 222 W. 23rd St. (betw. 7th & 8th Aves.), 212-675-3600.

So
I may have taken the sight of Hamill—the disillusioned working-class
college applicant turned sensational 1960s byline—speaking at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism School last
week a little too personally. (His talk was in honor of The Local East
Village, NYU’s much-announced, student-run, Times-affiliated news site.)
Weren’t the J-School’s sparkling rows of underused high-tech
journalistic gimmickry the definition of the triumph of cold cash over
merit? The more than 200 people, mostly twenty-somethings, who packed
the auditorium certainly weren’t mulling over the ironies inherent in
the set-up.

Hamill wasn’t pushing it on them either.

His
pleasantly gruff voice and dark-brown suit betrayed only worn-out
professionalism. And his remarks—recollections of the early- ’60s East
Village—would have been familiar to readers of his nostalgia-soaked 1987
New York essay “The New York We Lost.” But as befits a man who survived
disarming Robert Kennedy’s assassin to become a New York tabloid editor
and literary fixture, Hamill’s actual words have several potential
meanings. It was only a choice few—stuck furthest from the room’s center
of power— that heard beneath reminiscences about

Yiddish
old ladies and desperately cool beboppers. “The neighborhood had people
of uncommon quality,” he said. “People who only had made it here
because they believed in happy endings.” Hardly this crowd.

Fast-forward 20 years and the mystery is gone forever. a similarly-minded teen— who hasn’t already OD’d on Max’s related reminiscence from websites, books like Please Kill Me and rock mags—can plunk down $25 for Max’s Kansas City: Art, Glamour, Rock and Roll, a photo history out this week of the club’s two main iterations, which together lasted from 1966-82. The book is edited by gallerist Steven Kasher and features essays by a number of the club’s regulars. Besides photos of the usual suspects like Warhol and Reed, readers can get a glimpse of all sorts of Max’s related errata: tranny Rene Ricard getting blown by an “unidentified” who looks curiously like a young Steve Rubell, a picture of the restaurant menu (steak and lobster tails for $11.95) and a seating chart as zealous as anything created by Monkey Bar’s staff. Photos of the superstars and painters who made Max’s the focal point for the late 1960s art and fashion worlds are prefaced with a hagiographic essay penned by Factory hand Steven Watson. as the Factory era gives way to glitter-rock, we are treated to glam icons like Bowie and Iggy, while would-be famous punks (a notchthin Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine; a pre-Ramones baby-faced Dee-Dee) signal the beginnings of another period still. Mick Jagger makes an appearance covered in an ascot, fedora and shades. There are odder choices: a photo of Bonnie Raitt looks like it could have been taken inside any venue in the country.

To be sure, Max’s wouldn’t have been the magnet for artistic talent it was if it didn’t leave a few choice curiosities for this new volume. Even the most vapid of the club’s scenesters are more seasoned and interesting looking than the hottest poseurs who fill today’s party photo blogs. I couldn’t help wondering what later life brought an unidentified glitter kid—her long brown hair framing an enticing faraway gaze. You can chart a secret drug trend history by examining the scenesters’ eyes: from sleepy drunk in the beginning to speed-dilated pupils in the later ’60s, the Quaalude stupor of glam then into the hard-edged heroin constricted pupils of late-’70s punks who played the club’s second, more rock-centric incarnation. It’s interesting to note that already by then, Max’s cool-factor was created by nostalgia for the Velvets-era. For all of the venue’s purported musical influence, its crowd capacity never exceeded a hundred.

A sketched proposal of Forrest Meyers laser beam installation is compelling still, but most enlightening of all is an interview of Max’s first owner Mickey Ruskin conducted by iconic scenemaker Danny Fields shortly before the club closed for the first time in 1974. “Our Max’s-centric new York would never be the same,” Fields writes by way of introduction. already, the tone of prelapsarian longing had set in as the two go over a closing era. But Ruskin knows a thing or two about the club business. He thanks Warhol for making Max’s a success, while acknowledging that he also doomed it to obsolescence by attracting the Factory’s legions of “followers’ followers” who stayed when the kingpin left. a truly hot nightspot has always been lightning in a bottle, but the most valuable insight found in the book is Ruskin’s answer to Fields’ question, “What is commercial?” His reply: “Taking a situation and draining it.”