HILLY KRISTAL: 1931-2007

Hilly Kristal, founder and owner of the legendary punk club CBGBs, passed away on August 28, 2007, after a long battle with lung cancer.

Before opening CBGBs in 1973, Hilly had managed the Village Vanguard jazz club in the 1960s and his own place called "Hilly's" on East Ninth Street. Opening what he intended to be a country and blues bar (CBGBs stood for "Country, Blue Grass Blues") at 315 Bowery, Hilly allowed local musicians to use his place on Sundays and saw CBGBs become the most famous showcase for punk and alternative music over the following three decades. 

In his history of CBGBs, Hilly wrote: "I thought it would be a whole lot of fun to have my own club with all this kind of music playing there. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, things didn't quite work out the way I'd expected."

In October of 2006, after years of fighting his landlord, the Bowery Residents Committee (BRC), a not-for-profit organization funded with corporate donations as well as with city and state tax money, that sought to make a huge profit by demanding more than $30,000 per month from CBGBs, Hilly closed the club, vowing to resurrect CBGBs elsewhere in the city. Unfortunately, aside from a clothing and souvenir shop nearby at 23 Saint Mark's Place, this never came to pass. [The whole story can be seen in SHADOW #51 and by clicking this link]

The death of CBGBs and of Hilly Kristal is more of the cultural genocide currently sweeping New York City. Fueled by low-interest loans encouraging the removal of lower-income residents and small locally-owned businesses for the construction of "luxury" apartment complexes and by the invasion of yuppies, Euro-trash and corporate raiders, the current hyper-inflated real estate market pushed by landlord greed has been forcing out neighborhood businesses, venues and cultural institutions all over the city. Family-owned shops, clubs, affordable cafés and restaurants are all being displaced by astronomical rents, replaced by corporate chain stores, with a bank on every corner and a Starbucks every few feet. Our city is rapidly becoming homogenized into a carbon copy of every other bland and lifeless city in the US. Ironically, the special flavor of New York City that attracts these big moneyed carpetbaggers is being wiped out by their presence here. Once nothing interesting, stimulating, culturally significant or affordable is left here, they will move on, leaving irreparable damage in their wake. The people and the scene that gives this city its life blood will be gone.

The death of CBGBs and of Hilly Kristal is yet another nail in the coffin of New York City.

– Chris Flash