Closing Of CBGB Completes “Cultural Rape” Of The East Village

CBGB has closed:

Last night was the last concert at CBGB, the famously crumbling rock club that has been in continuous, loud operation since December 1973, serving as the casual headquarters and dank incubator for some of New York’s most revered groups — [Patti] Smith’s, the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, Television, Sonic Youth — as well as thousands more whose blares left less of a mark on history but whose graffiti and concert fliers might still remain on its walls.

After a protracted real estate battle with its landlord, a nonprofit organization that aids the homeless, CBGB agreed late last year to leave its home at 313 and 315 Bowery at the end of this month. And Ms. Smith’s words outside the club, where her group was playing, encapsulated the feelings shared by fans around the city and around the world: CBGB is both the scrappy symbol of rock’s promise and a temple that no one wanted to see go.

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“It’s the cultural rape of New York City that this place is being pushed out,” said John Nikolai, a black-clad 36-year-old photographer from Staten Island whose tie read “I quit.”

Added Ms. Smith outside the club, “It’s a symptom of the empty new prosperity of our city.”

Meanwhile, the Daily News Don McLeanizes CBGB with a maudlin headline — “The Night Music Died”:

The birthplace of punk, CBGB, where bands such as the Ramones and Talking Heads got their start, threw its own headbanging funeral last night.

With rock poet Patti Smith offering the expletive-laden eulogy to the grungy Bowery icon, Mohawk-wearing mourners took one final twirl in the mosh pit.

“You know what’s sad? Turning New York City into the suburbs,” Smith said. “The whole thing’s sad. This is just a symptom of the empty prosperity of our times.”

You know what is actually sad? Fetishizing Manhattan and turning punk rock into a museum piece . . .