VIA PRESS RELEASE | “Jesse Rifkin pulls the reader along with him on this wild and deeply researched nostalgia trip through New York’s vanished music scene, starting in the Greenwich Village coffeehouses in the 1950s and ending in present-day Brooklyn. This dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker loved it!”
—Alice Sparberg Alexiou, author of The Devil’s Mile, The Flatiron and Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary
Take a walk through almost any neighborhood in Manhattan and you’ll likely pass some of the most significant clubs in American music history. But you won’t know it—almost all of these venues have been demolished or repurposed, leaving no record of what they were, how they shaped music scenes, or their impact on the neighborhoods around them. Traditional music history tells us that famous scenes are created by brilliant, singular artists. But dig deeper and you’ll find that they’re actually created by cheap rent, empty space, and other unglamorous factors that allow artistic communities to flourish.
The 1960s folk scene would have never existed without access to Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park. If the city hadn’t gone bankrupt in 1975, there would have been no punk rock. Brooklyn indie rock of the 2000s was only able to come together because of the borough’s many empty warehouse spaces. But these scenes are more than just moments of artistic genius—they’re also part of the urban gentrification cycle, one that often displaces other communities and, eventually, the musicians themselves.
Drawing from over a hundred exclusive interviews with a wide range of musicians, deejays, and scenesters, the writer, historian, and tour guide Jesse Rifkin painstakingly reconstructs the physical history of numerous classic New York music scenes. This Must Be the Place (Hanover Square Press, publication date: July 11, 2023) examines how these scenes came together, and fell apart—and shows how these communal artistic experiences are not just for rarefied geniuses but available to us all.
Jesse Rifkin is the owner and sole operator of Walk on the Wild Side Tours NYC, a music history walking tour company in New York City, and consults as a pop music historian for the Association for Cultural Equity. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveller, VICE, and Fodor’s Travel. Prior to his work as a historian, he spent twelve years touring the country as a working musician, playing at CBGB, Lincoln Center, and venues of every size and shape in between.
