I had a good lunch Christmas Day at the Indian restaurant Havelli on Lower Second Avenue. I hadn’t been to this neighborhood landmark in many years, and, in fact I don’t get get down to that neighborhood all that often.
But wen I’m there I’m always miffed about the way our lousy civic administrations have condoned the disappearance of too many neighborhood landmarks: fixtures of Yiddish culture transformed during the 1960s into counter- culture destinations.
The Second Avenue facade of the Fillmore does survive, but that’s it: behind it there is a completely anonymous apartment building.
Seeing it prompted a memory of 1976, when I was hanging out in the neighborhood with some mates from school.
The Fillmore had been closed by Bill Graham in 1971 and by ’76 had been broken into by squatters. And so we made our way freely into the abandoned theater.
It was in disrepair but traces of recent history remained.Splattered on the floor were old tickets to Fillmore concerts. There was a hall of dressing rooms reached by a kind of parapet at the back of the stage accessible by stairs. It really a bit like an archeological dig: five years in the life of a sixteen-year-old will seem like an epoch but certainly the Fillmore already belonged to a distinct historical cultural epoch.
Later in the ‘70s it became the gay disco The Saint.
Now it is something that just contributes so little to the neighborhood, the urban landscape.