If you found yourself looking for entertainment in the East Village 30 years ago, you might have ended up at the Limbo Lounge, described as a “gallery and performance space; serves refreshments” in this 1984 New York cover story on the newly hip Lower East Side.
This is where campy cult play Vampire Lesbians of Sodom got its start in 1984, two years before the Limbo Lounge closed.
Then there’s 350 East 10th Street, the former PS 64, decommissioned as a school and used for years as a performance space for community groups, artists, and musicians.
Rockers, rappers, breakers, and scratchers—and local punk band 3 Teens Kill 4, wonderfully named after a New York Post headline! Both ads come from the May 1983 issue of the East Village Eye.
Tags: 3 Teens Kill 4, David Wojnarowicz, East Village clubs, East Village Eye, East Village in the 1980s, East Village theater 1980s, El Bohio East Village, Limbo Lounge NYC, PS 64 East Village
Ephemeral New York 
December 27, 2012 at 6:57 am |
I cannot be positive that the Santo listed here is the same Santo who owns The Source Unltd Print and Copy Shop at 331 East 9th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenue, though that would be easy enough to confirm. I know he is a local musician as well, and has been around since 1982. Always glad to see a local who has survived the changes in the neighborhood!
December 27, 2012 at 2:01 pm |
[…] And in the absence of anything new to report, let’s take you back thirty years to “rockers, rappers, breakers & scratchers”–and the Lower East Side Girls Choir–at East 10th Street’s Limbo Lounge. […]
December 28, 2012 at 3:40 pm |
Yes, it is the one & only Santo (who owns The Source Print Shop). I was there. He played an electrified wailing acoustic guitar with lyrics that he wrote from the heart. He also was at a lot of other local joints @ that time like Sophies, Neither /Nor, Life Cafe & even Red Square on Houston before they put Blockbuster in. It was an emptied out shell of a building back then. On one night the building was taken over by locals as a performance space. It was an interesting, loose time to say the least. I don’t even think that the building had any electricity.
March 10, 2014 at 11:29 pm |
[…] Angel with my friend Amy Frost and a friend of hers on the frigid night of December 29, 1984 at the Limbo Lounge at 647 E. 9th Street, deep deep in New York’s then-decrepit and drug-haunted Alphabet […]
July 16, 2018 at 5:44 am |
[…] a fine tenement building in the middle of East 10th Street between Second and First Avenues, one of the many tenement blocks built when the East Village was […]
July 16, 2018 at 8:26 am |
[…] a fine tenement building in the middle of East 10th Street between Second and First Avenues, one of the many tenement blocks built when the East Village was […]
July 16, 2018 at 8:51 am |
[…] a fine tenement building in the middle of East 10th Street between Second and First Avenues, one of the many tenement blocks built when the East Village was […]