Old and New

Last week I went to the Barnes & Noble at Lincoln Center to hear Katherine Lanpher read from her new book, Leap Days. It's an account of how Lanpher made a midlife transition from settled Minnesotan to fledgling New Yorker. As a native New Yorker, it was fascinating to hear the perspective of someone who came here after spending a lifetime in the Midwest. For Lanpher, everything about this city is new, whereas for someone like me, who remembers the Carnegie Hall Cinema, the Automat and Yankee Stadium when it still had pillars (and before it had George Steinbrenner), this is to a large extent a city of ghosts.

This week two more New York institutions are getting ready to disappear. On Sunday, CBGBs had its last show on the Bowery -- soon it will move to Las Vegas. And within a month or so, Tower Records will no longer exist.

I walked past both of them the other day. Although I was never an aficianado of punk rock (to put it mildly), I always liked the fact that CBGBs was close at hand. It represented something to the neighborhood -- the idea that any bunch of aspiring musicians could get up on that stage and possibly find an audience. That's what so many people come to this city to do -- to find that big break -- and CBGBs was a place where you could, if you were lucky, find it. Now that it's gone and Continental on St. Marks Place is gone as well, I don't know where aspiring rockers will play their first gig in New York. Williamsburg, maybe?

As for Tower, I can't imagine downtown without it. I spent four years in the 80s working in the same building as Tower, and I've spent more time in Tower than I have in any retail establishment in the city over the past quarter-century. After the attack on 9/11 (in which a former Tower employee and neighbor of mine, Joyce Ann Carpeneto, died), I used to joke to nervous family members that the only way the terrorists would nail me would be if they bombed Tower Records at 11:30 at night.

Now one is gone, and the other is going. And people like me, who have lived a lifetime in this city, will have two more places to add to the list of vanished New York landmarks. CBGBs and Tower Records will take their places alongside the old Penn Station, the Paramount Theater in Times Square and the beautiful Broadway theaters (the Morosco and the Helen Hayes) that were stupidly demolished to make way for the Marriott Marquis. They're building luxury housing on the Bowery near where CBGBs was, and God knows what will take the place of Tower.

But whatever it is, it just won't be the same.

Tom Moran