Andrea Martin-Banks, chief researcher at the Preservation Society shared these Halloween photos from New York …
She was in McDougal Street when she spotted these skeletons climbing the wall near Bob Dylan’s old house near Café Wha?. The house looks as if it is student accommodation now and somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to get the spooky figures attached to the wall and fences!
Greenwich Village is a lot different now from the place Dylan left for Malibu, but the village still has that grand air of statement honed in the 60s when people made pilgrimages to his white-painted doorstep.
Dylan himself described the Café Wha?, just seconds away from his front door, as “a subterranean cavern, liquorless, ill lit, low ceiling, like a wide dining hall with chairs and tables,” but “that’s where I started playing regular in New York.”
Cafe Wha? is still a fixture of MacDougal Street but most of the other bars and cafes have gone and they have been replaced by coffee shops and boutiques.
Not far from the famous Chelsea Hotel, where Dylan also lived, Andrea came across the shop which appeared to be selling pumpkins by the wheelbarrow load.
Apart from Dylan living their New York’s most iconic hotel built a very rock n roll reputation – Sid Vicious Nancy Spungen there, Arthur C Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey there. Dylan Thomas drank himself to death there, and Leonard Cohen famously wrote about Janis Joplin there.
Now that too has changed, and perhaps as far as rock n roll romance is concerned, not for the better.
#bobdylan #thevillage #mcdougalstreet #cafewha? #halloween #theskeletonhe’sintherain
