This Must Be the Place: Music, Community and Vanished Spaces in New York City

A fascinating history that examines how real  estate, gentrification, community and the highs and lows of New York  City itself shaped the city’s music scenes from folk to house music.

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 (including members of Peter, Paul and Mary;  White Zombie; Moldy Peaches; Sonic Youth; Treacherous Three; Cro-Mags;  Sun Ra Arkestra; and Suicide), writer, historian and tour guide Jesse  Rifkin painstakingly reconstructs the physical history of numerous  classic New York music scenes. This Must Be the Place 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.