In 1973, when the punk rock movement was just barely beginning to coalesce from the garage rock movement into something much more extreme, a man named Hilly Kristal took possession of a restaurant and bar that had been a 19th century saloon, a biker bar and finally a dive bar. He had opened an earlier club there that had failed and then re-opened it with a bigger focus on live performances than his earlier attempt.
Kristal was the son of two Russian Jewish immigrants who settled in New York, and after a stint in the Marines, he managed his first club, a jazz joint called
The Village Vanguard. In 1966, he and a partner, Rob Deisener, founded the Rheingold Central Park Music Festival. However, by 1968, Kristal left the partnership and opened his own bar in the Bowery section of New York city, which promptly closed within a few years.
It was then that Kristal decided to try something a little different and his next venture would change...
