Before CBGBs played home to The Ramones, the Mercer Arts Center was THE slummy locale to play and who better to headline there but the Lipstick Killers themselves; The New York Dolls. Located at the back of the Broadway Central Hotel near the corner of Mercer and 3rd St, the Arts Center was run by Sy and Cynthia Kaback. The front entrance was on Broadway and was a crummy SRO/residents' hotel. But the Arts Center housed performance spaces and was the perfect backdrop for a band who got its name from an uptown Doll Hospital. The New York Dolls played in the Oscar Wilde Room (among other similarly named performances spaces in the Center) until the hotel's collapse on August 3, 1973. In fact the Dolls played there every week from the middle of June 1972 until the beginning of October that same year. Seems oddly fitting that Personality Crisis would bellow out of a room named after another irreverent dandy with a penchant for feminine attire. My cousin Bill Dickson of The Rousers used to see the Dolls at the Mercer Arts Center. He and his band mates would get gussied up in their SVA art student finest and go shake a tail feather and then some to David Jo, Johnny Thunders, Jerry Nolan, Syl Sylvain and Arthur "Killer" Kane. Good times...
The building collapsed just hours before hundreds of patrons were scheduled to file in. While sadly the collapse did kill 4 hotel residents, the subsequent remains of the hotel were demolished and a 22-story dormitory for law students (they still live in dorms?) was erected in its place, built by, you guessed it, NYU. Have a look...
And before its reconstruction...
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