Jefferson Market Library

Co-sponsored by Jefferson Market Library
Join us for a talk with the co-author of this new book on a slice of New York’s famed music history, Positively Fourth and Mercer: The Inside Story of New York’s Iconic Music Club, The Bottom Line. Award-winning music journalist Billy Altman will be in conversation with Village Preservation’s Executive Director Andrew Berman.
In 1974, when young music promoters Allan Pepper and Stanley Snadowsky opened their night club the Bottom Line in an industrial area of Greenwich Village that was all but deserted after 6 pm, no one could have foreseen either its long-term success or its impact on the musical and cultural landscape of New York City. Over the next thirty years, while trends and tastes came and went, the Bottom Line throughout its fabled history remained true to its co-founders’ profoundly simple vision: that if you presented entertainers in an intimate setting where the focus would always be on what transpired onstage, both artists and audiences would treasure the experience.
The story of the Bottom Line is the tale of childhood friends who turned their shared dream into a reality – and, through determination, hard work, and, most of all, a belief in each other, made entertainment history and memories to last a lifetime.

Billy Altman is a Grammy-nominated journalist, critic, and historian whose work covering the worlds of music, popular culture and sports has appeared over the years in such publications as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Spin, Esquire, GQ, People, Entertainment Weekly and The Village Voice. A former senior editor of Creem magazine, he was a founding curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and a consultant to the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, and most recently he served as chief scriptwriter for both the National Blues Museum in St. Louis and the National Museum of African American Music in Nashville. A recipient of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, he is a longstanding faculty member of the Humanities Department at New York City’s School of Visual Arts, where he teaches courses in rock, jazz and folk music as well as non-fiction writing. He lives in the lower Hudson Valley region of Westchester County, New York.

Local Event: The Inside Story of New York’s Iconic Music Club, The Bottom Line

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The Inside Story of New York’s Iconic Music...

Co-sponsored by Jefferson Market Library
Join us for a talk with the co-author of this new book on a slice of New York’s famed...

The Inside Story of New York’s Iconic Music Club, The Bottom Line

Virtual

Join us in celebrating the immigrant history of the South Village with a special talk by Mary Elizabeth Brown, the Center for Migration Studies’ archivist and frequent speaker on Catholic Churches in the Village. We’ll take a look at how the efforts that began with the tightly focused Committee on Catholic Refugees from Germany in the wake of Hitler’s attacks on “non-Aryans” morphed in a multifaceted global Catholic Committee for Refugees after World War II. Being headquartered in the East and West Villages with links to the South Village mattered for being able to raise money and build community for the early trickle of refugees.
At a time when the United States didn’t have refugee visas, but where something needed to be done American bishops created a small committee. A year after Nazi Germany annexed Austria the committee for refugees “from Germany” had to expand their work. By 1940 the committee had a new name, the Catholic Committee for Refuge (CCR). Once the Second World War ended, the CCR focused on international adoptions, including hundreds of Italian immigrant children; and worked with displaced scholars and the resettlement of clergy seeking refuge from World War II and the Cold War. In 1966 the American bishops reorganized their charitable efforts, some of the CCR work concluded.
Village Preservation kicked off its campaign to honor, document, and seek landmark designation for the South Village and its remarkable immigrant and bohemian histories <a href="https://media.villagepreservation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/15074221/23_The-South-Village-A-Proposal-for-HD-Designation-12-2006.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">in December of 2006</a> and completed the effort <a href="https://www.villagepreservation.org/campaign-update/city-votes-unanimously-to-landmarkfinal-phase-of-gvshps-proposed-south-village-historic-district/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">in December of 2016</a> with designation of the third and final phase of our proposed South Village Historic District, the largest expansion of landmark protections in the neighborhood since 1969, and among the city’s first and only historic districts to honor immigrant and artistic history. We now celebrate each December as “South Village Month.”

Mary Brown first spoke to a Village Preservation audience in Spring 2005. She works as an archivist at the Center for Migration Studies, a mission of the Scalabrini Fathers, who are also active in the Village at Our Lady of Pompeii parish, and she teaches writing and US history as an adjunct at Marymount Manhattan College. She received her doctorate from Columbia University in 1986. Her dissertation was on Italian Catholic immigrants in the Archdiocese of New York. She also authored the Village Preservation commissioned report and study, <a href="https://media.villagepreservation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/15074230/19_The-Italians-of-the-South-Village-10-08-2007.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Italians of the South Village</a>.

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The Inside Story of New York’s Iconic Music Club, The Bottom Line

DEC

16

6:00 PM

Jefferson Market Library, 425 6th Ave, New York, NY

Learning to Welcome: Refugees in the Village, 1937-1966

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6:00 PM

New York City, NY

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22nd-annual "Christmas in Italy ®" starring Cristina Fontanelli

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