The corner of East 125th Street and Lexington Avenue is not one of the most salubrious locations in New York. Wait here on an early summer’s evening and – if you do not find yourself knocked over by the constant stream of people bubbling up from the 125th Street metro subway station, where the 4, 5 and 6 lines rumble in from the Upper East Side of Manhattan – you can glimpse a version of the Big Apple that is rather shorn of glamour.
Harlem may have witnessed a wave of gentrification in the last decade, but the tide of coffee shops and boutique hotels has not yet ebbed this far north, 15 blocks above Central Park.
This is America’s most eulogised city way outside the A-list party scene and the celebrity spotlight. There are pizza takeaways and cheap shoe stores, fast-food outlets and pharmacies. Turn to face east, and you should just be able to see the green metal flanks of the Harlem River Bridge as it drags East 125th Street (also known as Dr Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard) over the waterway of the same name – and on towards the Bronx.
And yet, stand at this crossroads and you are loitering within music history. For it is this very dot on the New York grid which features in I’m Waiting For The Man, the second track on The Velvet Underground & Nico – the debut album by The Velvet Underground.
“I’m waiting for my man, $26 dollars in my hand,” intones the band’s iconic frontman Lou Reed. “Up to Lexington 125; feel sick and dirty, more dead and alive.”
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He is singing, without disguise, about a heroin deal – a drug transaction somewhere in the bowels of the mid-Sixties (the album was released in March 1967). Not, you would think, the sort of incident, whether past or present, which would inspire many travel adventures.
And yet “Lexington 125” is one of the outposts pinpointed by a new publication which acknowledges a New York that – while shadowy and seamy in some instances – is held in fond regard by many. “The Velvet Underground Map of New York” (Herb Lester Associates: £4) cuts open a Big Apple that was once haunted by one of the planet’s most revered and influential bands; 25 flies in the ointment of a metropolis which comes with plenty of shine and sparkle, but which also has – and frequently revels in – a darker side.
The Velvet Underground Map of New York
This is a band which, of course, need little introduction – a four-piece formed in 1964 by Brooklyn-born Reed and Welsh instrumentalist John Cale, and abetted by guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen (Moe) Tucker.
Although these pioneering musicians had little commercial impact at the time they were making records (their back catalogue is usually deemed to encompass the four albums produced before Reed quit for a solo career in 1970), they would come to be seen as a vastly crucial page in America’s cultural history. They, and the thrillingly downbeat songs they forged, would also become indelibly tied to the city which framed their frequently dysfunctional fury and feedback.
The Velvet Underground in 1969 (left to right: Morrison, Tucker, Reed - plus Cale's replacement Doug Yule)
So much is clear from the new map. This is not the polished New York of Breakfast At Tiffany’s, nor the giddy playground portrayed in Friends and Sex And The City – but it lays out crucial cases of time and place that can drag a visitor back through five decades.
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Some of them are invisible unless you know that they are there – the dingy street corner mentioned in I’m Waiting For The Man; the similarly nondescript intersection of West 125th Street and Broadway, near Columbia University in west Manhattan, where Reed and Cale used to busk in 1965 (“neither Reed nor Cale,” the map’s commentary notes drily, “were natural crowd-pleasers, so it’s hard to imagine they were showered with riches”).
The map pinpoints location your unlikely to be shown by the local tourist board
Some, at first glance, are unremarkable, but have tales to tell. These include the Riviera Café, at 225 West 4th Street in Greenwich Village – where Reed, his relationship with his founding partner increasingly fractured, broke up the classic incarnation of the band in September 1968, bending Morrison and Tucker to his will by arguing for Cale to be pushed out. The café is still there, living on as a sports bar where American football games flash up on big screens over $4 margaritas (001 212 929 3250; rivieracafeny.com) – with no obvious hint of what happened. But to step inside is to wander along a faultline.
Some locations outlined by the map are rather more celebrated, not least the Chelsea Hotel, at 222 West 23rd Street in Chelsea (001 800 804 4480; chelseahotels.com) – the New York accommodation stalwart which has hosted a constellation of stars since it opened in 1905: wordsmiths Mark Twain and Arthur Miller, chanteuse Edith Piaf, rock stars Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and Iggy Pop (as well as Cale – who lived there in 1967).
Cale lived briefly at New York's Chelsea Hotel (Photo: Alamy)
Others, however, are ghosts. The band was famously managed by Andy Warhol between 1965 and 1967 – the great art revolutionary harnessing their youth and vitality to his own work (they played as part of his revolutionary Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia shows in 1966 and 1967). But the original version of The Factory – Warhol’s fourth-floor studio hub at 231 East 47th Street in Midtown – is long gone (even if the map traces its spirit to the parking garage which now dominates the address).
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So too is Mayfair Studios, the bunker which existed at 701 7th Avenue, just off Times Square, where the final sessions for that seminal debut were held in November 1966 (resulting in Reed penning the timeless Sunday Morning) – and follow-up White Light/White Heat also came to be.
Andy Warhol managed the Velvet Underground from 1965 to 1967 (Photo: Getty)
Then there is – or was – Max’s Kansas City. The Velvet Underground staged a nine-week residency here in the summer of 1970 (June 24-August 28), playing two sets a night in a marathon endeavour. Shortly after the last gig, Reed took his leave – and the band was effectively finished.
Perhaps appropriately, the venue did not survive either, closing in December 1974. And while it was reborn as a punk club in 1975, it would shut again in 1981, taking its heritage with it. Now the site – 213 Park Avenue South, near Union Square – is another New York café. But it will forever be connected to a wider narrative which, discordant and frayed at the edges, goes far beyond anyone’s morning macchiato.
The Velvet Underground Map of New York can be ordered at herblester.com; £4.
Five songs which slice into the Big Apple
Blondie – In The Flesh
“Went walking one day on the Lower East Side, met you with a girlfriend, you were so divine.”
Blondie were the quintessential New York band – formed in the city in 1974, and a key part of the new wave scene which flourished there in the late Seventies, becoming regular performers at legendary (now defunct) gig venue CBGB. The club was based in Bowery – a then-dingy part of the same Lower East Side saluted in this track from the band’s 1976 self-titled debut. Nowadays, the area is rather more refined than when Debbie Harry was at the height of her glory – and you can find elegant eateries galore on Clinton Street.
Princess Harry: Blondie were stars of the Lower East Side (Photo: Getty)
U2 – Angel Of Harlem
“Birdland on fifty-three, the street sounds like a symphony.”
The highlight of U2’s 1988 album Rattle And Hum is a tribute to Billie Holliday, the jazz singer who, as the song hints, is forever connected to New York. The original version of the jazz club Birdland existed at 1678 Broadway, just south of West 53rd Street, between 1949 and 1965 – not in Harlem, but a little below Central Park. Its present-day premises (001 212 581 3080; birdlandjazz.com) sit at 315 West 44th Street, in the Theater District.
Jay-Z – Empire State Of Mind
“Yeah, yeah, I’m out that Brooklyn, now I’m down in Tribeca.”
The man known on his passport as Shawn Carter wrote a typically grand-standing hip-hop love letter to New York on his 2009 album The Blueprint 3, framing his rise to prominence as a journey from Brooklyn (where he was born in 1969) to Tribeca – the portion of Manhattan’s Lower West Side which is so glitzy that it has its own film festival (tribeca.com/festival). Of course, Brooklyn, the most populous of New York’s five boroughs, has rather changed in the last 45 years (and particularly the last 10) – and, in areas like DUMBO (Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass), can boast restaurants and bars every bit as chic as anything proffered by its island neighbour across the East River.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1971 (Photo: Getty)
John Lennon – New York City
“Well we did the Staten Island Ferry, making movies for the telly; played The Fillmore and Apollo for freedom.”
Lennon released this fanmail to his new home in 1972, shortly after he had moved to New York. Effectively a sequel to the Beatles track The Ballad Of John and Yoko, it lists recent events in his life with second wife Yoko Ono. Harlem’s landmark Apollo Theater is, of course, still a fixture at 253 West 125th Street (001 212 531 5300; apollotheater.org) – but Fillmore East, a rock club which lit up the East Village between 1968 and 1971, is a thing of the past. Lennon performed there on June 6 1971, the month that it closed down.
Bob Dylan – Positively 4th Street
This stand-alone single – released in September 1965, between Dylan’s two keynote albums Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde – does not specifically pin its lyrics to New York, and the 4th Street in the title is never identified. But the song may well refer to the 4th Street which runs through Greenwich Village – the corner of Manhattan which was the heart of the folk scene from which Dylan emerged in the early Sixties. He first played in the city at (the now vanished) Gerde’s Folk City, at 11 West 4th Street, in 1961.
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