The Downtown Pop Underground

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After the young fashion designer Betsey Johnson met Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol, who needed silver outfits for a film they were shooting, she began designing clothes for the Velvet Underground and married group member John Cale in 1968. [more]

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After his career as a couturier fizzled, Charles James resided in the Chelsea Hotel—where a young Lisa Jane Persky worked as his assistant. [more]

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A shape-shifting rock ‘n’ roll oddity who helped spearhead the glam rock movement in the early 1970s, David Bowie could be seen haunting various downtown locations such as Mercer Arts Center and Club 82. [more]

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In the late 1960s, Debbie Harry sang backup vocals in a short-lived hippie band named Wind in the Willows, then quit the group and worked as a waitress at Max’s Kansas City before joining the Stilettoes and eventually cofounding Blondie with Chris Stein. [more]

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Edie Sedgwick was a Factory superstar who appeared in Horse, Vinyl, Poor Little Rich Girl, Kitchen, Prison, and several other Warhol films between 1965 and 1966 before splitting with Warhol. [more]

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DIY theater impresario Ellen Stewart cultivated an extended family of theater folks after she founded La MaMa in the basement of an East Ninth Street building, which then moved to various East Village location before settling in its permanent home on East Fourth Street. [more]

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An early member of the Cockettes in San Francisco, Fayette Hauser relocated to New York City and performed with fellow Cockettes Pam Tent, John Flowers, and Tomata du Plenty in the drag group Savage Voodoo Nuns, which opened for Blondie and the Ramones. [more]

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Hibiscus was a gender-fluid performer and founder of the psychedelic drag troupes the Cockettes and Angels of Light who was among the very first who succumbed to the AIDS epidemic, in 1982. [more]

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The playwright and performer Jackie Curtis was a working class Lower East Side native who was raised by his grandmother, “Slugger Ann,” the proprietor of a rough East Village bar named Slugger Ann’s. [more]

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Future Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren lived in New York while he was managing the New York Dolls and often went to CBGB, where he Richard Hell’s chopped hair and ripped, safety-pinned clothes—a style McLaren popularized with his partner, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood. [more]

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After moving to the Lower East Side in 1966 and became part of the underground poetry scene, Richard Hell eventually transitioned to rock ‘n’ roll with his old friend Tom Verlaine, with whom he started the Neon Boys and then Television, before quitting to form the Heartbreakers and then his own band, Richard Hell and the Voidoids. [more]

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Another resident of the “Blondie Loft” was Halston designer Stephen Sprouse, who created clothes for everyone and helped Debbie Harry transition from wearing thrift store clothes onstage to a more elevated style. [more]