The music scene of the ’80s and ’90s is fading on St. Marks Place. Photos by Timur Myshyyev.

By ALISON BRASKY

Sunday. The laziest day of the whole week for most folks, but Jimmy Webb, 51, is not most folks. With his long blonde hair and studded leather pants, vest and bracelets, Webb seems to be gliding around racks of clothing to a soundtrack of the ever ringing telephone and dozens of “do you have these jeans in size__?” in his home-away-from-home, rock and roll clothing store Trash and Vaudeville. Located on Saint Marks Place for over 30 years, it has become a destination for rock and roll fans, tourists, and on this Sunday, a string of celebrities.

Dee Snider, lead singer of Twisted Sister, strolls in, his wife, daughter, television personality and musician son Jesse, and Jesse’s pregnant wife gleefully in tow, letting Webb know that today is his birthday. After a gulp of iced coffee, Webb reaches up to a box, as if he knew this event was bound to take place at some point, pulling out a picture of a boy who frequents the store, whom Webb affectionately refers to as Dee Snider’s “5-year-old biggest fan ever.” Snider replies with a big smile, immediately autographing the paper.

Saint Marks Place in Manhattan’s East Village has long served as a meeting ground for rock and roll subcultures. Year by year, arguably since the 1990′s, punk rockers, gothic youth and other alternative people and subcultures have been frequenting the area in smaller numbers even as the neighborhood loses the coating of grime it flaunted in its days as a proudly low-rent district. A local celebrity who refuses a last name, Chi, 25, singer for various bands, sounds nostalgic as he remembers what it was like 10 years ago: “People who were into subcultures, being into metal, from the whole goth thing to punk, you got the whole skinhead movement, they would come looking for Saint Marks to bump into these people…It was like a meeting ground for the tribes.” The venues, the art, the energy, all drew these people to spend their time on Avenues A, B, C, D, 1, 2 and 3.

Gone are old haunts such as industrial/punk/gothic boutiques Ian’s, Religious Sex and Freaks, which have all closed, replaced by Hottie, a dime-a-dozen cheap jewelry store; Klong, a Thai restaurant; and Ramen Setagaya, a Japanese noodle shop.

There are so many Japanese restaurants that some are calling the Little Tokyo. “It was always a tourist spot but not like the way it is now and the way they’re calling it ‘Little Tokyo,’ it’s so upsetting,” Chi says. “It’s like, this is Saint Marks Place, this ain’t Little Tokyo! It’s just so wrong.”

Rents have risen and the neighborhood’s tenants and shops have been priced out. The area is clean and safe, attracting wealthier people. But where have the punk rockers gone?

Some cite the increased police presence as a factor that discourages sub-cultural groups from being drawn to the area. Chi explains: “I feel like a target for cops to pick on, and it’s like you gotta move along with the ‘audience.’”

The people and the businesses are moving because they can’t pay their rent; the neighborhood now has two Starbucks an intersection apart across from and on Astor Place, with a K-Mart across the street. Mom and pop shops are getting rarer, and chain stores have moved in. Not all folks agree that gentrification is necessarily a bad thing, and it is certainly nothing new.

On the other hand, people move to an area for its identifiable culture, and when enough people do this, the culture changes. “I would remind you that New York has always been this way,” said Philip Napoli, a social history expert and Brooklyn College history professor. “This is part of the nature of the city. We create only to destroy; so as something becomes one thing, people become to get attracted to it and it ends up changing the very character of what it once was.”

Punks, goths and others have not all been priced out, but their venues for live music were. And the music, after all, is what these subcultures are founded upon. The words, logos and pictures painted on the back of the black, studded leather jackets, mandatory apparel for any punk rocker, are most likely lyrics from a favorite song or a band name. Many of the famed musical venues are gone: CBGB’s was sold and the 315 Bowery location is now selling high end men’s clothing. The Continental, on the corner of Saint Marks Place and 3rd Avenue is now a billiards bar geared to NYU students.

Soren Roi, 20, the lead singer of the local punk rock band Thriller, finds it hard to play shows now. “A lot of times if we’re headlining the show, we won’t be able to play because we’re planning on playing last, and the show gets broken up before we play, so sometimes we opt to go on earlier just to guarantee that we’ll be able to play,” he said. “Which is funny how things kinda switch in a sense; that usually the bigger bands go on last and now nobody wants to go on last because there’s a good chance that the show will get broken up.”

Police have often broken up the shows prematurely; so have disagreements with the clubs’ management. The ubiquity of the badge in combination with the absence of venues has had a discouraging affect on many.

Nevertheless, the area has clearly changed. “Generations are not being able to live where they grew up; that’s the worst,” Chi said. That’s what New York City’s going down to … Neighborhoods ain’t neighborhoods anymore. Every borough.” Even if they bring more money into a neighborhood, such changes often bring a loss: venues for music and art, mom and pop shops, elderly residents and, ultimately, a loss of a sense of character and authenticity.

But maybe this gentrification experience should not be taken personally. “It’s always been a company-bounded city,” Napoli said. “It was built by a company after all, the Dutch East India Company … That ought to give us a clue.”

East Village rents are attainable only for a wealthier demographic, and certainly not the all-too-common starving artist.. One April listing advertised a one-bedroom apartment on East 13th Street for $3,000.

Many believe the culture will just move to a new location. More venues are being played in Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Bushwick. Some, like Napoli, say the music scene has moved out of Manhattan for good. “The anchor of the rock and roll subculture in New York City, which used to be the East Village … All of that is gone due to development and gentrification. Pushed out, pushed away,” he said. “That just means that the culture will find a new anchor location. it doesn’t mean that it will die. Ten years from now I’ll give a rock and roll walking tour of that area, because it will be just a memory.”

Some, such as Webb, are more optimistic. “You can take the boy out of the gutter but you can’t take the gutter out of the boy,” he said. “You could pave the streets with gold – it’s not gonna change Saint Marks Place.”

In the 1980′s the East Village was home to a thriving new scene referred to as New York Hardcore. Hardcore is a music genre that stems from the umbrella of punk. Hardcore and punk ideologies can overlap, as with sound. Hardcore musicians and fans can differ in dress, usually wearing plainer clothing, shorter or often shaved hair. In the 1980s, “The punk scene was already on its way out on the Lower East Side, and then there was a little lull in the action, then the hardcore scene resurrected it,” said Glenn Schiller, a punk rocker who became an East Village real estate professional 15 years ago. “But the late 70′s/early 80′s punk scene … turned into the first wave of the hardcore scene. The hardcore scene was thriving in the Lower East Side.”

The hardcore youths printed show flyers and handed them out in person on the street, making contacts, organized their own shows, wrote fanzines, and printed their own shirts. The do-it-yourself attitude was prevalent; there weren’t computers to aid the networking effort. “I came here and worked my way all the way up. It just takes a belief,” Webb said. “Do I think it’s harder back in the day for a [street artist Jean-Michel] Basquiat to come to New York and start tagging away? You know, but you can’t give up the dream! They can build yogurt places all around me, I’m not giving up!”

Now, much of the culture exists online. Social networking sites can send out virtual invitations, eliminating the need to network in person and buy and listen to records. It creates a disconnect. “If you look up all this stuff on the Internet, it feels like you were there; it takes the exploration out of it,” Schiller laments. “It was so much different in the days before cell phones … You would just go where your friends were, and your friends were there. You knew where to go and everyone knew each other.”

Rather than walk around St. Marks Place, young people can write, video-chat, and look at music videos online. “I asked my students … is there a place you go now to hang out? And the kids said Facebook,” Napoli said. “It’s possible the new space to be created is in groups on the web which is a kind of strange community, which is unsatisfying to me, but to another generation it might satisfy their need. Every Mac now has a camera and a microphone so you can participate virtually … Perhaps cyberspace is going to be that new location.”

Webb is not about to give up, and is hopeful that the recession will bring back the glory days of East Village grit. “Sometimes you gotta clean it up for it to get a little dirty again,” he said. “You clean your floor, it gets dirty again. You never clean your floor, it just gets gross.”