Coney Island High

Overview

Three-floor East Village rock club co-founded by Jesse Malin and Howie Pyro in 1995 (evolved from their Green Door NYC loft parties) that anchored the late-1990s NYC punk, glam, and ska revival until eviction for condo redevelopment ended its run in 1999.

Coney Island High grew out of Green Door NYC, the roving rock-and-roll dance party that Malin and Pyro (with Holly Ramos) had been throwing since New Year's Eve 1991, initially at Giorgio Gomelsky's Chelsea loft on 24th Street. When D Generation's Columbia Records deal gave Malin the capital, he and Pyro converted 15 St. Marks Place (the former Boy Bar space) into a venue that ran seven nights a week on the Green Door model: low door prices and mixed programming that put punks, metalheads, and ska kids in the same room. The building's three floors allowed separate shows to run concurrently; the main floor, reportedly holding several hundred people, was the stage room, with a bar floor below and a smaller room above. Programming ranged from hardcore matinees and ska and rockabilly themed nights to major-draw shows: Iggy Pop (an unannounced 1996 set), the Beastie Boys, Rancid, Social Distortion, the Misfits, the Damned, Queens of the Stone Age in their early touring years, and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones are all reported to have played the room. No Doubt played the club on November 3, 1995, early in the Tragic Kingdom tour (the date is in the band's official tour archive; whether it was their first New York show is not established). The venue is also remembered for the Joey Ramone Birthday Bash, held there from around 1997 through 1999. Howie Pyro DJ'd at the club and was, as Jesse Malin wrote in the Village Voice in 2022, its 'unofficial ambassador, DJ, and troublemaker.' The club's end is disputed in the sources. Jesse Malin has emphasized Giuliani-era cabaret-law enforcement, the prohibition-era statute that required a license for dancing and was aggressively wielded against New York nightlife in the late 1990s, as the decisive blow. Other accounts, including contemporaneous observers, attribute closure primarily to a landlord eviction: 15 St. Marks Place sat on one of the hottest blocks in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, and the building's owners cleared tenants to make way for a condominium development. After Coney Island High closed, the building was converted (reportedly altered and expanded around 2004) into a residential condominium with a sushi restaurant at street level. Jesse Malin, who had already opened Niagara (the bar built into the site of the legendary punk club A7) with Johnny T. Yerington and promoter Laura McCarthy in 1997, went on to open the Bowery Electric in 2009.