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 directly out of Green Door NYC, a weekly punk-and-metal party that Malin and Pyro 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 (a storefront already saturated with East Village rock mythology) into a venue that ran seven nights a week on the model the Green Door had proved: community-first, door-friendly pricing ($8–$20), and catholic programming that welcomed punks, metalheads, ska kids, and stray yuppies to the same room. The building's three floors allowed separate shows to run concurrently; the main floor held roughly 400–500 people and 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, the reunited Ramones, the Beastie Boys, Rancid, Social Distortion, the Misfits, the Damned, Queen of the Stone Age in their early touring years, and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones all played the room. No Doubt's first New York City performance took place at Coney Island High on November 3, 1995. The venue is perhaps best remembered for the annual Joey Ramone Birthday Bash each May, which drew a broad cross-section of the city's punk community and continued as long as the club stood. Howie Pyro served as the club's resident DJ, resident aesthetic conscience, and (as the Village Voice later put it) 'unofficial ambassador and troublemaker,' spinning Parliament, Hawkwind, and Shonen Knife between sets. 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. Both pressures were real and overlapping; the 1999 closure likely reflected all of them simultaneously. After Coney Island High closed, the building was eventually demolished and replaced with a residential condo tower; the ground-floor space became a sushi restaurant. 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 reopen the Bowery Electric in 2009. The club's lineage (Green Door to Coney Island High to Niagara to Bowery Electric) traces one continuous thread of musician-owned East Village rock infrastructure across three decades.

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