Don Hill's

Overview

Rock-and-roll dive at the SoHo-TriBeCa border where Don Hill (né Donald Mulvihill) ran a deliberately unpretentious room for 18 years, hosting Squeezebox!, TISWAS, MisShapes, and a string of intimate live shows that incubated queer punk drag, Britpop, and early-aughts indie rock in a single low-lit room.

Don Hill opened his Greenwich Street club in 1993 after a decade managing the Cat Club (1985–c. 1993), which booked early-career Soundgarden, Poison, and L.A. Guns. The new room at 511 Greenwich Street was small and deliberately unglamorous. Hill himself was present most nights, watching from the floor; Interview Magazine remembered him as 'down-to-earth and hands-on, always there watching bands and mingling.' The model was a hybrid: live music in a venue-sized room (bands including Green Day, Iggy Pop, and The Strokes played the stage) combined with heavily-themed weekly party nights that operated on a rotating-residency logic, letting distinct scenes share a single address without one displacing the others. The longest-running party of the Don Hill's era was Squeezebox!, which started on April 15, 1994 and ran every Friday until May 18, 2001. Created by fashion designer Michael Schmidt with Pat Briggs of Psychotica, drag queen Misstress Formika, and DJ Miss Guy, Squeezebox! set out to dissolve the separation between gay clubs and rock dives, putting live rock bands behind drag performers who had previously been limited to lip-syncing. The capacity of the room (reportedly around 150 on a Friday) made the collision intimate. It was inside Squeezebox! that composer Stephen Trask and performer John Cameron Mitchell developed the act that became Hedwig and the Angry Inch, with Trask's band Cheater (later the Angry Inch) among the party's house bands; the show opened Off-Broadway at the Jane Street Theatre on February 14, 1998. Other parties that defined the room: TISWAS (founded 1995 by British ex-pat DJ Nick Marc, originally at Coney Island High, moved to Don Hill's Saturday nights in 1998 and ran there for seven years as a Britpop/garage-rock incubator where the Strokes and Interpol played early shows); and MisShapes (Leigh Lezark, Geordon Nicol, and Greg Krelenstein, who launched the Saturday party at Don Hill's in February 2004 and ran it until the weekly ended in September 2007). Don Hill died suddenly on March 31, 2011, at age 66 (born Donald Mulvihill, New Jersey); the cause of death was not publicly reported. The club closed for good in April 2011, weeks after his death. In September 2014, a group of new owners reopened the address as The Hills NYC, stating an intention to honor 'Don's original vision'; the revival was short-lived. After Squeezebox!, Hedwig and the Angry Inch was filmed and released in 2001 (directed by Mitchell; Sundance premiere; Fine Line Features distribution) and reached Broadway for the first time in 2014, with Neil Patrick Harris in the title role. The Strokes' early appearances in the room preceded their 2001 RCA signing, and the club appears in oral histories of the early-aughts New York rock revival. MisShapes produced a party-photo archive, circulated through early photo blogs, that is one of the larger image records of downtown Manhattan in the mid-2000s. The building at 511 Greenwich Street remained in commercial use after the 2011 closure.