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), where he had introduced New York to early-career Soundgarden, Poison, and L.A. Guns. The new room at 511 Greenwich Street (a TriBeCa block technically in Hudson Square, zip code 10013) was small and deliberately unglamorous, described by habitués as 'a dive in the best sense.' 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 definitive party of the Don Hill's era was Squeezebox!, born on April 15, 1994 and running every Friday until its farewell on May 18, 2001, seven years of the most generative queer punk-rock nightlife New York produced in that decade. 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) serving as the house band; 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 that hosted early Strokes and Interpol residencies); and MisShapes (Leigh Lezark, Geordon Nicol, and Greg Krelenstein, who had all met at Don Hill's as teenagers, moved their downtown party to the room circa 2005 and ran it on Saturdays for roughly two and a half years before ending the weekly 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 their intention to honor 'Don's original vision') but the revival did not achieve comparable longevity. As of 2017, activity at the former Don Hill's space was intermittent.

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