Wetlands Preserve

Overview

Tribeca's self-styled 'eco-saloon': Larry Bloch's two-level, 600-cap former warehouse was simultaneously a jam-band incubator, a neo-soul and hip-hop stage, and a fully operational environmental-and-social-justice activism center, the only club in New York where a VW bus served as a merch hub and the dancefloor funded rainforest campaigns.

Wetlands Preserve opened in a former Chinese food warehouse at 161 Hudson Street in February 1989, founder Larry Bloch, a Grateful Dead devotee who had run a printing business in Santa Monica, poured over $1 million into the conversion. The two-level, roughly 7,500-square-foot space had an unconventional stage orientation (facing a corner wall rather than the main room) deliberately encouraging the circulation and community-building Bloch prized over passive spectatorship. An extravagantly painted vintage VW van, repurposed as a merchandise hub and community nexus, occupied a corner of the main floor; it later entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's collection. Capacity hovered around 600 standing, and contemporary accounts describe carefully balanced sound carried throughout the space, including hallways and bathrooms. The club hosted over 3,700 performances across its twelve-plus years. Wetlands became ground zero for the post-Grateful Dead jam-band movement, staging Phish's early New York dates (their first documented show there was March 4, 1989), and serving as a home stage for Blues Traveler, the Spin Doctors, moe., Dave Matthews Band, the Disco Biscuits, and Widespread Panic. It was equally a room where broader alternative currents ran: Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine, Oasis, Sublime, Counting Crows, and the Wallflowers all made their New York debuts on Wetlands' small stage. The Roots, then based in Philadelphia, drove up regularly for the venue's weekly open-mic Jam Session nights, ?uestlove later stated that without Wetlands' open-mic, the Roots probably would not exist. Black Lily, a women-in-music showcase co-hosted by neo-soul duo Jazzyfatnastees (Deneen Watts and Mercedes Martinez), originated at Wetlands before moving to The Five Spot in Philadelphia; Jill Scott, Macy Gray, and Erykah Badu all appeared at early Black Lily sessions. The club's defining structural difference from any comparable New York venue was the Earthstation Information Center, a fully staffed activist office embedded between the stage and the VW van. From its inception Bloch funneled club revenues into what he called the Eco-Saloon, a weekly Tuesday forum for environmental and social-justice campaigns: letter-writing drives, petition efforts, nonviolent civil-disobedience training, guest speakers. Over its lifetime Wetlands directed more than $1 million to the center, supporting work with Rainforest Relief and dozens of allied organizations. The activism apparatus predated and outlasted the club itself: after the venue closed, it continued as the Wetlands Activism Collective, which remains active. Larry Bloch passed the ownership to Peter Shapiro in 1997; Shapiro, 23 at the time and a Northwestern University film student who had made a documentary about Grateful Dead fans, maintained the club's activist commitments and continued allocating ticket revenue to environmental causes. In July 2001 Shapiro announced the closure: the building's owner had sold the property for conversion to luxury condominiums, and no alternative space had been secured. The final ticketed performance, a superjam curated by Ropeadope Records and billed as Project Logic, featuring DJ Logic, Mike Gordon, Warren Haynes, and Stanley Jordan, ran for nearly four hours in the early morning of September 11, 2001, ending hours before the World Trade Center attacks (the Wetlands was blocks away in lower Manhattan). Future shows were cancelled; two free public nights on September 28–29, 2001 (benefits for 9/11 relief) served as the actual closing evenings, with Robert Hunter headlining the final night. The building was converted to condominiums. Larry Bloch died of pancreatic cancer on October 24, 2012, at age 59. Shapiro later opened Brooklyn Bowl (2009), explicitly inheriting Wetlands' fusion of music and civic mission. The 2008 documentary Wetlands Preserved: The Story of an Activist Rock Club, directed by Relix editor Dean Budnick and aired on Sundance Channel, stands as the primary oral-history record of the venue.

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