In a dramatic chapter of New York City's music history, the Mercer Arts Center - a vibrant cultural hub in Greenwich Village - met its sudden end on August 3, 1973, when the 8-story building housing it collapsed in a cloud of dust and debris.
The venue, located at Broadway and West 3rd Street, had become a notable spot for experimental theater and emerging rock acts in the early 1970s. Among its regular performers were the New York Dolls, the pioneering glam-punk band fronted by David Johansen, who frequently electrified audiences in the venue's performance spaces.
The building itself had a storied past. Originally opened in the 1870s as the luxurious Grand Central Hotel, it gradually declined over the decades, eventually becoming a welfare hotel before its partial transformation into an arts center in 1971.
On that fateful August afternoon, the building showed clear warning signs of imminent danger. Theater impresario Seymour Kaback, who ran the arts center, noticed falling bricks and heard ominous groaning from the building's structure. After alerting authorities and the building's management, Kaback evacuated the premises just before the south section of the building came crashing down at 5:10 PM.
While approximately 300 people managed to escape, four individuals lost their lives in the collapse. The incident revealed that questionable renovations made decades earlier had severely compromised the building's structural integrity.
Today, an NYU Law School building stands where the Mercer Arts Center once hosted groundbreaking performances. The collapse marked the end of a unique cultural institution that had briefly flourished in New York's early 1970s arts scene.