Joey Ramone Place
In his prime probably the least likely New Yorker to ever be enshrined by any kind of establishment ritual, Joey Ramone was nevertheless honored November 30, 2003 (which the city called “Joey Ramone Day”), when the short stretch of second street between the Bowery and Second Avenue was renamed in his honor—a kind of formal recognition usually reserved for the irrelevant and long-forgotten (much like Hollywood’s Walk of Fame). CBGBs, the raucous take-all-comers rock club that fostered the birth of Ramone’s punk scene in the seventies and eighties, was just around the corner.
Joey Ramone helped define an entire genre of music: punk rock. So the city decided to award him with a street. That same street where he laid down some of his first tracks. I was there when it all went down.
photo by SSchultz
