Breaking News! The Rents Are Too Damn High! Cakeshop Closing Is Truly An End Of An Era For The LES

“Have you been to the Lower East Side?” People would ask from outer boroughs as if they’d seen something with clandestine eyes. And eventually I too would pity anyone who did not. Even still, there would eventually be someone somewhere asking me “if i’d seen it in the 70’s?”

It’s true, every few years the blooming of one utopia has always spelt the end of another’s. But it’s easy to trade nostalgic early 2000 stories, sprawled across the LES: the scenes, the stores, and the people we loved and lost, more over the spaces we lost with it. It’s a whole other story for another mission to explain why we’re living in a time where culture in big cities is becoming increasingly difficult to foster, nurture, and preserve when the greed has grown so cancerous that it spreads to the hood, aka urban profiteering. But today, we pour our proverbial 40 ounce for Cake Shop. They’ve accounted that New Year’s Eve will be their final night. Here are some of the listed final shows on sale via Ticketfly, during a good 10 year run, I was only 22 fresh out of high school when I walked into their doors, asking to post a flyer for my bands show.

What seems to be the ongoing struggle for Brooklyn today had its catalysis on the Lower East Side, when a Gap and Starbucks open, hold onto your seat! Luckily Arlene’s Grocery is still there as is Pianos, (still kicking ass according to NY native/artist A.Sarr), but the end of an era is an understatement at this point, with hyper gentrification and communities being targeted for this process: having those utopia’s to usher in have become more and more difficult to flower, it’s time for collective local action, the rents are too damn high.

RIP:  the Living Room (twice), Grand Victory Bar, Pink Pony, Max Fish, the Dark Room, Fontana’s, El Sombrero, Alias, Lolita, Motor City Bar, Rothko, Cameo Gallery, Luna Lounge, Sin-é, The Cakeshop.

For Extra Credit: Remember when Henry Rollins sorta made sense but was also sorta a dick about it? (Sort of the old school New York attitude.)

Here is a traveling photographer who caught some great photo’s back in 2011 during a rapidly gentrifying LES, the Cakeshop still had the vinyl backroom!

(A time machine of Cake Shop in 2011)