The Beastie Boys may have rapped about “Looking Down The Barrel Of A Gun” and a “Car Thief” on Paul’s Boutique, but it looks like there’s something else to worry about in the Lower East Side Neighborhood that Mike D, Ad-Rock, and MCA made famous with that 1989 album.
Manhattan local news outlet, DNAInfo, has reported that a fire broke out on the corner of Ludow and Rivington streets around 8 p.m last night. Non-Gotham residents probably have no clue, but the corner – featured in the panoramic photograph packaged inside Paul’s Boutique – was once home to the actual Paul’s Boutique and is now home to The Three Monkeys, a restaurant that specializes in falafel wraps.
FDNY received a call about the fire at 8:11 p.m., completely extinguished it by 8:46 p.m., and while no injuries were reported, officials have yet to determined a cause for the blaze. It’s unknown what type of damage the building has sustained or what the landscape of Ludow Street now looks like, but life should go on as normal.
The seven-block area, just east of Little Italy, was profiled by The New York Times just last year and is also apparently where Lou Reed – who once lived at 56 Ludow – first recorded The Velvet Underground’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties”.
In much better news, the Beastie Boys premiered their much-anticipated short film Fight For Your Right Revisited at Sundance last night. According to the LA Times, the MCA-directed film is a 20-minute “meta-narrative” to the Beasties’ smash 1986 anthem “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party)”. If you want to read the spoilers, then check out the full review here. There’s no word on if and when the film will be released on the internet.
