Max's Kansas City

Max's Kansas City at 213 Park Avenue South near Union Square was opened by Mickey Ruskin in 1965 as a bar and restaurant that became the primary social and artistic gathering point for the New York avant-garde of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The back room — where Warhol's crowd held court — was the most socially consequential table in New York for several years: a space where painters, musicians, poets, models, and hustlers negotiated the complex social hierarchies of the downtown art world. The Velvet Underground were regulars, and the back room's atmosphere — its drugs, its sexual freedom, its complete indifference to the mainstream — was the social context in which their music made perfect sense.

In 1970 the Velvets held a nine-week residency at Max's playing two sets nightly. On August 23, Andy Warhol associate Brigid Polk recorded the show on a portable cassette recorder, producing what was released in 1972 as Live at Max's Kansas City — a document of the band in a room they understood completely, playing for an audience that understood them. The recording quality is rough; the performance is intimate and compelling.

Max's Kansas City closed in 1974 and reopened in 1975 under new management as a music venue that hosted the emerging punk and new wave scenes before closing finally in 1981. The building at 213 Park Avenue South has been used for various purposes since. The restaurant and back room that defined a particular moment in New York's creative life exist only in memoirs and photographs — an accurate fate for a place whose entire significance was social rather than architectural.