Patti Smith, The Ramones, The Talking Heads, and dozens of other avant-garde, head-smashing and crowd-punching punk acts made this club - which closed in the mid-aughts after giving The Strokes one of their biggest boosts. The brick Bowery building where the neat and orderly John Varvatos store currently resides, used to be CBGB, the grimy, smelly, sweaty, occasionally puke-covered epicenter of underground rock.
