A Gurdjieff-inspired Ukrainian bar became a hub jazz club, drug scene and neighborhood institution

Evidence

Located at 242 East Third Street, between Avenues B and C, Slugs’ was a former Ukrainian bar purchased in 1964 by two young devotees of the Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff and renamed for a characterization of “human beings” found in Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. Slugs’ became part of the neighborhood drug scene and then, thanks to Jackie McLean, who played there without a cabaret card, the hippest jazz club in the neighborhood. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 888

Categorization

• XREF: The Jewish Lower East Side nexus here — how a single block of East Third Street hosted Slugs’, Sun Ra’s Sun Palace, Lenny Bruce’s bad scene, the Electric Circus — connects directly to the reader’s whole gentrification-origin thesis in this chapter. A Gurdjieff bunker converted into a jazz club is a perfect concrete artifact of how the scene layered over old immigrant infrastructure.
• SEED: A concrete example of how avant-garde institutions formed inside abandoned or cheap immigrant-era infrastructure — load-bearing for any essay on what physical conditions create scene density.