Downtown scenes grew in cheap, transitional spaces between neighborhoods

Evidence

And later that summer, on August 11, the Spikes were included in an abortive eight-hour spectacle held at the once grand, now moldering Broadway Central Hotel, located in the no man’s land between the East and West Village. Still used for bar mitzvah celebrations, it was not yet the “Heroin Hilton” or welfare hotel it would become (“a cesspool of squalor and crime,” per the New York Times). — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 739