Entertainment

Richard Hell: My New York

Richard Hell bused into town from his Virginia home in 1966 as a 17-year-old named Richard Meyers, and never looked back. He settled into the East Village — where he still lives — and transformed himself into a punk pioneer. A co-founder of the band Television and founder/frontman of Richard Hell and the Voidoids, he says: “I was looking for adventure.” Hell, who wrote “Blank Generation,” has now written an auto-biography, “I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp.” This is his New York.

1. Ziegfeld Theatre, 141 W. 54th St.

“I love it! It has a huge screen, which is rare now. And the auditorium is really big — the size that you just don’t see anymore. And all the seats are really comfortable. The whole environment still has that flavor of going to see a movie where they wanted to make you feel like royalty. Beautiful lighting, curtains, the seats are plush. I saw Scorsese’s ‘Hugo’ there in 3-D. The Ziegfeld was the perfect venue for it.”

2. Madison Avenue, between 59th and 86th streets.

“It’s mildly embarrassing, but I like to window-shop here and buy shoes sometimes, where it’s all the really haute designer label kind of stuff. If something takes me up to that area, I’ll usually take 20 minutes and look at it all. It’s like a beautiful walk in the woods in the winter, looking in these shop windows. Everything is sparkling and pretty.”

3. The courtyard of his grandmother Linda Meyers’ apartment building, 72 Barrow St., at Hudson Street

“I came here when I just turned 17. She would invite me over for dinner every couple of weeks. That courtyard has always been a kind of little oasis to me. The walkways are paved with shale, and there are these flower beds — filled [in season] with Life Savers-colored tulips. And a really pretty urn on a stone pedestal in the middle, and a couple of fruit trees. Going where my grandmother lived is good for my disposition, soothing.”

4. Underneath the Manhattan Bridge, Manhattan side

“For about 10 years — from the mid-’90s — I had a car here, a ’68 Plymouth Satellite, bright yellow, kind of souped-up. You could go park your car there and work on it. I might be changing the sparkplugs, replacing some part. It was all desolate. There were just these big, wide streets, vacant lots, seedy buildings. I like emptiness.”

5. Horn & Hardart, formerly on 14th Street, near Irving Place

“I was living with a roommate at 1 Irving Place shortly after I arrived here. It had a Horn & Hardart automat underneath it. I used to go in there because they didn’t have a very thorough busboy service. So I’d go in and sit down at a table that had just been vacated, and eat the food that was left on the table.”

6. Cinemabilia, 10 W. 13th St. (no longer there)

“I worked here, and I started off packing. They sold scripts, film literature — just about anything made of paper associated with movies. I got some good stills from [Jean-Luc] Godard films there of [actress] Anna Karina. I also got this amazing education there about movies, and used to enjoy Andrew Sarris’ film columns for the Village Voice. By the time I left Cinemabilia, I had a side business going writing term papers for students in his film class at Columbia. $75 was a guaranteed B+. It was significant to me because we actually got off the ground as a band [Television] when I was working there. It was the manager of the store, Terry Ork, who enabled us to get on our feet as a band. He knew Richard Lloyd, who became our guitarist, and we practiced at Terry’s loft in Chinatown. He also became, nominally, our manager.”

7. Strand Bookstore, 828 Broadway

“I got my first job there when I was 20. I packed — down in the basement, when it was just for employees — for libraries and also for private customers. The great thing about it was that the management was really kid-friendly. It tended to attract young people to work there who were artistically inclined — writers or musicians — so it was really congenial. And you got a discount on the books. I bought books every payday. It’s amazing that it hasn’t lost the kind of appeal that it had for me then.”

8. Hudson’s army-navy store, formerly at Third Avenue and 13th Street

“They had all kinds of functional and low-priced clothes — jeans, T-shirts, work boots. I got the suits that the Voidoids wore for our debut at CBGB. They were black corduroy, suits you’d imagine a miner would wear to church in West Virginia.”

9. Chinatown market area, near corner of Bowery and Canal Street

“It’s just full of life, and almost all locals, not tourists. You just feel this whole other flavor of another culture. It’s almost like going to China. All this beautiful fresh fruit and this wild seafood — half of it is alive. I was down there a week or two ago with my wife, and there was this big plastic bucket, 2-feet-high, and we glanced down and it was filled to the brim, completely thick with 4-inch-long frogs — alive. I wish I knew how to prepare that food.”

10. Vacant lot, north side of 13th Street, between Second and Third avenues (now a construction site)

“Whenever I would have to walk across town, I’d try to wrap myself down 13th Street. The lot was all overgrown. And when you were walking down 13th, the buildings that were still standing on 14th Street gave it this kind of broken-toothy kind of edge to it. A friend of mine wanted to make a movie with me — and my first idea was to do something in that lot. I put on a bunch of wounded-person makeup and staggered out from behind one of the 14th Street buildings. I have the footage, somewhere.”