The music blogger Alex Smith, whose website, Flaming Pablum, has been a historical resource for us before, sent word that the corner of Cortlandt Alley and Walker was being renamed yesterday for Charly Garcia, the Argentine singer-songwriter considered one of the most important and avant-garde figures of Latin American music. And it was a huge scene! These are his pictures.
This is all a deep-dive for me, since I had never heard of Garcia, so I am deferring to Smith to give us the story. He was kind enough to email a primer. If you want even more of the history, see his posts here, here and here. And it will not be a waste of time to watch the 5-minute video on graffiti artist Richard Hambleton, below.
Here’s the deal: Charly Garcia is still alive [I asked since I thought it was NYC policy to not name streets after living people]; he is now 72 and was not at the event. His connection to Tribeca is tenuous at best — he never lived here or did anything here other than to take one picture here somewhere around 1983. But that image, Smith argues, is on a level with the Abbey Road cover image, at least in Latin America. So here goes:
Garcia is a huge rock star in Argentina and throughout Latin America. In the early ’80s, he came to New York City to record at Electric Lady Studios on West 8th Street. While doing so, he was staying in an apartment on Waverly Place. One day, during his time recording the album, he went out for a walk with a photographer. By this point in the proceedings, he’d already picked out a name for this album and an image. But, in walking around Tribeca, he came across a striking swathe of graffiti and had his picture taken under the cryptic legend “Modern Clix.” So enamored was he of this, that he scrapped his original idea and re-titled his impending record CLICS MODERNOS, using that photo as the album cover art. [The album was released in 1983.]
In time, that album became a HUGE phenomenon in Latin American rock/pop circles.
But wait…there’s more!
The graffiti Charly posed in front of was actually a combination of three images:
1. The largest is one of famed street-artist Richard Hambleton’s “Shadowmen,” which used to appear all over lower Manhattan.
2. The tag next to that was from renowned graffiti artist Zephyr.
3. The words “Modern Clix” came from the name of a Lower East Side punk band of the same name, lead by a gent named Fran Powers. Powers no doubt added that tag to the wall.
Back in 2021, I spotted a photograph shared on Facebook by a tourist named Bo G. Ericsson who’d snapped the image in about 1983 — it was a long shot of Cortlandt Alley, looking south. Sure enough, at the intersection of Walker Street, I spotted the same graffiti that adorns Charly’s album. I posted it on my blog.
In short order, I got a note from an Argentine writer/filmmaker named Inaki Rojas who was thrilled that I’d pinpointed the exact location of the original graffiti — drawing a parallel to it being as iconic a landmark as, say, Abbey Road.
Inaki started piecing together a documentary series on the web about it, and word started to spread — to the point where people were making pilgrimages to the very spot. This all spurred one Mariano Cabrera to petition the city to get the corner commemorated on the 40th anniversary of its original release by erecting a plaque and re-christening the corner the CHARLY GARCIA CORNER.
Phew… that’s more or less the back-story.
