Is Greenpoint's Polish National Home the New Tramps?

Last spring I attended a concert at the Polish National Home in Greenpoint. Oneida and Lightning Bolt were on the bill and 600 or 700 people showed up to drink cheap beer, chat and dance to a DJ as psychedelic slides were projected on the walls. The bands took a long time to go on, and once they did it was obvious that the sound system could use improvement. Still, most people I talked to were taken with the space and the scene. One guy, who tends to be a bit dour, made an assessment and a prediction. "This is the real underground," he said. Okay, whatever, I thought at the time. "You just watch. Six months from now, it'll be gone."

Whether cheap good times, even communal cheap good times, constitute an underground is debatable. But the prediction was dead-on in one respect. Come Sept. 5, Warsaw at the Polish National Home will present rocker Will Oldham, aka Palace, aka Bonnie Prince Billy. The ticket price will be $15, more than twice what it cost to see Lightning Bolt, or, earlier this summer, the Gossip and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Steve Weitzman, formerly of Tramps and currently of the Village Underground, and Jon Weiss, of the Cavestomp garage rock events, are now the in-house bookers for the Polish National Home. They're not shy about their plans to bring a little bit of Manhattan to the historic hall in Brooklyn.

"This is a city of two million people that had to travel to see anything of importance," Weitzman told me. "We're going to be bringing in important shows." He envisions a concert hall (its capacity is 800) that will serve all of Brooklyn and beyond, not just the immediate neighborhood with its mix of Polish-Americans and what Weiss likes to call "New Bohemians." Still, Weitzman and Weiss are quick to point out that they haven't taken over the hall. It's run by a Polish-American association with an 11-member board that meets once a month. Board president Antoni Chroscielewski told me his goal is for the Home to "still do what we did, having patriotic functions, concerts from Poland, choirs, folklore...but we want to be with the times and secure our fiscal basis. We see the change of demographics in our area and we'd like to be known as a place of quality serving both communities?Polish and American."

So Weitzman and Weiss will be doing a bit of a balancing act, an example of which is their scheduled Sept. 14 show with Ukrainian-American band Gogol Bordello, preceded by four acts being flown in from Poland (the show is also part of this year's CMJ Music Marathon). Other upcoming headliners include Sound Tribe and Sparklehorse. It's a safe bet you won't see big shows at Warsaw on, say, the anniversary of Polish independence. There will still be Miss Polonia beauty contests. What there may not be are the kinds of shows that brought out the particular crowds that Weiss says led him to the Home in the first place.

"I'd heard just through word on the street that there was this amazing space in Williamsburg, so I went out there to look at it... I walked in and I was just stunned. I called Steve and he, well, he had a few reservations." Weitzman laughs. "I said, 'What city is this in?'" he recalls.

John Fitz is the promoter who put on those Lightning Bolt and Gossip shows. He'd planned others, too, for the fall: New Zealand band the Clean, who have a large following, for the date now filled by Gogol Bordello, an Oneida record release party in October, Godspeed You Black Emperor in December. As Fitz tells it, after putting down deposits for the first two shows he found that Weitzman and Weiss were in charge. He says his dates were canceled, then offered back to him after some wrangling, but he ultimately declined to work with the new team, which also includes Chroscielewski's son Mark.

"I won't charge extortionate prices for people to get in," he says. There were other issues too, like drink prices and who would play in support of headliners. "I wasn't interested in creating bills that were esthetically dumb." Still, it was Fitz's decision to cut his losses with respect to the Home. He's continuing to put on shows in the ever-increasing crowd of Williamsburg music venues, places like Local and Mighty Robot. And the Clean will still be playing a CMJ show and one at Maxwell's.

For his part, Weiss extends an invitation to all independent promoters to work with him and Weitzman. He speaks of opening a smaller space in a part of the Home he calls the Oak Room, where there could be "open-mic nights for the local talent in Williamsburg, bands that perhaps could not fill the main ballroom...it's an opportunity to work with local bands and help them develop and grow." Weitzman says the audience for shows at Warsaw will be "serious music fans," like those who supported a variety of musics at Tramps.

So the underground is gone. Will it be missed?