Roving Rube Picture of the Day
Each day (that he gets around to it) the Rube posts a new picture, together with some explanatory notes.
10/28/01
Abraham and Alan
These two busts, adorning the Brill Building at 49th and Broadway, are of its developer, Abraham Lefcourt (top left), and his son Alan. (Donald Trump, take note.)
The Brill Building, completed in 1931, became the one of the centers of the song publishing industry. A brief history can be found here at "History of Rock 'n Roll" site.
"The Jewish Week" site also has an entertaining and informative article about the heyday of the "Brill Building" sound in the early 60's, which is excerpted below:
"They were Jewish kids from Brooklyn who transformed American pop music. Like the ancient Israelite priests, these 20th-century Jewish priests of pop performed their own daily rituals, creating and producing songs in and around a gold and concrete temple in Midtown Manhattan called the Brill Building ... And the songs poured out of them like seltzer from a blue-glass dispenser: "Under the Boardwalk," "Teenager in Love," "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow," "Up on the Roof," "Be My Baby," "Stand by Me," "We Gotta Get Out of This Place," "Breaking up is Hard to Do," and of course, "On Broadway." ... Cousin Brucie believes the Brill Building should be commemorated somehow ... "I keep looking through the glass doors for the ghosts and I don't see them there anymore," says Morrow ... "The Brill Building was more than bricks and glass - it was an emotion, innocent, fun and creative, when nobody was stifled. In those days it was the music business, today it is the business of music. We will never retrieve those days again." "