Photo Credit: Roving Rube. Viewpoint: 70th St. between Broadway and Columbus, looking north; 3/17/02 1:43 PM.
Notes (Roving Rube): Buddy Holly made his last studio recordings here at the Pythian Temple on the upper West Side, and Peggy Sue -- the one he named the song after --was there to hear them.
She likely was as startled as the Rube -- and Bill Haley and the Comets, who recorded "Rock Around the Clock" here -- by the Egyptian Revival details of this 1927 building, which was designed during New York's first King Tut craze -- his tomb had been discovered in 1922 and gripped the public imagination.
The Rube remembers the second craze from the 1980's, with his coworkers buying books of the the Met's exhibition of the Boy King's treasures, and Steve Martin singing "King Tut ... had a condo made of stone-a" -- now revealed (to the Rube at least) as a secret allusion to this obscure building, which was converted to condos right around that time.
The yellow mirrored windows (some are visible behind the lions) were added then -- previously the facade was mostly windowless: "The building was intended to be the regional meeting facility for the lodges of the Knights of Pythias and as such it housed several stacks of windowless lodge halls, each one complete with ancillary rooms and an organ loft." (Architect David Gura, quoted by Carter B. Horsley in TheCityReview.com.)
Having no windows promoted the secrecy which the fraternal orders, like the Knights of Pythias and the Masons, cloaked their meetings with back then. This leads the Rube, to whom coincidences always give the shivers, to remember that Frances Ford Coppola chose to end "Peggy Sue Got Married" with a secret ceremony in one of these Masonic lodges.
This building, like so many in Manhattan, is hidden away on a side street (), and the bulk of its ornamentation () is hard to for anyone to even see, except for the folks on the upper floors of the brownstones across the street. Should one of them, by coincidence, be reading this right now, please take some photos and send them along to the Rube!
"There were a lot of "firsts" in the fall of 1957. By October first of that year, "That'll Be The Day" was The Crickets' first record to surpass the million mark in sales. ... Jerry Allison, who I had gone steady with, asked his mother to call mine to get her permission for me to come see them play. She agreed, and on October 19, I attended my first rock show at Sacramento Memorial Auditorium. Jerry met me backstage and security guards took me to my seat (I was by myself). That night was the first time Buddy Holly and The Crickets ever performed "Peggy Sue" on stage and the first time I ever heard the song. For those of you who are interested, my first feeling was major mortification. At that time, I was extremely shy and although I was very flattered, all I could think of was, "What have y'all done to me?" (Little did I realize just how much the events that Friday night would affect my destiny.) Peggy Sue Gerron, Streets of Lubbock