Beastie Boys Square Unveiling with Mike D and Ad-Rock
An emissary from Seattle travels to NYC's Lower East Side for the big event.
We passionate Beastie Boys fans have very few chances to see Mike D and Ad-Rock share a stage these days. Within minutes of learning they were scheduled to attend the unveiling of a “Beastie Boys Square” street sign on the intersection of Ludlow and Rivington Streets in New York City, I had my red-eye flight from Sea-Tac to JFK booked.
I landed just before 6 a.m. and got on the A train headed towards Manhattan, my mother’s birthplace. I hadn’t slept on the flight, but adrenaline and a killer Beastie Boys mix I’d put together helped propel me to my first cup of coffee. Conveniently, Caffè Vita has a location in Manhattan’s Lower East Side right across from my destination, so I was eventually able to chug the same extra-strength cold brew I enjoy in Seattle.
Ludlow and Rivington is the intersection featured on the cover of Paul’s Boutique, my favorite Beastie Boys album ever since I purchased the bright yellow cassette tape at Tower Records on the day of its release. I was a knuckle-headed fifteen-year-old metal-head and hip-hop aficionado when Licensed to Ill came out in 1986, so I was certainly part of that album’s target demographic.
By the time Paul’s Boutique arrived in the summer of 1989, I had worn out my first copy of De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising tape and subsequently felt like I’d already heard my favorite rap album of the year. I honestly wasn’t expecting to have my mind blown by a group I felt I’d outgrown, but that’s precisely what the Beasties did.
I got to Ludlow and Rivington expecting hordes of the faithful to have already overrun the spot, but all I found was a group of folks setting up the stage and DJ booth while a crew from NYC’s DOT Traffic Control & Engineering put the new sign up.
On my flight I’d read a social media post from photographer Glen E. Friedman about a mural-in-progress at the site, depicting one of his photos of the Beasties. He expressed concern that the artist, Danielle Mastrion, wouldn’t finish in time for the dedication ceremony and wished her luck. I was wearing my favorite Two Thangs t-shirt, a mashup of Friedman’s photo with Belgian bande dessinée The Adventures of Tintin, in honor of Mastrion’s mural and I was very happy to see that she’d completed it.
The first people I noticed loitering around the scene with me were a guy in a Thelonious Monk t-shirt and his thirteen-year-old daughter, who turned out to be the biggest Beastie Boys fan I’ve ever met. She had discovered the song “Brass Monkey” when she was younger and thought it was the stupidest, most embarrassing thing she’d ever heard. Repeated listenings led to appreciation, followed by exploration of the rest of their catalog and total fandom. Licensed to Ill was her gateway album as well as mine, though she avoids listening to the song “Girls” because she doesn’t like to think of her heroes as sexist swine. I can relate.
I’m sharing her photo with her mother’s permission because this kid is a total rock star. Dad was cool too.
Shortly after the DJ started playing a set of fabulous old school hip-hop, primarily East Coast artists appreciated (and sampled) by the Beasties, we took our place in front of the stage. It was getting progressively hotter and more humid as the morning fog dissipated, but I was having the absolute time of my life people-watching and chatting with fellow fans with the bass thumping in our faces.
On my right was Johnny from New Jersey, who was proud to show me his Paul’s Boutique-inspired tattoo.
On my left was the cool kid, who became something of a media sensation once the DJ played a Beastie Boys song and the photographers in front of us heard her flawlessly rapping along at top volume.
To me, the other star of the day was Mr. LeRoy McCarthy of Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. A former Bad Boy Records rep and film location scout, Mr. McCarthy has championed Beastie Boys Square for a decade. In 2014 his proposal was rejected by the community board for not meeting the necessary criteria and he was banned from bringing it back up for five years.
He came back with support from some key city council members and kept fighting. I was almost as excited to spot him proudly watching the proceedings from a fire escape as I was to see Mike and Adam when they finally showed up.
I also saw B-Boy affiliates like Keyboard Money Mark and visual designer Cey Adams in attendance. The Beasties have name-checked an army of personal friends in their lyrics over the years, so t-shirts honoring the late Ricky Powell and shouts of “Hey, there’s Evan Bernard!” were unsurprising.
An hour or so past the scheduled time of 12 p.m., the unveiling ceremony finally began. Members of the city council or whatever talked for a long time about relevant things. All of them mentioned how hot it was.
I’d noticed.
Then Michael Diamond and Adam Horovitz — the surviving Beastie Boys, and the men I’d traveled so far and waited so long to stand six feet away from — walked onto the stage. I had to remind myself to raise my battered old iPhone 6S to take a photo once in a while. All those years of collecting rare Def Jam singles and bending the brims of my baseball hats and figuring out which songs the Dust Brothers had sampled long before there was an Internet, all those decades came to fruition as I stood paces away from Mike D and the King Ad-Rock themselves.
I was fortunate enough to see the Beastie Boys perform in 1987, 1992, and 1998, but I was never close enough to the stage to really appreciate how human and dorky and real they both are.
It made me mourn the missing Beastie — my favorite Beastie, the late Adam “MCA” Yauch — all over again.
It was great to see the two interact, teasing each other and then paying heartfelt tribute to the neighborhood, LeRoy McCarthy’s efforts to make the day happen, and the memory of Adam Yauch. The honor of the street sign itself was weird for Ad-Rock, who remarked upon how strange the names of long-forgotten luminaries on signs were to him when he was a kid walking to school.
Nevertheless, Adam and Mike led the countdown to the sign’s unveiling and the politicians pulled a rope and there it was.
Then I walked through the huge crowd and went home to my own neighborhood.
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