On Tuesday, the excavators did what a couple of decades of stage divers never could. They brought City Gardens down.
The old Trenton rock club at 1701 Calhoun Street has sat empty since it closed in 2001. What comes next on the site is still unclear, according to News 12 New Jersey.
I spent some nights in that room in the 1980s. I was working at WPST then, and my colleague Tom Cunningham and I went to shows there together.
Today, Tom is the nation’s leading Bruce Springsteen authority and hosts a Springsteen show on WWZY. I’d also call him New Jersey’s foremost rock historian. And he’s a dear friend.
WPST is still in the family. Today it’s our Townsquare sister station, right across the hall from New Jersey 101.5.
So when the walls came down this week, I called on two people who knew the place far better than I did. One of them booked it. The other helped put it on the radio.
A mailman, a newspaper ad and 10 friends
Randy Ellis, better known as DJ Randy Now, was a letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service when he spotted an ad in The Trentonian for a new club in Trenton.
All he wanted was to DJ a dance night every Sunday.
That meant a mail route that started at 6:30 a.m. and a club that ran from 9 p.m. until last call around 2 a.m. “There was always a stop at a 24-hour diner first,” he told me.
Fewer than 10 of his friends showed up the first night. He wasn’t playing disco, and he wasn’t playing Top 40. He was playing the Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello and a stack of UK dance records people were starting to call new wave.
The owner, Frank “Tut” Nalbone, the King Tut on the sign out front, hired him back for the next Sunday. Ten friends became 20. Then 40, 50, 60 a night, mostly word of mouth through the colleges.
It didn’t hurt that New Jersey’s drinking age was 18 when Randy started. Pennsylvania’s was 21. College kids from Pennsylvania came right over the Calhoun Street Bridge.
The $2,500 gamble
Randy asked King Tut if he could bring in a Trenton band that wrote its own songs, the Shades. They played every Thursday, and the crowd doubled and tripled within two months.
Then came the A’s from Philadelphia. WMMR was playing them, and so were we at WPST.
Then Randy took a swing at a UK punk band called 999.
He got their agent on the phone. It was Ian Copeland, the brother of Stewart Copeland from the Police. The band wanted $2,500. Randy said OK, with no idea whether that was the going rate.
Did he overpay? “I did,” he admits. About 600 people came anyway.
After that, the agency offered him Joan Jett, Wall of Voodoo and Iggy Pop, all before their big hits. Randy picked up a show on WTSR at Trenton State College, now The College of New Jersey, to promote the bands coming through.
In 1986, he quit the post office for good.
Where WPST came in
City Gardens started as a punk club. When new wave and alternative music hit the mainstream, Tom told me, those bands became a staple at the club and on the WPST airwaves at the same time.
Record labels loved it. Their artists played City Gardens, and the station talked them up.
Tom remembers Trenton-area bands getting their big night on that stage, like Bricks Mortar opening for Clarence Clemons & the Red Bank Rockers. He remembers the Hooters and the A’s crossing the river from Philly.
And he remembers Robert Hazard & the Heroes on Jan. 15, 1983, in a raging blizzard. Tom introduced the band that night.
I was there with him. It’s still one of my best memories from my WPST years.
“Robert and company blew the roof off the place,” Tom said. “It’s a night I’ll never forget.”
Me neither.
Hazard wrote “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” I still play it every weekend on New Jersey 101.5.
SEE ALSO: I met Jon Bon Jovi in 1984
Robert Hazard on his first visit to WPST in June 1982, when his debut EP came out | Photo courtesy of Tom Cunningham
Firsts in America, and a band named Nirvana
Randy kept chasing whatever came next: no wave from New York, new romantic and goth from the UK, West Coast punk, New York hardcore, reggae, ska.
He says A Flock of Seagulls and the Thompson Twins played their first U.S. shows at City Gardens. So did Sinéad O’Connor.
Then he heard grunge coming out of Seattle. He booked Mudhoney, then Soundgarden, and that led to Nirvana.
They played City Gardens on Sept. 27, 1991, three days after “Nevermind” came out, according to WXPN. Within months, the music world had changed.
Tom was with Reprise Records by 1994. On March 18 of that year, in yet another blizzard, he saw Green Day there, weeks after their major-label debut “Dookie” came out. That album went on to sell more than 20 million copies.
The band trashed the dressing room after the show. When Tom asked why, they all just laughed and shrugged.
He saw the Ramones play a full set in less than 45 minutes. He hung out with Joan Jett and the Blackhearts in the upstairs dressing room in 1987.
And for a few years in the mid-1980s, the guy pouring drinks was Jon Stewart. He tended bar there, WXPN reported.
Joan Jett and the Blackhearts in the upstairs dressing room at City Gardens, March 15, 1987 | Photo courtesy of Tom Cunningham
Still on the radio in Trenton
Here’s the part I love.
A lot of the artists who climbed onto that Trenton stage on their way up are still on the radio in Trenton today. On New Jersey 101.5, you’ll hear A Flock of Seagulls, the Thompson Twins, Joan Jett, the Hooters, R.E.M., the Beastie Boys and Green Day.
The club is gone. The songs never left.
What finally brought it down
Stage diving did not help.
Randy says lawsuits started arriving by certified mail from parents of kids who got hurt. They named the club, the owner, Randy and even the bands.
He also says a shiny new competitor, Katmandu, got a 10-year tax break from the city. It was nicer and cleaner. City Gardens never changed.
Randy left in 1996. The club closed in 2001.
The city later took over the property and put it up for auction in 2019, with bidding starting at $30,000. When News 12 visited in 2022, a car had driven straight through the front of the building.
City Gardens at 1701 Calhoun Street in Trenton earlier this year | Google Maps
Neighbors watched the demolition this week. “It’s not really sad, but it’s pretty cool,” Dean Fasoli of Trenton told News 12. He used to roller-skate over from his house on Paul Avenue.
“Ninety-nine cents to get in and 99 cents for a beer? Are you kidding?” he said.
Where to find Randy now
Randy never left the music business.
He runs Randy Now’s Man Cave, a record and pop-culture shop at 119 W. Ward St. in Hightstown. It’s an intimate room, and it still books live music.
The biggest show on the calendar is coming up fast. Living Colour’s Vernon Reid and Corey Glover play two shows there Friday, Oct. 16. Tickets are on the Man Cave website.
For more than two decades, a mailman’s Sunday dance night was the loudest room in New Jersey.
Tuesday, it went quiet.
Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 show host Eric Johnson only.
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