CBGB owners hunt for a New York room, twenty years after the club closed

The people who own the CBGB name want a room again. Phil Sandhaus, a music industry veteran and the current owner of the brand, has confirmed that the search for a New York site is live, almost twenty years after the Bowery club closed for good.

It is not close to done. Sandhaus says a reopening has been in his plans for years, but excessive rents and the general state of the New York club business have made a permanent location hard to find, and no site, opening date or financing has been announced. Brooklyn and Queens are both under consideration, because the Lower East Side the club grew out of now costs several times what it did.

The brand has found something to do in the meantime. The CBGB Festival returns for its second edition on 26 September at Under the K Bridge Park in Brooklyn, with a bill headed by Patti Smith, Morrissey, Interpol and the Sex Pistols with Frank Carter, alongside Bikini Kill, Buzzcocks, Circle Jerks, Agnostic Front, Mannequin Pussy and Militarie Gun.

That festival exists because the property search stalled. Sandhaus says the original plan was to find a building first; when the market made that impossible, the festival became the way to keep the name active and to put historic acts on the same bill as newer punk, hardcore and new wave bands. The first edition in 2025 was headlined by Iggy Pop and Jack White.

The room being remembered opened in 1973 at 315 Bowery under Hilly Kristal, and it was not meant to be a punk club at all. The letters stand for country, bluegrass and blues, which is what Kristal originally booked; what actually turned up was Ramones, Television, Blondie, Talking Heads and Patti Smith, and the place became the centre of the American underground instead.

It closed in 2006 after a dispute over the lease. Since 2008 the address has been a John Varvatos clothing store, so any CBGB that opens will do so somewhere else, under a name rather than in the building that earned it.

That gap between the brand and the bricks is the whole question here. A festival can put Patti Smith on a bill; a club is a room with a booker, a rent and a neighbourhood, and the reason the search has taken years is that the second thing is much harder to buy than the first.

Our other rock coverage of that scene's afterlife includes the Sex Pistols with Frank Carter adding 50 Years Of Punk dates and Iggy Pop and Bikini Kill headlining Mosswood Meltdown.