This Must Be the Place: Music, Community, and Vanished Spaces in New York City

Journalist Rifkin’s ambitious yet uneven debut chronicles New York City’s thriving music milieus over the past 60 years. Zeroing in on Lower Manhattan, with Williamsburg, Brooklyn, idiosyncratically tacked on since it’s just “one subway stop away from the East Village,” Rifkin captures jazz in Soho and folk in Greenwich Village, and examines how those scenes affected—and often significantly changed—the “mostly working-class or industrial” neighborhoods in which they formed. In the 2000s, indie rock helped make Williamsburg “an epicenter of cutting-edge music,” hiking rent prices that drove out Puerto Rican and Dominican families. Rifkin conducted more than 100 interviews for the book, and stitches in fascinating anecdotes from the likes of Buffy Saint-Marie, Charlemagne Palestine, and Judy Collins, who describes the early spirit of Greenwich Village: “After I moved here, I immediately ran into everybody in town who wrote songs. I’d walk down the street and there would be Tom Paxton... and then he’d sing me ‘Bottle of Wine.’ ” Despite its bright moments, snarky side notes distract (“As of this book’s writing, Rudy Giuliani is tragically still alive. I wish him only the worst”), and Rifkin’s frequent laments about the type of businesses that currently occupy former music spaces becomes repetitive. This is a missed opportunity. (July)