What does it mean to be created by a neighborhood? We know a lot of Upper East Siders who can make that claim. But what if the neighborhood that created you vanishes? And more intriguing, if the vanishing had something to do with your being there in the first place? What does that story look like?

In a word, hardcore — the Lower East Side, not the neighborhood of the turn of the century, but the place where the beats, then the hippies, then the punks, and finally what emerged in the early ’80s as New York Hardcore, lived and died.

Harley Flanagan, founder of the Cro-Mags, was in the center of it all, gathering many of the Hardcore elements into a sharp focus.

Currently finishing his much-anticipated autobiography, Harley sat down with New York Natives to talk, to remember and to look toward the future of a place that left an indelible mark on music and on NYC.

Before there was an East Village, before Grunge, before Green Day and even Lady GaGa’s East Village hit-parade, New York Hardcore reverberated with a generation of kids and was appropriated by too many genres, in too many countries, to count. Go ahead … Google it. 

“No Rules” as Harley explains, that was true of the music and of the LES in general. The violence was rampant and permeated the lives of everyone living there. As Harley says in his forthcoming Life of My Own, “I remember one night when I was a little kid lying there [in my bed], hearing some chick down the street getting raped, and just knowing there was really nothing I could do. It was like a helpless feeling. You knew if the cops got called it wouldn’t matter because they probably wouldn’t show up, and if they did, it would be too late … But we didn’t have a phone either way (a lot of people didn’t back then). Years later me and some friends of mine caught three guys trying to rape some chick in Tompkins Square Park; we caught one of them, we beat him till he stopped moving. That might be hard shit for some of you to understand, but back then there was such a thing as street justice. I don’t know what happened to her, she disappeared into the night. We never saw her again.”

Read the entire interview with Harley at New York Natives here.

One of the better recounts of what it was like in the LES in the “bad old days.”

And the guys and gals at NY Natives write some great stuff. Be sure to check back on the site often.