Hells Angels Ride the Big Apple: New York in the Early 1970s
The Hells Angels were founded in San Bernardino, California, in 1948. For their first 13 years they stayed largely in California, but the 1960s changed that. By 1969 there was a New York City chapter, and the first floor of 77 East Third Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side had become its clubhouse. These photographs come from that early New York period, when the club was putting down roots in the city and the California chopper had already made the trip east.
Hells Angels Reach New York
The New York chapter was not a group of California Angels passing through town. Sandy Alexander was president from the start and stayed in that job until March 1984, long enough to become one of the people most closely tied to the club’s first generation in New York.
Alexander had a résumé that sounds like it belonged on the Lower East Side. He was a former Marine from California and, before becoming synonymous with the New York Hells Angels, worked as a trapeze artist at the Electric Circus on St. Mark’s Place. He was already standing in the middle of the downtown music and counterculture scene before the clubhouse became his permanent address.
The Clubhouse on East Third Street
The address became as recognizable as the motorcycles. The six-story building stood between First and Second Avenues. The clubhouse occupied the first floor, while the five floors above contained apartments, most of them occupied by Hells Angels members. The club would stay associated with the building for half a century.
The first floor did a lot more than give the bikes a place to park out front. Weekly chapter meetings—“church”—were held downstairs. Minutes were kept and attendance was recorded. The clubhouse handled chapter business, while motorcycle runs, parties and trips to other chapters filled plenty of the time in between.
Then there was the street itself. A row of chopped Harleys could eat up a good stretch of Manhattan curb, with parked cars, pedestrians and neighbors packed around them. For the California version of the club on the road, Bill Ray’s 1965 photographs are a completely different world.
Dan Nelken Walks Through the Door
Photographer Dan Nelken arrived in 1970 after seeing Danny Lyon’s biker photographs and deciding he wanted to do something similar in New York. He approached one of the Angels, was introduced to Sandy Alexander, explained what he wanted to do and got permission to photograph.
Nelken stayed around for the next two years. He photographed new bikes, gas stops, riders on the road, Manhattan members meeting Boston members, people hanging around in front of the clubhouse, a New Hampshire gathering, afternoon naps and hangovers.
Most days were not funerals, raids or police headlines. They were riding, wrenching, traveling, hanging around the clubhouse and recovering from the night before.
Groover Coffey Comes Home
In March 1971, New York got pulled into the aftermath of a much larger fight. At a motorcycle show in Cleveland, the Hells Angels and a rival club called the Breed went at each other in a battle that lasted about a minute. Four Breed members and 22-year-old Hells Angel Jeffrey “Groover” Coffey of Hartford were killed. Twenty-one more people were injured, and 57 were initially charged with first-degree murder.
Coffey’s body was brought to Manhattan. TIME reported that he lay in state in full Hells Angels colors at a Lower East Side funeral parlor with his motorcycle beside the coffin while dozens of Angels gathered to pay their respects.
The week got uglier. TIME also reported that eight men were arrested after an alleged attack on a 17-year-old woman in a nearby leather-goods shop. They were booked on charges that included rape, sodomy, assault, criminal trespass and unlawful imprisonment. Those were charges, not convictions. Even so, the funeral gathering had become another major police story.
A Raid, Then a Grateful Dead Benefit
The following year brought more trouble on East Third Street. A March 1972 Village Voice report said police raided the six-story building after an investigation that began with the alleged robbery and beating of a young man in the neighborhood. The paper reported that police found revolvers, about a thousand rounds of ammunition, knives, a machete and a bomb. Vincent Girolamo and Anthony Morabito were among those arrested.
Within days, the New York Angels were at the Academy of Music on 14th Street for something completely different: a Grateful Dead benefit. The Dead played a week-long run there, and Saturday night was for the New York Hells Angels. Sandy Alexander arrived with Angels from Third Street and elsewhere, motorcycles lined up outside, and the Village Voice described a night that raised money for the less glamorous costs of Angel life—bail, spark plugs, chrome polish and keeping the bikes on the road.
Big Vinny
Vincent “Big Vinny” Girolamo became another name permanently attached to the clubhouse. In September 1977, 22-year-old Mary Ann Campbell fell to her death from the roof of the six-story building. Girolamo was arrested the following year and charged with her murder, accused of throwing her from the roof. He died in 1979 before the case went to trial.
His funeral brought hundreds of Hells Angels into New York, with motorcycles joining the procession to St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx. Back on East Third Street, his name stayed over the door for decades on a plaque reading “BIG VINNY 1948–1979” and carrying the line, “When in doubt, knock ’em out.”
New York Choppers
I originally came to these photographs for the motorcycles, and they still deserve a closer look. Harley-Davidson remained the bike of choice, but these were not restoration projects. They were working customs—ridden, changed, repaired and changed again.
Panhead- and Shovelhead-era big twins dominate the pictures. Extended front ends, high bars, skinny front wheels, trimmed fenders, altered tanks and personalized paint show up again and again, but there is no point trying to force every modified bike back into a neat factory model description. Mixed parts are part of the story.
What caught my attention when I first put these photographs together still holds up: most of the motorcycles are fairly new for the period. There are plenty of Panhead- and Shovelhead-era machines, while Knuckleheads and Flatheads are conspicuously absent. I also do not see a stock springer front end in the bunch. For a club that had only recently established itself in New York, they were not riding a collection of old leftovers.
The New York setting changes the bikes as much as the parts do. A long chopper on a California highway looks built for the horizon. Park the same machine tight against a Manhattan tenement and it looks about twice as long, especially when pedestrians, parked cars and half the neighborhood are standing around it.
The Federal Government Comes for the Clubhouse
The East Third Street story kept going long after these photographs were taken. A nationwide federal investigation of the Hells Angels ran from 1977 into 1985. On May 2, 1985, law-enforcement agents raided the clubhouse. More than a dozen New York chapter members, former members and associates were later convicted and sentenced for narcotics-related offenses.
The federal government also tried to take the building. That case ended differently. After a five-week trial in 1994, a jury found that the government had not proven the property was used, or intended to be used, to facilitate a felony drug violation during the period covered by the forfeiture law. Judge Sonia Sotomayor later refused to overturn the verdict. Members had narcotics convictions; the government still could not take the clubhouse on that evidence.
Fifty Years on East Third Street
The Hells Angels finally moved out in 2019, ending roughly fifty years at the same address. By then the neighborhood around them had changed almost beyond recognition, but the building still carried the same basic markers: motorcycles at the curb, club insignia on the front and Big Vinny’s memorial plaque over the door.
I started looking at these pictures because of the choppers. And yes, I am still wondering about the monkey.