Eli Morgan Gesner
'Meet My Friends' Interview Series With Artist & Founder of Zoo York Eli Morgan Gesner
A Note from FFNY:
Welcome to our ‘Meet My Friends Interview Series’, where we highlight some of the coolest cats I know, many of whom grew up in this concrete jungle we call NYC.
One such individual is Eli Morgan Gesner. A familiar face in the downtown scene, Eli is a Gen Xer, culture generator whose name is synonymous with East Coast skate culture, graffiti, and bringing streetwear to the masses with his friends. Eli has significantly influenced these scenes we have all come to take for granted and that run consumerist culture in the now.
In our interview, we delve into Eli's experiences growing up in NYC, his graffiti artist ways, his love for dancing, and his thoughts on the future of our metropolis. Enjoy the looking back while always looking forward.
Let’s take it back. As a young kid in the city what were some of your fave things to do? What daily activities come to mind?
In the 1970s, before I started skateboarding, I was really into Roller Disco and checking out all the Playgrounds around Manhattan. My two main Playgrounds were the ones right next to our apartments growing up. The Fountain Playground in Riverside Park around 98th Street made famous in the movie ‘The Warriors’ (I was actually there the day they shot the ‘Can you dig it’ scene) and Bleecker Street Park down in the West Village. The old Bleecker Street Park was a concrete death trap but I loved it.
I would also try and hit the Roller Disco Circle in Central Park next to Sheep’s Meadow as much as possible. But the highlight of my childhood adventures was the period between 1978 and 1981. Central Park had just built all these new, huge, wooden forts with ropes and tires strung about and they were all built inside these huge sand pits.
All the kids on the Upper West Side would meet there and play these massive games of ‘Wood Tag’. Same rules as Tag except that the ‘It’ would grow and grow until one person was left, and that person was the winner. The other rule was that you could only play on the wooden forts, ropes, chains, or tires - If you fell in the sand you were in the ‘It’ Gang. So this would force every kid to climb, jump, and swing for their lives as if they were being chased. Very Zombie Holocaust now that I think about it.
It was so popular that we had fifteen and sixteen year old kids playing with us ten year olds. It was intense and high stakes. Thirty kids, all trying to get one another, like an acrobatic Gang Fight. The best of us all was this scrappy little gymnastics girl who was my age. Man, She would fling herself to the most impossible places to escape being tagged. I remember watching in awe at how fearless and insane she was.
She would leap off of the top of the fort, across the sand pit, and land on a tire swing twenty feet away. Stuff no one else would do. All the kids would scream in disbelief. She was like a Superhero. When I started skateboarding I tried to embrace her reckless confidence. If I could relive any part of my life it would be those games of Wood Tag. They were nuts.
As a teenager where did you find your peoples?
I started writing Graffiti when I was nine, so 1979, and it just kind of escalated for a few years. Kids stuff really. The Soul Artists and The Zoo York Crew are from my neighborhood on the Upper West Side so the kids who came up under them had skateboards. That’s how I got introduced to skateboarding. By the older kids in my neighborhood who learned it from them. They told me I had to get a skateboard if I wanted to hang with them.
As a skater in NYC you spend most of your time skating from skate spot to skate spot but our HQ for sure was Washington Square. We would all meet up there and then venture out across the city. As far as nightclubs go, growing up in NYC, at least back in the 1970s, they would let kids into roller disco during the day.
‘I WENT TO BOND, STUDIO 54, THE ROXY, AND A WHOLE BUNCH OF OTHER SPOTS I CAN’T REMEMBER THE NAMES OF’.
Back then, it was also cool to bring your kids to bars. My Mom would meet her friends at Hanratty’s to drink and they kept a booth open in the back for us kids to hang at, drink Shirley Temples, and scribble in coloring books.
The first time I went out to a real club at night, however, was Danceteria when I was about thirteen. Some of the older graffiti writers took me kind of as a joke. They told the door girl that I was their nephew, which was funny because they were all Black or Puerto Rican. They let me in and I lost my little mind. I ran all around, up and down the stairs, just being blown away by everything but I told my mom I went to see Rocky Horror so I had to be back by 2am.
Later, I started throwing parties at Club Mars and other spots.
Since FFNY started as a dance party, I love to hear about going out pre internet days. What parties were you a part of, and what was the feeling of the city then?
I got kicked out of so many High Schools in NYC that by 1986 no one would take me. So I got sent off to boarding school. From 1986 to 1988 I was going to underground one-off Hip Hop parties whenever I came back to NYC. Really sketchy and violent but super fun.
In 1988 New York Magazine did the cover story ‘Club Kids’. This was a new invention. Clubs, apparently, we’re getting a little tired so the owners started letting underaged kids into clubs around 9pm with an open bar so that, when the adults showed up at midnight, the place would already be jumping. And on the cover on this magazine was my childhood buddy Mykul Tronn. My sister, Page, was back in NYC and already going out to Mykul’s parties so when I finally graduated back to the City, first day I was up in the Tunnel.
These were super fun times. Late 80’s Downtown New York Nightlife. And I happened to be just underaged enough to reap the rewards of every club letting teenagers in to drink for free and dance the night away. This was way before ‘Bottle Service’ ruined Nightlife by sitting people down in booths.
Every club was a massive space with NO SEATS - You had to dance. And we did. The one problem was that, for a lot of the kids my age (the more pedestrian, Washington Square Park kids, not the notorious over the top Drag Queen style Club Kids) Hip Hop was our music of choice.
The big established Downtown Clubs would never really play Hip Hop. They’d play ‘It Takes Two’ by Rob Base and DJ EZ Roc, and the crowd would go nuts, but that was it. That was your ONE Rap song for the evening. Hip Hop brought out what, my bosses called ‘The Element’. The Element were gangster ass hoods who only listened to Hip Hop and liked to shoot up the place. And the club owners weren’t wrong. This happened a lot back then.
I’ve been in the middle of a bunch of shoot outs and even watched my friends get shot on two occasions. Shit was real. And there were some places, like Nelle’s, that would play Hip Hop here and there but they were not letting any of us teenage sweaty street skaters in. We weren’t cool back then. They would let the grown-hot-men-edgy-fashion-model skaters in, but not us dirty street kids carrying skateboards in. Jeremy Henderson even got a janky mini-ramp in Irving Plaza for the Payday Hip Hop parties, which was amazing, but short lived. And there was The World and Powerhouse but none of them really tapped into the crowd of kids in Washington Square Park. Our crew. That’s what Beasley and I wanted to do. Take the melting pot of all the kids in Washington Sqaure Park during the day and give them a club that wasn’t an ‘outlaw party’ and wouldn’t get shot up.
And then, in 1989, a new multi-floor nightclub opened called Mars. And after working there as a promoter for a few months Beasley and I convinced the owners that we could pull off a weekly hip hop party and not get anyone killed. They gave us our shot and we started a hip hop party called ‘Trip’ - But that is an entire other giant story to tell another time.
If you could have experienced nightlife from another era where would you of checked out?
Studio 54 in the Disco Era for sure.
How did people find out about shit before cell phones?
Obviously, land lines were how the initial reach out started. ‘Meet you at Washington Square in an hour.’ And then you would head out, arrive at your destination, and wait. And sometimes motherfuckers didn’t show up. But most of the time you would find a skater there. Sometimes we would just roll to a spot and sooner or later someone would just show up.
There was always someone at Washington Square or The Brooklyn Bridge Banks and because of this, every skater in NYC knew one another and would skate together. Today, I’ll go to a skatepark in NYC and hardly anyone knows each other. I remember talking to Jim Kerr (The son of the Radio DJ Jim Kerr) to go out and skate at Union Square one freezing cold night.
My subway broke down on the way there and I was stuck in the cold ass train for an hour. When I got to Union Square it was dark and freezing and there was no one to be found. Did Jim Kerr even make it here? How would you know before cell phones?
Then, rolling around, I found a Polaroid picture on the floor. I picked it up. It was Jim, standing on his skateboard, flipping me off. No shit.
Lets talk getting creative. What was the first thing you ever created/ designed?
I grew up drawing and was always damn good at it. That’s actually how I got into graffiti. The older kids in my school would see me drawing in class and then make me draw things for them. Characters and letters.
It’s also how I fucked up in school. If you grow up having everyone tell you you’re going to be professional artist when you grow up, even the teachers, well then, what the fuck am I taking math for? I looked at school as a waste of time.
So I just drew in class. All day every day. One day in 1984 at Elizabeth Irwin I drew a picture of my friend, Ian Frahm. Ian was the best skater in NYC at the time and wrote graffiti as well - Thor IBM - So I drew this picture of him skating while I was in Science class.
My school was across from Soho Skates so I skated over and there was Ian. I showed him the drawing and he really loved it. I tore it out and gave it to him. Two weeks later I walk into Soho Skates and they had made my drawing into a tee shirt without telling me. I was thirteen.
THEY GAVE ME TWO FREE TEESHIRTS, AND JUST LIKE THAT, I WAS A PROFESSIONAL DESIGNER.
When Soho skates moved, they got me to make their new logo. A cool skater dude doing an air inside a black graphic box with Eurostyle Extended Bold rub-off Letraset letters. Really slick graphic. My buddy just found one of the actual tee shirts from 1985. Still holds up. After that Rodney and Bruno hit me up to design the famous Shut Skates Crest logo. I was maybe fifteen. We still use that same graphic at Shut Skates all the time today, 34 years later.
Who were the artists that were the talk of the town when you were coming up Who inspired you to do what you do?
Again, since a child, I was drifting through grade school with this blessing / curse that I was not a normal person - I was an artist - But what did that mean? By October 1982 I was a skateboarder and was spending every day with my drug dealing skateboard pal. One night, at his studio apartment hanging with his Mom, we watched Dan Rather on The CBS Evening News. They did a report on a young Keith Haring.
Literally the next day, my skateboard pal wore his first run, hand made, Keith Haring ‘Radiant Baby’ tee his Mom bought him earlier that year. Just a crappy white tee with a one color black graphic.
“WE HEADED DOWN TO SOHO ON OUR SKATEBOARDS WHEN WE HEAR - “HEY! SKATERS!’ - WE LOOK AND IT’S FUCKING KEITH HARING RUNNING ACROSS THE STREET TO US. ‘NO WAY! I MADE THAT TEE SHIRT!’ HE TOLD US. ’NO WAY! WE JUST WATCHED YOU ON TV LAST NIGHT!’”
He asked us what we thought about the NEWS piece and we talked on the street for a good half hour. Then Keith took out a marker and signed my boy’s tee shirt. The reason I’m bringing this up is not because it was Keith Haring. It has more to do with the magic of growing up in New York City. At least back then. People on TV were demigods in the rarified air.
Keith was the first person to destroy that illusion for me. This guy is just like me and he’s on TV. He is famous for what he does but he’ a human being. It made it tangible. I was on this dirty street corner with the guy I saw on TV the very night before. And he was the same as I was.
A kid trying to do cool shit. I ended up hanging out with Keith a few more times before his untimely death. He was cool with the owners of Soho Skates and dug the graphics I made for them. He told me to my face if you have any doubts, things like this are why you raise your kids in New York City.
What did creating mean to you in your 20’s vs today?
This is a complex question for me. A question I struggle with every day. What I have boiled it down to is that back then, there was NO FUTURE in what we were all doing. Skating, writing graffiti, going to legally questionable night clubs; This was outlaw stuff. There was no career here. And, unless you were Tony Hawk or Basquiat, there was certainly no money.
Yet, despite that, we all persisted. And that is the KEY difference. The attitude that I know this passion of mine will ultimately put me in the poor house but regardless - That’s how important this is to me. So fuck my future. Literally.
‘MY PERSUIT OF MY PASSIONS WAS A CONSCIOUS SUICIDE MISSION’.
I was never going to own a nice car and I would probably die alone in an SRO Hotel. And I’m cool with that. Everyone my age was certain that by giving up a secure career for our love of art and skating, we were forever going to be, not only poor, but rejects of society.
Emphatically that was our position on pursuing this life path. However - I knew that graffiti being illegal and skateboarding being illegal was intrinsically WRONG. I knew it. It was wrong for society to vilify what we were trying to do.
And so my goal was never to get rich or famous. It was always to change the world. To force the world, through our work, to see that skateboarding and graffiti were a BENEFIT. Not a petty crime. And time has shown that we were on the right side of history.
Today, most of the younger people I interact with view the ‘culture’ as a more fun career path than being a Lawyer or a Doctor. It is a generational discord that I struggle with day to day.
On the one hand, I am happy that a creative kid can get the support of his parents to go off and be a sneaker designer or whatever. I helped make that facet of our civilization possible. But I also kind of want to strangle them all.
The younger generation’s motivation is capitalistic. Not altruistic. I guess that’s when you know you have really changed things.
“WHEN SOMETHING THAT WAS ONCE AN ARREST-ABLE OFFENSE NOW MAKES YOU THE CREATIVE DIRECTOR OF LOUIS VUITTON.”
Can you recall the first art show you ever attended?
That I can’t tell you. I was brought to dozens of art shows as an infant. I remember when they were building the World Trade Center, they would always have cool art installations down around the construction site. Art Beach and all that.
I remember seeing this crazy art installation in 1975. An entire massive office building lobby, empty, and this artist had made huge inflatable sculptures out of colored sheets of plastic. Like garbage bag material, but gigantic, and colorful. He had huge fans that would inflate these sculptures inside. Completely fill up this giant 40 foot ceilings and you could walk around inside of them. That blew my little mind.
Lets talk about being a New Yorker. What is it about being a New Yorker that translates to all people everywhere?
I think being a New Yorker does NOT translate to all people everywhere. There are plenty of people all across the World who are happy in their small town or their remote mountain village, who never want to go anywhere else, and could give a fuck about NYC.
“BUT THERE ARE ALSO MASSES OF PEOPLE ALL OVER THE WORLD WHO’S LIFE’S DREAM IS TO GO TO NYC. AND IT IS THOSE PEOPLE WHO COME AND BRING GREATNESS HERE. THEY BRING THEIR FOOD, THEIR MUSIC, THEY BUILD OUR CITY AND PARKS, THEY TEACH US NEW THINGS.”
Especially how to love one another.
NYC is not for the cowardly and narrow minded. It is not for people who are content with what they know and it is utterly not for people who think that everything they like is right and everyone else is wrong.
NYC affords you so many amazing things. Things you can find no where else on Earth. But to get those things you will have to put up with more discomfort than one would in a safe little town.
Obviously, crowded subways, garbage, nasty smells, etc. You have to have the strength and sophistication of character to take the good with the bad here.
“I am not a Gay, Chinese, Orthodox Jew, Salsa Dancer. But I’m friends with all those people.”
And as a New Yorker I for damn well sure fight for their right to be whoever the fuck they want. I read in a science magazine recently that tolerance is a learned behavior. If you do not expose yourself to things outside of your comfort zone you become intolerant, close minded, and paranoid of the unfamiliar.
New Yorkers have a bad rep for being rude and mean when in fact WE ARE probably the most tolerant and accepting people on the whole planet. So fuck you.
Where do you still find inspiration in NYC?
Awe man, I live on Perry and Washington still to this day. The West Village is my home and it still (begrudgingly) melts my heart. But as a skateboarder I literally know every single street in Manhattan. I can look at any Movie or TV show and I know where they are shooting - ‘Corner of 53rd and Lex looking West. The Citi Corp Building is behind the camera’ -
“THE ENTIRE CITY WAS MY BACK YARD AS A CHILD. BUT MY FOREVER LOVE WILL ALWAYS BE CENTRAL PARK - SIMPLY BECAUSE IT DOES NOT CHANGE - THE CENTRAL PARK OF 2024 IS NEARLY EXACT TO THE CENTRAL PARK OF THE LATE 1800’S. ”
Unlike other monuments to my youth. They repositioned the Fountain in Washington Square. They tore down the Brooklyn Bridge Banks. My Zoo York studio was in the Meat Packing District from 1993 through 2002. The Meat Packing District is where Mars was, where Hogs And Heifers was, where dead meat carcasses were, where crack head transvestite hookers were -
Not where DVF, Tesla, and the Highline Park were - That part of the city breaks my heart. And it’s a cruel twist of the knife that I still live right there.
I suppose, in the most optimistic way, it has forced me to accept change. It’s so dumb. The human predisposition to ‘own’ a location and get all salty and grumpy old man about it. It’s cliche. But it is inbred in us. It’s tribal.
If you could choose one person to show you their NYC from any time period who would it be?
That’s a good question! There are so many! Seeing the original, wild New York lands that the Native Americans lived on before the Dutch ‘purchased’ it would be mind blowing.
Hanging with Boss Tweed in the mid to late 1800s would be, by today’s standards, probably pretty horrific but still cool. I would love to have Frederic Williams Thompson give me a tour of Luna Park in Coney Island when it was first wired for electricity 1905 I think that was.
Having Duke Ellington show me around 1920s Jazz Era NYC would be awesome. I would have loved to have one of the Construction Workers who built the Empire State Building take me all the way up to the metal girders at the top during construction.
Andy Warhol’s Factory scene of course. I don’t know. I love it all.
When I die, rather than going to Heaven, I would just like to fly around for eternity as a ghost and time travel and check out all the different periods of History. The Romans, back to Egypt, and the Dinosaurs. For me, THAT would be the better than Heaven. Heaven is just such a stupid idea. I never got it.
If you could only eat from one NYC restaurant for the rest of time which spot would you choose?
Either Lucky Strike or Florent. But since they’re gone probably Emilio’s Ballato.
Favorite Ma & Pop shops you wish were still around?
I wish some of the younger kids got to see 8th Street, Soho, and St. Marks Place in its prime in the 1980s. ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’ and ‘After Hours’ era.
That shit was awesome. It was like every cool person in a hundred mile radius would invade these few cool streets. Maybe like how all the 1980s New Wave California Malls looked in the movies. Valley Girl.
But this was outside in the streets of New York.
Remember Think Big with the giant Pencils and shit? My Mom made their catalog and I modeled for them once.
There was this cool shop called Star Magic I used to love as a kid.
Dream Wheels. Soho Skates. I always got my hair cut at Astor Place Hair Cutters. 8th Street Play House. Trash And Vaudeville. And of course Unique Boutique and Canal Jean Co.
As an artist I used to live in Pearl Paint and Industrial Plastics on Canal.
I made some crazy ass shit with the stuff I bought there. Later, Prince Street in the 1990s was cool as fuck but nothing could compare to the wild, day glow excitement of downtown NYC in the 1980s.
What song forever plays in your NYC?
Easy - ‘Taxi Driver’ by Bernard Herrmann. All day.
Why do we love it here so much?
Because - New York City achieves what America aspires to be.
What’s a new discovery that’s been making life sweet these days? A new app, hack, podcast, shortcut, direction you’re going, expert you’ve learned something from?
I’ve been messing around with a lot of thematic music experiments lately. Making sound scapes and scores.
And I have to tell ya, I kinda find myself getting lost in these little home made electric music boxes made by buddy Richard Upchurch at Brand New Noise. Noting fancy, super low fi, and very haunting - And fun!
I play with these music boxes alot. They’re meditative for me and nine-times-out-of-ten I land on some sound I love and I incorporate the results into more complex ideas.
Whats a big upgrade to your NYC that your grateful for?
I renovated my studio recently. I was lucky enough to donate a bunch of my work into the new Smithsonian Institute American Skateboarding Collection. That and the ‘All The Streets Are Silent’ documentary kind of forced me to take inventory of all my old club Mars, Phat Farm, Zoo York, and whatever other ephemera I had piled up.
It was becoming too ‘hoarder-ish’. So I built out a dedicated off-site archive, organized everything, moved it in there, and then gut renovated my studio for work.
That’s my biggest NYC upgrade.
What do you hope the future of NYC looks like in say 10 years?
I think one of the most destructive things to ever happen to NYC was ‘Sex And The City’. Before that show, wealthy women aspired to have their wealthy Husbands buy them big houses in the suburbs, leaving the dirty city for immigrants and artists.
Now, NYC is for rich people. It’s a gated community. And that gate is the top Tax Bracket. I hate this situation so much I made a horror movie about it (‘Condemned’ 2015)
With working class people now unable to pay mortgages they will be forced to leave, and, opportunistically, more and more rich people will buy up more and more of NYC.
Best case scenario, they become Land Lords and make a killing when people can only afford to live month-to-month because of our increasing population and diminishing work force due to technology and automation.
Worst case scenario, the Rich tear down more and more old buildings, to put up more and more glass towers, with more and more vacant apartments inside, for more rich people to hide their money in. This is already happening now. Let’s hope I’m an idiot.
Any up and comer cats in NYC we should know about?
I am going to have to shout out Kevin Corrigan’s daughter, Sadie Bones, who wrote and directed her first feature film ‘If That Mockingbird Don’t Sing’ at the age of 18 - 18 years old!! WTF?
Do you know how HARD it is to make a 90 minute movie? The film just premiered at the Bentonville Film Festival.
We are called ‘FRIENDS FROM NEW YORK’ so who’s someone you’d like to shout out that’s been an incredible friend to you lately or someone that’s always been there for you and you’d just like to thank them here for being in your life and being rad.
There’s just way too many. Being born and raised in NYC, most of the people I know are ‘Friends From New York’. If you grow up here, NYC is just like a small town with your local crew of kids, theres just, like, a million strangers walking around everywhere who you will never see again. But if I have to pick one, it’s gonna be Jeff Pang. We’ve been all over the world together and have done so much incredible shit together. Love that guy.