'Sweet Spot With Mike Sugerman:' Experiencing Jimi Hendrix's Electric Lady Studios
"Sweet Spot," by Mike Sugerman
NEW YORK (WCBS 880) – Every couple minutes, someone like Mark Anderson and family, of Edinburgh, Scotland, find their way to Jimi Hendrix's Electric Lady Studios on Eighth Street in the West Village.
"It's spine-tingling to be honest. You can take all the churches and the castles that we have back home but you can forget them, I want to stand by Electric Lady Studio," he says.
Hendrix opened Electric Lady Studios and lived in the cottage in the back until just died in 1970. Now, there's a movement to have the street renamed in his honor.
"'Jimi Hendrix Way' is our social movement to create a little bit of nostalgia, history, commemoration and excitement on Eighth Street," says Storm Ritter, owner of Storm Ritter Studio, a boutique down the street from Electric Lady Studios.
She's a young woman who would have been quite comfortable back in the '60s, but it's the realities of half a century later that she's dealing with now.
"All you see are so many empty storefronts, it's – challenging and it really translates really well to the tourists, to the residents, and to the overall area," she says.
"I've seen hundreds of store close," says Richard Geist, who's owned Uncle Sam's Army Navy since 1998.
Jimi Hendrix Way? 'Way cool,' he says.
"No, if this was called 'Jimi Hendrix Way' it would make a huge difference in our sales, in our employment of people, sales tax and on and on and on…" he says.
But officially co-naming a street in New York City is no easy task. It's a process Ritter says will take at least a year.
"We have to have a petition, and we have to letters of recommendation, we need to have support from the community board, which we'll propose down the road. Right now, it's really what we're just pushing is making a community," she says.
Trying to make a truly 'Jimi Hendrix Experience.'
