One man created a movement and a scene

How a event grew out of one musician's need to create an alternative place to play:

How Does It Feel, Antifolkies, to Have a Home, Not Be Unknown? - New York Times, 8/11/06: "IN 1983 a young singer-songwriter known as Lach showed up at the storied Greenwich Village club Folk City looking to play. The club’s booker turned him down, saying that his music was too punk. Lach responded by opening an after-hours club on the Lower East Side the following year, naming it the Fort.

"His first event started during the week of the New York Folk Festival, and so he labeled it the New York Antifolk Festival. The folk festival hasn’t been held for years, but Lach’s festival is still going strong: tomorrow at noon it will begin its latest edition with a parade and an outdoor concert at Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, followed by a week of shows at the Antifolk headquarters, the Sidewalk Café on Avenue A....

"From its beginnings at the Fort, antifolk has reached far and wide, and seems to be granted more respect overseas than here at home. There is a festival in London, a zine chronicling the community called Urban Folk (also at urbanfolk.org), various record labels, a book (in German) chronicling the movement and a documentary in the works. During Lach’s recent 10-city tour of Britain, Time Out London called him 'NYC’s living legend.' Mostly, though, there are more and more new participants; the sign-up for the Antihoot now regularly approaches 100."