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Research dossier · People & Ideas

Hilly Kristal

American club owner and musician (1931–2007)

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJul 24, 2026
Entity authoritySource title only
Source-derived summary

Hillel Kristal was an American club owner, manager and musician who was the owner of the New York City club CBGB, which opened in 1973 and closed in 2006 over a rent dispute.

Editorial summary

“Hilly Kristal” enters the record as american club owner and musician (1931–2007). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Hilly, Kristal and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1973, 2006—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Hilly, Kristal and American.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Hilly Kristal” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Hilly, Kristal and American provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 24, 2026. The first chronological checks are 1973 and 2006.

Critical limits

Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Hilly Kristal”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Hilly Kristal primary sources, Hilly Kristal archive and Hilly research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Hilly Kristal”?
  2. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
  3. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Hilly Kristal” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.