Irving Plaza
known as The Fillmore New York in the late 2000s
Irving Plaza (known through sponsorship as Irving Plaza, powered by Verizon 5G and formerly known as the Fillmore New York at Irving Plaza) is a ballroom-style music venue located within the Union Square neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City.
It was featured on the Complex City Guide list of "50 Best Concert Venues of America" in 2013.
History
Polish Army veterans
The building was purchased by the Polish Army Veterans of America District 2 in 1948, and turned into a Polish-American community center. Generals and other distinguished Poles graced its stage including, in 1976, the future Pope John Paul II.
Rock venue
In 1978, the hall was converted to a rock music venue by future Peppermint Lounge promoters Tom Goodkind and Frank Roccio, who after a year began to share promotional efforts with a "Club 57" crew headed by Jane Friedman and Louis Tropia. Goodkind and Roccio brought in acts such as the B-52s, Talking Heads, the Ramones and, with Friedman and Tropia, a wealth of British bands, establishing the venue as a premier American location for punk and new wave.
The venue was reopened by Chuck Terzella in October 1983, with management by Frank Gallagher and the English DJ Andy Dunkley, presenting reggae and other ethnic music, plus college rock, proclaiming in their ads "We don't have video". Terzella's club filed for bankruptcy in December 1985, and closed in June 1986.
Chris Williamson, who already promoted the punk and hard rock oriented "Rock Hotel" nights at the Ritz, then took over in November 1986. He began programming alternative rock occasionally using the designation "Rock Motel". A New Year's Eve Rock Hotel show with The Dictators turned nasty after the band initiated a food fight and a bouncer became upset and began beating up some of the patrons.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Irving Plaza” is known as The Fillmore New York in the late 2000s. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Irving, Plaza and known, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3154621. Authority coordinates are 40.734, -73.989. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2013, 1948, 1976 and 1978.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Irving Plaza” 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.