Irving Plaza

Irving Plaza is a 1,025-personballroom-style music venue at 17 Irving Place and East 15th Street in the Union Square neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. The three-level auditorium has served as a Polish Army veterans' headquarters, a swing music ballroom, a rock venue and has hosted church services as well. It is featured on the Complex City Guide list of "50 Best Concert Venues of America".

Polish Army veterans

In 1948 the building was purchased by the Polish Army Veterans of America District 2 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

Thirty years later, 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.

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern United States and is the United States' 27th-most extensive, fourth-most populous, and seventh-most densely populated state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south and Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont to the east. The state has a maritime border in the Atlantic Ocean with Rhode Island, east of Long Island, as well as an international border with the Canadian provinces of Quebec to the north and Ontario to the west and north. The state of New York, with an estimated 19.8 million residents in 2015, is often referred to as New York State to distinguish it from New York City, the state's most populous city and its economic hub.

With an estimated population of nearly 8.5 million in 2014, New York City is the most populous city in the United States and the premier gateway for legal immigration to the United States. The New York City Metropolitan Area is one of the most populous urban agglomerations in the world. New York City is a global city, exerting a significant impact upon commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and entertainment, its fast pace defining the term New York minute. The home of the United Nations Headquarters, New York City is an important center for international diplomacy and has been described as the cultural and financial capital of the world, as well as the world's most economically powerful city. New York City makes up over 40% of the population of New York State. Two-thirds of the state's population lives in the New York City Metropolitan Area, and nearly 40% live on Long Island. Both the state and New York City were named for the 17th century Duke of York, future King James II of England. The next four most populous cities in the state are Buffalo, Rochester, Yonkers, and Syracuse, while the state capital is Albany.

Irving

Irving is originally a Scottish surname, a variant of the name Irvine, which is derived from the eponymous River Irvine in Dumfriesshire. It may also refer to:

Persons

Family name

Disco Biscuits

The Disco Biscuits are a jam band from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The band consists of Allen Aucoin (drums), Marc Brownstein (bass), Jon Gutwillig (guitar), and Aron Magner (keyboards, synths).

The band incorporates elements from a variety of musical genres into a consistent base of electronic and rock. Their style has been described as trance fusion.

History

The Disco Biscuits formed at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1995. Their name is a slang term for Quaaludes, although this is not what the band was named after.

Diamond Riggs Studios

After purchasing the former Old City Philadelphia studio space of DJ Jazzy Jeff in 2006, the band found themselves with an abundance of resources, and came to find out that there are a lot of local musicians that needed a place to congregate and work. In part, this helped launch the unique collaborations that made up the Planet Anthem sessions.

Camp Bisco

Camp Bisco is an electronic and jam band music festival, hosted by and centered around The Disco Biscuits at Indian Lookout Country Club in upstate New York. The Disco Biscuits launched Camp Bisco in 1999 with the idea of combining sets by electronic DJs with improvisational rock bands at a time when both the jam band and electronic dance music scenes were taking off in their own rights. The two scenes overlapped at a certain juncture via bands like Sound Tribe Sector Nine (STS9) and the Disco Biscuits. Camp Bisco has since expanded to include indie rockers and hip-hop artists. Acts such as Skrillex, Bassnectar, Amon Tobin and Big Gigantic performed at the 11th annual festival in July 2012.

Plaza

A plaza /ˈplɑːzə/ is an open urban public space, such as a city square.

Throughout Spanish America and the Spanish East Indies, the plaza mayor of each center of administration held three closely related institutions: the cathedral, the cabildo or administrative center, which might be incorporated in a wing of a governor's palace, and the audiencia or law court. The plaza might be large enough to serve as a military parade ground. At times of crisis or fiesta, it was the space where a large crowd might gather. Like the Italian piazza, the plaza remains a center of community life that is only equaled by the market-place.

Most colonial cities in Spanish America and the Philippines were planned around a square plaza de armas, where troops could be mustered, as the name implies, surrounded by the governor's palace and the main church. A plaza de toros is a bullring.

In modern usage, a plaza can be any gathering place on a street or between buildings, a street intersection with a statue, etc. Today's metropolitan landscapes often incorporate the "plaza" as a design element, or as an outcome of zoning regulations, building budgetary constraints, and the like. Sociologist William H. Whyte conducted an extensive study of plazas in New York City: his study humanized the way modern urban plazas are conceptualized, and helped usher in significant design changes in the making of plazas.