While engineers from the Army National Guard were carrying out the long-awaited teardown of the old King’s Inn, a bit further up Broadway, death metal fans and other patrons of a popular drinking spot and music venue were doing their own — decidedly less welcome — demolition job. Now the building’s owner and police are trying to determine who is responsible for damages reportedly totaling upwards of $50,000.
Early in the morning on Saturday Oct. 8, hours before landlord H. Lee Wind and sheriff’s officials were set to serve an eviction order at the Basement bar at 744 Broadway, a triple-bill metal show ended in an orgy of destruction. Wind said that by the time he arrived early Saturday morning, the former bar was a wasteland of powdered drywall and broken glass with every fixture, from the toilets to the ceiling fan either smashed or hauled away.
“I guess you had some people who believe, to some extent in anarchy in music,” said Wind. “The problem is, they tried to transfer that anarchy into a real situation.”
The destruction occurred at the conclusion of a musical bill headlined by death metal rockers Immolation. Photos posted on the Facebook page of Poughkeepsie-based Tainted Entertainment, which produced the event, show fans cavorting in a snowstorm of floating drywall and tearing down a ceiling fan. Other pictures and accounts from patrons who turned out for the show describe a chaotic scene with free liquor flowing freely, scantily clad women dancing on the bar and a sledgehammer taken to various fixtures.
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