From grocery to saloon to Beastie Boys’ concert venue, the story of the last wood building on the Upper West Side

The Upper West Side is an area of architectural splendor—with Beaux-Arts beauties, romantic brownstone rows, and Art Deco masterpieces. But before that, there was this simple wood-frame building on the corner of Broadway and West 100th Street. Constructed not long after the end of the Civil War, the Italianate-style building predates Broadway (then known as the Boulevard), the elevated train that once ran along Columbus Avenue, and an 1882 mandate outlawing wood structures below 155th Street, which the city recognized as fire hazards. How 2641 Broadway managed to survive on this corner while so many of its wood-frame and masonry neighbors met the wrecking ball is a mystery. But its various incarnations—as a grocery, hotel, saloon, cigar shop, fusion restaurant, and a 1980s concert space for the Beastie Boys, among other wildly different uses—reflect a century and a half of Upper West Side growth and history. The story of the wood-frame building begins with a man named Henry Grimm, who…