Out with the Knit, in with the Wine

IT was an especially cacophonous Auld Lang Syne. But for the Knitting Factorys last night in Manhattan, it was appropriate, as the shaggy avant-folk group Akron/Family led a version of that Scottish New Years hymn on Wednesday night that mutated from a simple singalong to screeching feedback to a meditative one-note drone.

Surfing the crowd as Deerhoof plays during the Knitting Factorys shows on New Years Eve, the clubs last night in Manhattan. More Diners and drinkers on New Years Eve for the opening night of City Winery in TriBeCa, where grapes are fermented on the premises.

The Knitting Factory has been celebrating noise and eclecticism ever since it opened on East Houston Street in 1987, and in its earlier days the club gained renown as a defining stage for downtown music, that clamorous and unclassifiable New York amalgam of jazz, punk, art-rock and every kind of experimentation.

But once again an arty Manhattan outpost has become a victim of the neighborhood renewal it helped to foster. The Knitting Factory, which moved to Leonard Street in TriBeCa in 1994, can no longer afford the areas rising rents and will reopen in May in a considerably smaller and less expensive space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

This real-estate drama, however, has a twist: one of the areas gentrifiers is a stylish new restaurant and performance space opened by Michael Dorf, the founder of the Knitting Factory. New Years Eve also served as the debut of City Winery, on Varick Street in the South Village nearby, with a performance by Joan Osborne, and the two concerts could hardly have been more different.

At the Knitting Factory, where the dominant color was, as it has always been, black, a bohemian young audience sweated out the night in sardine closeness, with about a dozen acts performing on three floors. A note slapped above the second-floor bar read simply PBR can $3. At the spacious, golden-hued City Winery, Ms. Osborne sang bluesy soft rock in a crimson gown, and the sold-out crowd many of whom looked as though they could well have been the parents of the Knitting Factory clientele sat comfortably at tables and ordered from a list of 500 wines.