Walk through New York long enough and the city hums beneath your feet. Not in the way tourists hear it — no bright marquees or shiny new venues — but in the echoes. Ghost clubs hiding behind boutiques. Former dive bars turned yoga studios. Record stores that now sell gourmet olive oil. The stages are gone, but the songs? They linger.

That’s exactly what Jesse Rifkin captures in This Must Be the Place. It’s not a tidy history of icons or Top 40 hits. It’s the story of space — the forgotten, rented, broken-down spaces that gave New York’s music scenes their pulse. Rifkin reminds us that artistic movements rarely begin with a genius at a piano. They start with cheap rent, empty rooms, and a neighborhood in flux.

The book walks us through decades of musical DNA: how the 1960s folk scene bloomed in Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park, how the city’s near-bankruptcy in 1975 cracked the door wide open for punk, how Brooklyn’s empty warehouses in the 2000s gave indie rockers a stage before they ever saw one.

And it’s not just about the headliners. Rifkin interviewed more than a hundred musicians, deejays, scenesters, and everyday dreamers. Voices from Peter, Paul and Mary to Sonic Youth, from Moldy Peaches to Sun Ra Arkestra, are woven into a living, breathing map of vanished venues. These scenes weren’t accidents; they were ecosystems.

What’s striking is how these bursts of creativity often lead to cycles of gentrification. Artists move in because it’s cheap. Culture blossoms. And eventually, someone sees opportunity — and the rent spikes. The same people who built the scene are pushed out. It’s a rhythm that’s almost as recognizable as any chorus.

Rifkin doesn’t mourn the past with rose-colored glasses. He maps it, names it, gives it form again. And in doing so, he makes a quiet argument: these creative communities don’t just belong to history — they belong to us all. If they happened once, they can happen again.

This book isn’t just for music historians. It’s for anyone who’s ever stood in front of a nondescript building and felt something stir. A ghost guitar riff. A memory of a night they never lived. A sense of what was — and what could be again.