A press release his announcing Kristal's death said there are currently plans to open new CBGB clubs "in several locations."

Kristal exhaustively documented the club's layout before its closing, with an eye toward reopening it (see "CBGB's Last Hours").

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The smell is bad enough to test anyone's gag reflex.

Worse than the stench of death, it's a putrid mix of decayed wood, decades-old dust, mold, vomit, sweat, stale beer, rat feces, a million cigarette butts and fruit so rotten that it actually smells slightly sweet.

This is the smell of CBGB's last hours.

It's an aroma this reporter won't soon forget. Nor will the team of 10 construction workers who've been hired to painstakingly dismantle the iconic birthplace of punk rock, piece by dingy piece, for reassembly at some undetermined future time and place.

For days, these guys — each armed with crowbars and wearing white surgical masks — have been unscrewing, unhinging and unbuilding one of rock music's most revered landmarks. They're doing so in an environment that's the very definition of hazardous, knowing all the while that they're always just one misstep away from a tetanus shot, or worse. Lord knows what lurks beneath the surface of this proudly filthy club, which hosted music, booze and fans — and all the substances that come with each — nearly every night from its opening in December 1973 till its swan-song show on October 15.

Let's just say the club smells its age. There must be at least four dozen flies buzzing around. At points, the stink is so intense that some of the workers can't help but dry-heave. "I've never smelled the smell we're smelling today," one of them says. "It's like a mix of Sprite and sh--." Everything must go. The historic plywood stage that the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, Bad Brains, the Police, Sonic Youth, the Pixies, Soundgarden and tens of thousands of others have sweated and spat upon. The battered bar where countless fans and musicians have imbibed all manner of intoxicants. The rickety wooden loft that held the lighting board, the graffiti- and sticker-coated wall panels, the neon beer advertisements caked with moss-like dust, the stained urinals from the men's restroom — a room where even the bars of Dial soap left at the sink have been tagged by Sharpee-wielding vandals. It's all being removed, wrapped in plastic and loaded onto two storage trailers that will sit in New Haven, Connecticut, until Hilly Kristal, the only proprietor the club has ever had, decides where he wants to attempt to re-create CBGB.

As his club is dismantled around him, Hilly sits in the same place he's been for much of the last 33 years: at his ancient desk near the club's entrance, as seemingly oblivious to the sounds of hammering, splintering wood and wrenched nails as he was to the thousands of soundchecks that took place over the years.