I was working at the Whitney and helping to open different museum branches, so I was shuttling between 42nd Street, Stamford, Conn., and the downtown branch, which was just a few blocks from where I lived, on Front Street in the South Street Seaport area. It was a total nexus. [1] I had reached 30 and was having to face how hard it was going to be. Hey, lets go get drunk at a bar.. You could say I was not a considerate neighbor. Denzel had just gotten St. The old downtown art scene was floundering, while some people, like Robert Mapplethorpe, had risen. Spankys, a sports bar on 75th Street, attracted the young Republican crowd that had begun to invade the area. We blasted Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson. Since no ones making them, they dont.. The bathroom of Area nightclub, which was located on 157 Hudson Street and opened in 1983. 26 places sorted by traveler favorites Clear all filters 1. The Mudd Club was right around the corner, going full throttle. The oppressively hot and always jam-packed Ski Bar was so crazy The New York Times compared its atmosphere to that of a beer commercial, and nightly there were sweaty singles dancing and drinking with unbridled enthusiasm. Many of its bartenders have gone on to open their own places. I went over and started chatting with him, and we became completely engrossed in this conversation about jazz. Everyone was very excited. They were supposed to be 17 or 18. The landlord turned off the plumbing, so wed defecate into garbage bags and throw them out the window. I met Peter Hujar through Susan Sontag. The Times considered it a a bit of a fallen Disneyworld, chalking that up to the eras young singles having no pretensions to hipness and a perhaps commendable lack of irony.. The rental apartment upstairs from my mother, with the same layout was recently listed for $9900.00 a month. And the city wasnt so much about money. David McDermott and Peter McGough, artists. ), When we go out drinking, we go for broke, one man told The Times. He was in his preppy stage in those days, wearing button-downs, which really is hard to imagine now. Best Upper East Side bars in NYC. To me it was all an art project. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. It was sort of 11 to 7. Block says it was the first non-nightclub bar on the Upper East Side to have a DJ booth, in this case a ski lift gondola repurposed from Killington Ski Resort. We would get on at the ramp at Chambers Street and ski up to Spring Street to the Ear Inn. Ann Magnuson, actress and performance artist. Not only did we dress in wigs and dresses from 14th Street, but we took on personas to match. We had a studio on Bleecker near Seventh Avenue. Blocks bar was ski-themed, natch, with a Ski-Doo hanging from the ceiling, bartenders wearing neon-colored ski pants in the winter and bathrooms labeled Unload Here (mens) and Grooming in Process (womens). Being at the Carlyle was amazing, but I was still an undergrad at Yale at the time, and the whole thing felt unreal, as though I was living two lives. Dinner on the Upper East Side with a former president of the United States. His name opened every door for me. They were very basic but super interesting. Flemings Reunion Party - MurphGuide: NYC Bar Guide Mos), a Tex-Mex slash surfer-themed bar with a totemistic statue of Geronimo the Apache Surfer hanging by the entrance and countless big screen TVs. Al Sharpton (right) backstage at Madison Square Garden on June 11, 1974. Those were days when we ate meat just blissfully. What if they just let all women drink for free? There would be 200 people in there. But, most women slugging free beers at Brother Jimmys or complimentary Champagne at Jungle Jims or on-the-house Slalom Shots at Ski Bar arguably enjoyed these ladies night deals. It was a walk-up. They called it rocking early breaking, essentially. The night was such a hoot we tried to reprise it a few times, but the tenor slid from hilarity to melodrama, and, like so many ecstasies of the era, soon just crumbled and fell apart. And then we said, We gotta do the real hip-hop that were actually doing at the block parties and at the house parties and at the park parties. So we decided to make it all beat no music, just me and Run [Joseph Simmons, another founding member of Run-DMC] doing the real hardcore, just rhyming on this record. The whole reason I was able to raise money for my causes was because of him. On July 11, the guests included novelists Harold Brodkey, Mona Simpson, Richard Price and Scott Sommer (who might be better known if he hadnt died at 42). Zipped into a distressed red velvet number, I was the wacky blonde June Buntt, who liked to say the second T is silent. I was married to the astronaut Brad Buntt, who liked to say hed been in space for years now. The writer Dennis Cooper, in blue jean coveralls, was Mavis Purvis, a lesbian farmer living on a rural commune with her girlfriend. Reagan really ruined it for me. I also had a tiny place on 12th Street between Greenwich and Washington the top back room of a falling-apart townhouse that the owner was renting out. And if we didnt have the money, wed go to the matre d it was absurd because this restaurant was in the middle of the slums and say, Can we pay you tomorrow? and theyd let us. There was a place called Columbus, on Columbus Avenue and 69th Street. Today hes in his mid-50s and out of the bar business entirely. Afternoon workouts. A crack den lined with books. The mayoral election of Rudy Giuliani in 1994 would favor the NIMBYs, as he sent task forces around to raid bars, enforce cabaret laws with hefty fines, and even enact Operation Last Call, having police officers carry a meter to check noise levels around closing time. Load more. Its until you pass out.. If it was a Thursday, Id be rushing to get all my work done, because that was the night I went dancing. I would go there every day to write. Hed walk in and be perfectly comfortable with the Duke of Edinburgh. . It's now a Samsung store. It was in this desolate area between TriBeCa and Chinatown, and I knew every alley. In a letter about her trip, she wrote, When pages needed to be retyped, Jimmy did the retyping. I was in my early 30s, and I had Tatiana and Alex, my children, so I didnt stay out until dawn like I had in the 1970s. Sorry.. I saw Jody Watley on television, and I was like, They dont steal silver, Im going to wear those!. Normandie Court, a complex of four 34-story beige towers occupying the entire block bounded by East 95th and 96th Streets and Second and Third Avenues, opened around then, offering dirt cheap rent. One of my responses was to just keep working. He had two responses: Pretty good, was high, high praise. Alanna Heiss, founder of PS1 and the Clocktower Gallery. If they didnt give us any food, wed go off to the next person. $5 all-you-can-drink that was my bar menu., 2014 - 2023 VinePair Inc. Made In NYC, Bartenders: Now's Your Chance To Experience Barbados. I would stay in the clubs, but I wouldnt dance. On NYC's Upper East Side, Ladies' Night Ruled the '90s - VinePair Elsewhere, so he was going back and forth between doing the TV show and the play. It was very close to the Forward Building, which housed the important Yiddish newspaper. Then it got to be a habit. Le Relais, on Madison and 63rd, was more everyone my age and everyone from Europe. Amura ($$) Japanese Menu Available. You couldnt do nothing stupid or bad because your friends mother was your mother, too. This bar, deep inside the St. Regis on Fifth Avenue, is one of the few New York hotel bars whose . (What a loft was, I wasnt entirely sure.) It was before he was onstage and all that; he was just starting out. I mean, thats when Brooklyn was Brooklyn, not some extension of the West Village or a place with good coffee. He was like the Jimmy Fallon or Trevor Noah of that era. It was the three of us. Sep 13, 2019 - Restaurants that I ate at as a child..most no longer exist. Soon there was an all-out war being waged for putting butts on barstools, and in these days before the internet, the bars would advertise their increasingly outrageous specials in the Village Voice and free local fliers sloppily stacked at the entrance to ATM banks, while hoping for write-ups in New York Magazines weekly goings-on section. Bar owners argued that they should be able to capitalize on the marketplace however they could and that only the State Liquor Authority could outlaw such ladies night deals. You werent afraid of getting it, you were wondering when are the symptoms going to show up. Friday's location on the Upper East Side. There was an interest beyond becoming ladies who lunch. Everyone talks about the 1970s as being the birth of feminism, but for me, the 80s were really about feminism in practical use. Sometimes it was just me and my sister walking up to the velvet rope or the bouncers, or it would be a group of us, and they would let us right in. She and Larry Gagosian had this space, it was a condo loft in a building on West Broadway. Then, I didnt have the kind of formal board that one would today. The idea of hip-hop hadnt really gelled. I would get back home [from school] at a decent hour, four in the afternoon. Brooklyn: Empire Roller Skating Center, a rink with a sound system built by Richard Long that was a favorite of Chers; Albee Square, a public mall where Big Daddy Kane and Biz Markie used to hang out. It was just shattering, but of course I had to pretend that this was the surprise that I had brought my board to see. I had no student loans and the housing was still affordable. Landis shot the models one afternoon on the Upper East Side. Upper East Side Bars - Directory of the Best Bars on the UES Today the Upper West Side is considered one of the richest, cleanest, and most expensive places to live in New York City. I unlocked the door. Honestly, my mind was empty, but I wanted to be consumed by that emptiness. It was around the corner from another tiny spot called Chandalier. Michael Gira, the frontman of the band Swans, was on the [first] cover. I returned to New York in 81 after 10 years as an expat. Photograph: Paul Wagtouicz. I didnt know anything. The robust economy powered unfathomable riches into New York's in the late 90s: In SoHo restaurants, Madison Avenue boutiques, and East Side real-estate offices, no price is too high for the lords . My fantasy was to rent one of these theaters on 42nd Street and show my movie alongside Mad Monkey Kung Fu. I was finishing my dissertation and working as the porn critic for the New York Native, so Id go up to the Adonis at 51st and Eighth and different theaters in Times Square. (How many spinal taps can you give to someone under a refrigeration blanket whose fever wouldnt break?) Others would drop by out of curiosity and wonder what was on my mind. The apartment was big, but the hall was in very bad repair, or at least looked it. I liked to work out in the late afternoon, because in the morning I wanted to save every iota of energy for my work and the store. I never wore gold jewelry I didnt want to be a target. And the rest of us were kinda like, Oh man, what? It was a real neighborhood place, with people dropping in and hanging out, and a sort of day care center for neighbors who wanted us to watch their kids. He had always been like a surrogate father to me, and when his manager quit midway through the tour, he called me to come and just make sure people werent ripping him off at the venues every night. 1567 2nd Ave, New York, NY Thats what I did. Wed go: Look, even if you dont know how to strip wood, were gonna show you: This gooey mess that you have to brush on the wood, wait till it bubbles, then you scrape it off. Most mornings, we would wake up and check the answering machine. It is demeaning to women to be treated this way, claimed Long Island man Richard Savino in 1984. It was on the 13th floor of an old city building, and you had to walk up a whole floor from the 12th, which was the last floor served by an elevator. One night I saw Jack Smith do a reading, and I can still remember this line, which kind of sums up that era: The cockroach caravan crosses the rented desert of exotic landlordism.. Theyd say, Yo, Dap, listen to that. All the hip-hop artists came [to the atelier]; there wasnt any other place that catered to rappers. Youd have Chinese opera and then some kind of Russian circus act and then a punk band and then a drag queen. A restaurant my wife and I definitely did not frequent was Elaines. We always had coke, and many guests brought their own. Ski Bar would issue custom-made lift tickets good for eight drinks apiece. Remembering the Lost Gay Bars of NYC - PAPER The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 is sometimes used as a marker of the beginning of the end of the art world as it was then known, as if the two were somehow related, as if an election ushered in some new aesthetic permission, a new vulgarity, which is really a kind of negative magical thinking. When I first moved to Manhattan I was eager to get back to the Bronx as often as possible, so I would go to the Pathmark on 207th Street and pack bags to try to make change. It was social, the Upper East Side ladies. I didnt know what I was doing. Upstairs, the formally attired crowd (jackets required, gentlemen) dines on classic fare including the 21 Caesar Salad, Creamy Chicken Hash, and the ever-popular 21 Burger, which has been on the . A lot of the alternative spaces Franklin Furnace, A-Space had music, too. Dinner on the Upper East Side with a former president of the United States. Best 30 80s Night Clubs in New York City, NY with Reviews - Yellow Pages My apartment was four stories up, and I got a place on the floor below for Kim Gordon. When I crossed the bridge, I had my Saturday Night Fever moment the city was for the taking. One of his favorite pieces was the Alto Rhapsody of Brahms, sung by Dame Janet Baker. The crass reason, of course, is because since the beginning of time, straight men have wanted to be drinking in the same place women are drinking because, yes, men are pigs. It was like a village, yknow? Peter had no small talk at all. (By the time we filmed Desperately Seeking Susan in 84, New York was already beginning to become more gentrified.) Jumbo-sized martini glasses smeared with ruby lipstick. Ave., NYC 16 Timeless French Bistros and Brasseries in NYC - Eater NY It was nothing but rejection. Hes a Leo all the Leos I know love history. Whether you were struggling, successful or just plain lucky, these stories remind us that in these years New York City dirty, dangerous, derelict, dazzling was the only place to be.

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