They were relatively small, rundown theaters; they tended to have a fair amount of drug use going on. Owner Sean Fleming's band was among the many popular bands that would perform there. It was a restaurant a modest place, like an Italian restaurant but really it was an actors hangout. Then I would go to Macys and go to the $10 rack. Foursquare. Its basically the most conscious, relatable record. They were supposed to be 17 or 18. There was a studio near First Avenue in the 50s that used a dance technique that was a modified version of Pilates. I never saw that before and hed never experienced that. This was a luxury ski town, not the Upper East Side, and he had to ultimately tone things down. Pizza with Duck Sausage wins quick stardom. There were no movie theaters, bookstores, galleries or photocopy shops, so my entrepreneurial idea, which failed, was to open one, Chelsea Copy. Points of interest include Central Park, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Guggenheim, The Whitney Museum, Hunter College, Gracie Mansion and Carl Schurz Park. Williamsburg is like New York in the 70s. It was before he was onstage and all that; he was just starting out. I loved to walk down Clinton to Delancey I called it Rue de Rves because it was filled with bridal shops with garishly colored dresses. They could be stimulated by the heterosexual pornography that was on the screen. And right away we see David Bowie, wearing a suit and sitting completely by himself in one of the hottest new clubs in the city. Sep 13, 2019 - Restaurants that I ate at as a child..most no longer exist. The bathroom of Area nightclub, which was located on 157 Hudson Street and opened in 1983. Carver came by, down from Syracuse on some publishing business. It was packed every night; it won the Pulitzer Prize that year. 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). Some of the best bars on the Upper East Side cultivate the feeling of "Old New York.". Or with only a few comments in between. Miller, Edited by Kate Guadagnino and Thessaly La Force. I said, To hell with it! Jasmine Guy auditioned; she wasnt of age yet. Not only did Mr. Brown come on with me, but Muhammad Ali did, too. Spanning the late 1980s through the late 1990s, . Open in Google Maps. Peter cant keep going that way, not in the city that its becoming now. I unlocked the door. He had intended whatever conversation we were having to go in another direction. I remember I was drawn to the ad for the loft because it was in a place that sounded like trifecta; my father had taken me to the track, so that seemed comforting and familiar. Guerrilla art activities took place all over. Initially, owner Klay Reynolds had allowed ladies to drink whatever they desired; then he went through more Baileys Irish Cream in the first month he offered the deal than he would have expected to go through for all of 1991. A walk across the Williamsburg Bridge just to save a subway token. In the 60s, it was only open to the high class and the rich, like authors up on the Upper East Side. I had a horrible graveyard shift at a coffee shop, one of the only places to eat in Chelsea, open 24 hours super crickets, deserted. Belgian, Crepes, Wine Bar, Coffee Shop Menu Available. When Flashdance came out in 1983, Paramount put me up in the Carlyle Hotel to do promotion. I was preparing that summer to start my first semester at St. Johns University. You could order a pizza anytime. Someone broke the front glass and stole the poster. It was chaired by Brendan Gill, a great theater critic and architecture writer. Delmonico's, 21-23 William Street (1831-1923, intermittently thereafter) In 1831 Swiss brothers John and Peter Delmonico founded the city's first . Melon I ate a lot of hamburgers there. She and Larry Gagosian had this space, it was a condo loft in a building on West Broadway. PM: We refused to take a job. This was a moment in Manhattan history that had never really been seen before and hasnt been seen since. I met Peter Hujar through Susan Sontag. I lived at the Olympic Tower, and Halston was downstairs.. 1982 Having introduced nouvelle cuisine at Ma Maison in Los Angeles, Chef Wolfgang Puck presents "California cuisine" to patrons of his new chic-casual Sunset Strip restaurant, Spago. Between 1981 and 1983 I was commuting between New York and a rented apartment in Rome, researching a book about my Italian ancestry that would be called Unto the Sons. My wife, Nan, would visit me in Italy as often as she could, but always briefly. I could wake up in the middle of the night and hear his typewriter going. This bar, deep inside the St. Regis on Fifth Avenue, is one of the few New York hotel bars whose . 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. He has one book but he doesnt have the next two. Afternoon workouts. We had a prom, a debutante ball, a ladies wrestling night. 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. I think that free drinks for women is discriminatory and a bad idea, wrote Cynthia Heimel, a feminist columnist, in the November 1991 issue of Playboy. We also created a percussive orchestra that was all pots and pans and a lot of racket, and that was the debut of the band Pulsallama. Or wed go around to try to get breakfast from our friends, ringing doorbells to see who was up. It was raw: It had been a paper storage facility. Rival crews had been dancing in the subway, and it turned into a fight over who had won. My fantasy was to rent one of these theaters on 42nd Street and show my movie alongside Mad Monkey Kung Fu. You did a lot of the auditions immediately. By the end of the relationship, I was living there. Then, I didnt have the kind of formal board that one would today. And Bowie had no idea that was my background. It is demeaning to women to be treated this way, claimed Long Island man Richard Savino in 1984. An important place to have breakfast was Buffas, on the corner of Lafayette and Prince youd see Jim Jarmusch and Jonathan Demme in the booths there. Spankys, a sports bar on 75th Street, attracted the young Republican crowd that had begun to invade the area. I committed the tapes to memory; I would do them over and over. Then our leading lady, Susan Berman, broke her leg, and we had to wait for her to get out of the cast. James Brown and the Rev. He needed someone he trusted. The object was to keep stitching no matter what happened to the fabric. We would get on at the ramp at Chambers Street and ski up to Spring Street to the Ear Inn. He was the voice of every commercial on the radio or television at that time, and the richest among us. We had a studio on Bleecker near Seventh Avenue. There were problems, of course; you serve young men and women as much alcohol as they can humanly consume and theres bound to be. So in April we held the Rites of Spring Fertility Bacchanal. 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.. Wheres Joe? Eventually youd realize that he died, and his family came and put his artwork in a dumpster. Within 18 months, several more "singles bars" were opened on 1st Avenue. Youd get into costume, put makeup on, make sure your props were in the right place, talk to the stage manager. The idea of hip-hop hadnt really gelled. Arent the both of us up early, I said. We were then escorted to a quiet table in the rear by the smiling proprietress herself, Ms. Elaine Kaufman, and joined by her good friend, the gregarious publicist Bobby Zarem, a city slicker born in Savannah, Georgia, who told Mr. Carter: Your brother Billy once called me a Yankee because Savannah is north of Plains. Norman Mailer wasnt there that night. Cities . Youd have Chinese opera and then some kind of Russian circus act and then a punk band and then a drag queen. In a letter about her trip, she wrote, When pages needed to be retyped, Jimmy did the retyping. I never wore gold jewelry I didnt want to be a target. The only place that designated who you were was the Upper East Side. This was the scene at 2 a.m. on a Friday night in the spring of 1983 when my lover (as we called ourselves then), the film director Howard Brookner, and I threw the first of our preposterous Ladies Parties. Gay and straight people would party together. People would bring me their videos to pop in. . When he got sick, we were in a downward spiral for a year and a half. AIDS was a very strange situation; starting in 82 you knew very little about it, and then a few years later you suddenly realized it was the largest killer among your personal friends. hip-hop open mic nights and more than a few not-entirely-cool bars around the Upper East Side. Peter had no small talk at all. Not all these bars were necessarily beloved. Whats she doing now? She was like [hyperventilating]. It was a walk-up. One time a girl a teenager, maybe 15, 16 came in with her dad. But some places were so beloved theyre still talked about fondly today. This morning was no different than any other. Hear Rosie Perez talk about her first time at CBGB: Six days a week I arrived every morning between 7:30 a.m. and 8 a.m. I would go to these obscure classes around the city that were mostly for dancers. There was likewise Brother Jimmys, a Southern BBQ joint that served overproof punch out of rubber garbage pails. I made a short performance called Life Without Grace, a kind of eulogy. My primary motive back then was to put on a show, and anything that slowed me down from that had to be curtailed. 380 Lafayette St, New York . Separated from the commotion of the day, I would stretch my own canvases and start to paint in the dormitorys common room. In the mornings, usually around 11 a.m., Id go to one of the coffee shops around the corner on Avenue A. Odessa was one, and Leshkos was the other. 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. And yet, over the years, bars continued to try to offer ladies night deals (whether discounted or completely free drinks) and various factions had tried to stop them. It felt like there was all this dangerous energy. 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. 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. The elevated West Side Highway, meanwhile, was a place you could ski. Courtesy of John Kelly, photograph by John Dugdale, John Kelly, performance and visual artist. And why I got out.. Todd didnt like the idea that I was doing a fanzine. The silence, as they say, was deafening. The deal with him was he never had to come and he never had to give any money, but he would give his name and a recommendation. We were shooting the pilot, and I was trying to find the best dancers I could. We used to have a TV with a VCR on at all times, playing MTV and the guys coming up. I found them very original, underivative of the 60s or 70s they had a cleanness and a strength to them. Having had an alcoholic mother, he did not like being around people who drank much. 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 . I was 16 when we started going to the Roxy, and my guest list was 100 people, and we were kind of like the ornaments on the tree. I was eating very healthfully, which wasnt easy then, seeking out the few macrobiotic restaurants there were. I felt like I was having the best entertainment of my life, because people were going up and down the aisle, going, Loose joints People were talking throughout the whole movie going, Yo, shut up! It was just like the kung fu movies they were the same audience. If I threw a party, by midnight there was probably an especially good mix of people there. I knew people who were dying as early as 79, and three months later their partners were dead, so by 1981 I had a clear picture, even if it hadnt fully sunk in, and it was an incredible life changer. My contemporary, the writer Ed [Edmund] White, had the apartment next door. Then it was getting a good time slot at CBGB, so you werent on last and werent on first. Not surprisingly, it worked. Then there were the rumors that they were going to make a movie of the play, and naturally we all thought, Oh my god, were gonna be in a movie! But when the time came to make that movie, they only took Denzel, Larry, and Adolph. Silently. Todd Jorgensen ran the Xerox machine in Jamie Canvas, the art supply store in SoHo everybody went to. In the mornings, Id walk along 125th Street to the store, which I opened in 82. What if they just let all women drink for free? It was like a village, yknow? There were others: the Venus, and down in the 14th Street area, the Variety Photoplays, a Spanish one called The Jefferson, The Metropol [Metropolitan]. I didnt know what I was doing. Kyle: It has a window with LED lights around it, and a tourist was in the window and seemed to be making a humping motion. I lived and still live in a large duplex at the corner of Park Avenue and 80th Street, in a 1907 building designed by Delano and Aldrich. I was always worried about getting a dirty shirt or chipping a tooth., Ski Bars biggest attraction was the Slalom Shot, a four-foot-long slab of ice with a twisting trail cut into it. We didnt bother to get any filming permits; the city was just coming out of its bankruptcy crisis, and I dont even know if the mayors film office was up and running. I doubt if many artists experienced it that way. It made me immobile. By the early 1970s, 20 to 25 percent of American couples had met at a bar, according to Stanford University research. I tended to feel particularly safe in the theaters. I couldnt believe he knew the same stuff I listened to as a kid in Greenwich Village. And they were there illegally. While her friend Sara explained, We dont even like this place. Jean-Michel Basquiat wandered in at some point a neighbor with whom we had a nodding acquaintance. Beware salivating yuppie swells there for Ladies Night, the magazine wrote (fondly) of Mannys Car Wash, a Chicago-style blues club on East 87th Street. Once I saw someone selling a broken light bulb. He would maybe drink half a glass of wine. Hear Eric Goode remember when he found out about AIDS: I enrolled at the Parsons School of Design in 1982. One of many iconic Upper East Side eateries owned by the Santo Family Group . Le Relais, on Madison and 63rd, was more everyone my age and everyone from Europe. We liked to get there early, which the club promoters loved because wed get the party started. There would be all of the amazing designer clothes that nobody wanted, that were too weird. 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. It was social, the Upper East Side ladies. The Mudd Club was right around the corner, going full throttle. The Upper East Side was the place to party in the early 1990s, recalls Jennifer Capobianco, a bartender from the era. Usually Id take the bus down to Mickeys [Chinese Chance] at 1 University Place, where Julian Schnabel was the cook. Brandy's Piano Bar. It all depended on who was playing. His shoulders dropped and he said, Yeah. We looked at each other again when I opened the door for him; we were each wondering what had just happened. It would be drag queens with punk kids, musicians and artists everyone. The infamous Upper East Side murder has yet to fade from public memory. My habit must have appeared bizarre to my peers. And Dynasty. Ive never gotten over Dynasty. And then people started dying. 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. We were such fashion victims. So I call LL up and I let her speak to him for a few minutes. Even by the early 1990s, the Upper East Side remained haunted by what had happened there in 1986, when the infamous Preppy Killer, Robert Chambers, had pounded tequila and beer chasers at. I was doing commercials and Ntozake Shanges For Colored Girls [For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf] I went on tour with that show, as part of the first national company. Best Upper East Side bars in NYC. One is the van that were filming in thats our set but also a place to stay warm in between shots one is a car for running errands and then theres a truck, guarded by two Doberman pinschers, with all of our lighting and camera equipment. People thought I was a little crazy. And then eventually some surface decoration with tucks and treatment Id take the fabric and just sew in any direction. I remember the smell of the theaters so well popcorn and weed. Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth performing at CBGB in 1983. . We never served any food, but we always had a couple cases of beer and a basic bar. In the summer of 1992, New York Magazine published a photo of the Slalom Shots alongside a brief blurb and, according to Block, That more or less started the anarchy in the neighborhood.. In those days, there wasnt any downtown, so life was much easier. Hearing hip-hop on the street, minimalist new music, free jazz it all added to this fabric that was a landscape. Id walk to Cooper Union, where I was teaching. I was 19. Have a good day. His hands were in his pockets now. We made an altar to a llama, and everyone dressed in kind of Greco-Roman outfits I wore a toga with sequins. In the '80s, 25 East 61st st. was home to B. Harris & Sons, jeweler to the stars! There were very few artists there. Or his family didnt come, and the landlord put his work in a dumpster. Everybody was happy for him and saying, O.K., its possible, were in the right place, were doing the right thing., I remember the first time we went in and read A Soldiers Play out loud, we were all just staring at each other going, Oh my god, this is amazing. Two days later, Adolph came in, threw his script down, and said, Im ready! And we all looked at him like, Okay, fine! So we all threw our scripts down, too, because everybody had learned the play in like two days. I suppose I should have loved New York; things were very good for me. And the hair. I was like, Oh cool, youre doing art too? Bands would put up fliers all over SoHo; there were wheat-paste fliers everywhere. CBs wasnt the best sound; it was such a long and narrow space that if it was crowded you couldnt really see anything, unless you were standing on the side of the stage, and then you just heard the stage sound. 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. Here are our favorites. For a while I lived on the Upper West Side, on the parlor floor of a brownstone on 71st Street between Amsterdam and Columbus. We just called it The Bar, which morphed into Ze Bar, like with a fake French accent. Hear Kim Gordon recount her first impressions of New York City: People say that Manhattan was dirty and dangerous in the early 80s, and I just have to laugh. It was on 35th and Fifth, and it was a place where the sushi came around on a conveyor belt. Today the Upper West Side is considered one of the richest, cleanest, and most expensive places to live in New York City. It was a kind of a monks cell. The gallerys not open so youll have to come back. Hey, lets go get drunk at a bar.. Our club-hop starts with the titular Limelight, Gatien's firstand still favoriteNew York club. She had made a video of herself dancing to LL Cool J. The people who were chic, the downtowners, pretty much just wore black that could instantly give you a look. At 11 to 12, Id had a nine-hour day. I dont even know if it was named AIDS at that point. ), When we go out drinking, we go for broke, one man told The Times. I would stay in the clubs, but I wouldnt dance. I tried to write every single day, first thing in the morning, 10 a.m. All the music [in the atelier on 125th Street] came from the VCR. But I didnt feel super cool or anything. I will never forget the day, because I didnt tell my mother and father that I was going to make a record. Four days a week, I was studying at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute down on 15th Street. High-end lounges and clubs were beginning to pop up downtown, especially around the flourishing Meatpacking District, and if plenty of ladies would continue to drink for free at places like Lot 61, Moomba, Spy Bar, and Marquee, it was the male customers who were usually paying for the overpriced bottles of Grey Goose and Patrn. Block had learned of high-octane fish bowl cocktails during his brief Brother Jimmys stint and Ski Bar served its own versions with names like the Worldcup. In the summer of 1981 I was living with Gary Fisketjon, my best friend from college and my future editor at Random House. But it had started with a simple idea: What if a bar just let women drink for free? I got my first loft in what was called Lower Manhattan before it was renamed the Triangle Below Canal, which was the realtors term that became TriBeCa, in 1967. It was crazy. These parties inevitably blur together in my mind, but I remember that night because a week later, Abbott stabbed and killed a waiter at the Binibon cafe, a few doors down the block. When I was 15, I was in the clubs. Or I would throw a party. The Ladies Auxiliary of the Lower East Side sort of a punk rock version of my mothers Junior League group, which I started with some other girls from the East Village hosted several events at the club. The all-you-can-drink deals just dont happen these days, because the rents are so high, says Block. Rapping and fashion were being born at the same time. Wed say, Theyre not up in the morning, so dont go to them or They have kids, so maybe theyre up because the kids wake up. Wed visit people in the morning, early. And the city wasnt so much about money. Lobster Newburg as it looks today. Although it didn't hold up against Chili's, TGI Fridays, and Applebee's, there was a time when it was fairly ubiquitous throughout the states. Sometimes wed have lunch. By 1968, there were a whopping 85 bars on the Upper East Side, most of them singles bars. So wed be starving. 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. As soon as he opened [his own place] I started working there, alongside Sara Driver [the filmmaker and partner of Jim Jarmusch]. We said we were artists, and artists make art. 1. Thats what I did. Learn more about historic floods. To me, the 1980s were incredibly liberating. Its until you pass out.. Do you even think about what it was like in Brooklyn? I decided to start a music fanzine around 82; I called it Killer. When Todd wasnt looking, Id be running off copies and stapling them together. One place I went to a lot was the St. Marks Baths. Queens: PS1, the site of the era-defining exhibit New York/New Wave (1981); Queensbridge Houses, public housing that counted Juice Crew founder Marley Marl and rapper members Roxanne Shant and M.C. Mom says that your apartment looks like a crack den, my daughter told me once. We were just taken with each other. (By the time we filmed Desperately Seeking Susan in 84, New York was already beginning to become more gentrified.) Youd think he would have been the most outrageous-looking person there, but he looked like a businessman. Everyone associates me with Jesse Jackson, but actually James Brown is the person I consider most like a mentor. Then we packed up our stuff, went back to the coffee shop to have breakfast and headed home. In 80, I got a job at Todds Copy on Mott Street. They paid me like a tenth of what they paid me to do the acting, and it became my whole life. Ave., NYC Were shooting one of the final scenes in Smithereens where the main character, Paul, talks to a hooker in his graffiti-covered van the film was very influenced by the graffiti art and punk scene of that time, particularly on the Lower East Side. And if I missed it, I felt really bad. And then we had Robert Rauschenberg, a rascal and a great man. And they said, Yeah, you can have that they werent even thinking about it. Id get to the gallery late afternoon. 1. I was straight-edge, so if I snuck out, I was all right, because I wasnt hungover the next day like the other kids. This was every Friday. I had this idea I was going to be a writer; if I couldnt, there would be no point to my life. Wednesdays and Thursdays were Ultimate Ladies Night with free Margaritas all evening, not to mention a gratis taco bar during happy hour. Next door to my apartment on East Eighth and Avenue C was the Green Oasis Community Garden, and I got involved with that. (Never let on to a dog youre afraid of him, my Uncle Charlie would say.) Wed eat. [The clothes] were really like one-plus-one, big squares with holes, basically. I returned to New York in 81 after 10 years as an expat. 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. On the other end of the spectrum, a growing mens rights movement would continue to try and put the kibosh on ladies night deals throughout Manhattan and the suburbs, even if their arguments werent necessarily made in good faith. Here, notable locals revisit their routes and routines, from lunch on the Upper East to nighttime sojourns to then-emerging neighborhoods like TriBeCa. I remember this night in particular because of another guest, Jack Henry Abbott, who was living in a halfway house a couple blocks away. It was a small scene, people like writer Stephen Saban, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel [Basquiat] and Kenny Scharf. You could say I was not a considerate neighbor. It cut down a great number of the people who were out there doing it, but at the same time, the ones who were left were much more intense about it. Reagan really ruined it for me. I was kind of tomboyish, but also pretty poor. Then you checked to see if there was anything in the theater papers for auditions. 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. Dinner on the Upper East Side with a former president of the United States. The bakery, located in the front and open 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., is great for an excellent croissant and coffee break. It was the tale of two cities back then, and I was in my late 20s, trying to get the message out, running the National Youth Movement out of an office in St. Marys Hospital in Bed-Stuy.
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