And they said, Yeah, you can have that they werent even thinking about it. 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. If they didnt give us any food, wed go off to the next person. Patsy Cline. Le Relais, on Madison and 63rd, was more everyone my age and everyone from Europe. I was living with my aunt and one of my cousins in a shotgun apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Id dance until about two in the morning and then Id go back to work. To me, the 1980s were incredibly liberating. This morning was no different than any other. There was a popular Puerto Rican dance club, Ochentas, and across the street from that was an Afro-Cuban spot, Club Broadway. At one end of my block was J.G. Rich New York in the late 90s | Vanity Fair I lived at the Olympic Tower, and Halston was downstairs.. And then there were athletes and New York characters a bunch of people who I didnt know what they did, I just knew I saw them all the time. Since no ones making them, they dont.. I was also a regular at this neighborhood salon presided over by a Mr. Steve, who wore big, Coke-bottle thick glasses and was practically blind. We had a studio on Bleecker near Seventh Avenue. 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 liked to get there early, which the club promoters loved because wed get the party started. People would bring me their videos to pop in. Hear Eric Goode remember when he found out about AIDS: I enrolled at the Parsons School of Design in 1982. I was like, Oh cool, youre doing art too? Bands would put up fliers all over SoHo; there were wheat-paste fliers everywhere. They had done mostly commercial work, and I had to explain to them that this is different than their commercial stuff to take a different kind of care. But as soon as we walked in, nearly everyone stood and applauded. 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. I would just sit there. In school, I never fit in at all. Bars would battle to get people in the doors., Then a bar on First Avenue, Far Out Lounge, came up with a gimmick that would change everything, with the ultimate idea to draw in the skirts that bring in the suits.. They are not obliged to talk to anyone. I lived at the Olympic Tower, and Halston was downstairs. It was a walk-up. The manager, Dorian Mecir, had a heart of gold. Do you even think about what it was like in Brooklyn? As told to Kate Guadagnino,Elizabeth Gumport,Merrell Hambleton and Erin Sheehy. I was hustling. As told to Caroline Bankoff,Heather Corcoran,Nancy Hass and M.H. I mean, thats when Brooklyn was Brooklyn, not some extension of the West Village or a place with good coffee. I figure its costing me two bucks to put a girl in my bar for two hours, Reynolds claimed at the time. Guide. Honestly, my mind was empty, but I wanted to be consumed by that emptiness. 26 places sorted by traveler favorites Clear all filters 1. Then we hit the clubs: Sound Factory, the Roxy, the Fun House. I was living with my parents in the Alfred E. Smith projects on the Lower East Sides waterfront. At Elaines, for instance, you would find people Elaine was floating. Not surprisingly, it worked. Write a Review! A guy in a black cocktail dress teetering precariously on the sill of an open window in a rear apartment (Room 410) of the Chelsea Hotel, screaming into the night. As Brad Lauren, a 23-year-old production assistant claimed at the time, having just paid $3.50 for a Miller Lite that ladies were drinking gratis: Its the most socially acceptable form of discrimination., By 1994 lines were down the block at Ski Bar every night and the police started to put up barricades to keep people off Second Avenue. That was the start of the end of this era, says Block. Home; . And Bowie had no idea that was my background. I was staying in Garys loft on East Fifth Street between Bowery and Second, on summer break from the writing program at Syracuse, where Id been studying with Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff. Howard was Lili LaLeen, a German film actress in a vintage Mary McFadden. Today the Upper West Side is considered one of the richest, cleanest, and most expensive places to live in New York City. Then, I didnt have the kind of formal board that one would today. There is no limit to it. The silhouette I was doing broad shoulders and thin hip was my way of reinterpreting masculine power, but with humor. The 10 Best Bars On The Upper East Side - Culture Trip Silently. Rival crews had been dancing in the subway, and it turned into a fight over who had won. His show was on at 1 a.m., after Johnny Carson. 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.. My sense of time was completely distorted. And Im not a corporate client, so please give me a break. Photograph courtesy of Charlie Ahearn, whose groundbreaking hip-hop feature film Wild Style (1983) featured Grandmaster Flash, Lee Quiones and Fab 5 Freddy, among others. [Kim] would work one day, and Id work the next. 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. Coming from China, I was eager to be accepted in this new environment, which felt like a monstrous machine indifferent, its frenetic energy fueled by ambition. I had just moved the gallery to Franklin Street in TriBeCa from West 57th Street. People have bidding wars over apartments that cost millions of dollars. 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. 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. All the music [in the atelier on 125th Street] came from the VCR. Fleming's was a fun Irish bar on the upper east side in the 1980s & 1990s, up until it closed in 1994. I would often wake up in the middle of the night as the city slept. Otherwise neighborhood wasnt as important as finding a space one guy I knew, the photographer Patrick McMullan, lived in the coat-check room of a former hotel. The era might have been old New Yorks last real gasp a time when the very streets, dirty and unsafe as they were, seemed infused with possibility. Certainly at night, few people were there, and few were there on the weekends. And we had Tina Chow, who had such unearthly beauty she would come into a room and just drift. The idea of hip-hop hadnt really gelled. Delmonico's, 21-23 William Street (1831-1923, intermittently thereafter) In 1831 Swiss brothers John and Peter Delmonico founded the city's first . Top Gay Clubs & Bars in Upper East Side (New York City) - Tripadvisor A group of artists, friends and a few colleagues, including Marcia Tucker, the founder of the New Museum, demolished what remained of a former meatpacking company and converted it into JAMs new space. I saw Jody Watley on television, and I was like, They dont steal silver, Im going to wear those!. We blasted Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson. Everyone associates me with Jesse Jackson, but actually James Brown is the person I consider most like a mentor. A restaurant my wife and I definitely did not frequent was Elaines. The Upper East Side of New York City is a Manhattan neighborhood that lies between Central Park and the East River and goes from E. 59th St. to E. 96th St. By 1981, I was no longer the manager at [the East Village performance space] Club 57, but I still helped out and performed there a lot. So were in this abandoned lot on a corner of 11th Avenue, somewhere in the high 40s or low 50s and not far from the old deserted elevated slate railroad that became the Highline. Creative Time ran Art on the Beach on the landfill that is now Battery Park City back then it was just a huge field of sand. The city was different then. It was frequented by many celebrities, especially actors and authors. Hes a Leo all the Leos I know love history. I made a short performance called Life Without Grace, a kind of eulogy. But I had no idea what I was photographing. Our first goal [as Sonic Youth] was getting a gig at CBGB. Bronwyn Thomas, she was like happy feet on her toes. Caribbean Restaurants Restaurants. You can walk down the. Lobster Newburg as it looks today. Jean-Michel Basquiat wandered in at some point a neighbor with whom we had a nodding acquaintance. Upper East Side Bars - Directory of the Best Bars on the UES Hed just been released from prison, and his prison memoir, In the Belly of the Beast, had been published that week. Todd Jorgensen ran the Xerox machine in Jamie Canvas, the art supply store in SoHo everybody went to. We finished that scene around 6 oclock in the morning. We became sort of like brothers. It was chaired by Brendan Gill, a great theater critic and architecture writer. My apartment was four stories up, and I got a place on the floor below for Kim Gordon. Now let me write mine. In October of that year, when I was back in New York, the Carters visited the city and Nan invited them to dine with us at Elaines [restaurant]. It was 1990 on Manhattans Upper East Side and, after the extravagant 1980s, the neighborhood was in the throes of a countrywide recession and unemployment was on the rise. Mexican chain, which while not the inventor of the slush/frozen margarita, was legendary for them, especially their "Ridiculous", which was the size of a smal. Someone broke the front glass and stole the poster. Hed come around maybe at 7 oclock. I held auditions for Fame, the TV show, on a Sunday at the New York School of Ballet because thats where I trained, and Mr. Thomas [ballet dancer Richard Scott Thomas] was happy to give me a studio. Sep 13, 2019 - Restaurants that I ate at as a child..most no longer exist. Ski Bar turned into a Taco Bell and Block moved to Telluride, Colo., where he and Singer opened a similar bar, Poachers Pub. You simply traveled to where things were happening. The Penrosenamed for a neighborhood in Cork, Ireland, where two of the owners grew upbrings a bit of the indie-chic East Village to Gossip . 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. 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. Pierre Francillon and Richard Alvarez, both artists and friends of fashion designer Andre Walker, in 1983 at the Middle Collegiate Church, where Walker held a fashion show. Thelonious Monk or Nina Simone or Gloria Lynne would stop by to visit them, so I grew up around these real bebop superstars. Giuliani sending his goons around to raid things. The object was to keep stitching no matter what happened to the fabric. Bars & Music Mama's Bar. It is demeaning to women to be treated this way, claimed Long Island man Richard Savino in 1984. I tried never to leave my ZIP code. Team Infatuation August 19, 2022. There's always a striking contrast to what it was and what it is now. Sometimes I would read him the weeks work. Hey, I said. 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. 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. In the 1980s, the restaurant began to decline, as it switched up menu items in favor of more chicken and fish. I remember going to a gay club, and I totally bit their look: Daisy Duke shorts, combat boots and the half T-shirt all I did was add fishnet stockings. 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. I was sneaking out. May 6, 2009. There was a thing I did every Friday night because my boyfriend [now husband, artist Carroll Dunham] worked at Time magazine, so I wasnt out looking for guys. You could be a young person in Manhattan back then, Block recalls. James Brown and Ali because of them, I basically became a made guy. Best Upper East Side bars in NYC. We would go till 4 a.m. Hell, we would go past 4 a.m. 2. Things were 50 times as bad in Brooklyn as they were in Manhattan. You could feel it turning, the tackiness beginning to creep in. Even though every single record Id put out up until then was gold, platinum or multiple platinum, Diana was the first time Id ever worked with a big star. I didnt know anything. The pictures on the wall were all from the Fifties, and a group of us girls would go and get our hair done in crazy bouffants. Id get to the gallery late afternoon. She was very busy editing books of her own, among them Jane Fondas Workout Book, Thomas Keneallys Schindlers List, Margaret Atwoods Bluebeards Egg and Rosalynn Carters memoir First Lady From Plains. At one point Nan traveled to the Carters home in Plains, Georgia, an ordinary split-level with an imperial iron fence that had been Richard Nixons from Key Biscayne (the Carters didnt believe in waste). Id go with Andy Warhol, or to dinner and then to Studio 54 afterwards. You would go up to the club and then you would look for a friend, like, Wheres so-and-so? Oh, he got the thing; he got the sickness. It would just ruin your night. See more ideas about memories, restaurant, howard johnson's. Live Psychic on East 84th offered free drinks and $10 tarot card readings from, yes, live psychics on a platform to the left of the dance floor, while single ladies shimmied to songs like Right Said Freds Im Too Sexy. While American Trash, a biker-themed bar, had literal garbage on the walls and ceiling. And shoulder pads. While her friend Sara explained, We dont even like this place. 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. Spankys, a sports bar on 75th Street, attracted the young Republican crowd that had begun to invade the area. Having had an alcoholic mother, he did not like being around people who drank much. But it had started with a simple idea: What if a bar just let women drink for free? Ski Bar would issue custom-made lift tickets good for eight drinks apiece. You couldnt get people to go to a club before midnight. 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. 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. The painter David Salle in his Manhattan studio, 1983. I was living uptown really the classic uptown, which, because I was young, seemed a little wild to some people with my kids and my mother (also, at that time I was in love with a Brazilian man Id met in Bali). They had gotten the idea that it was a very good headquarters. It was before he was onstage and all that; he was just starting out. By 1968, 85 bars called the neighborhood home, like Gleason's, slightly further uptown near Yorkville, and similarly decorated to Friday's, with Tiffany lamps and the ornate wooden bar that had graced the Schaefer Beer pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair. Once I saw someone selling a broken light bulb. When we went out it was to perform. I got my apartment through Stanley Strychacki, the founder of Club 57. Two weeks later we were begging to let people come watch us rehearse. In the mornings, Id walk along 125th Street to the store, which I opened in 82. Together, this chorus of voices assembled, edited and condensed creates a compelling mosaic, revealing a city bustling with creativity but also slowly emerging from its recent near-bankruptcy, with upscale restaurants just blocks away from rubble-filled, graffiti-painted lots. 80s Night Clubs in New York City, NY About Search Results Sort: Default All BBB Rated A+/A Coupons View all businesses that are OPEN 24 Hours 1. Todd didnt like the idea that I was doing a fanzine. 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. And Dynasty. Ive never gotten over Dynasty. And then people started dying. 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. The straight clubs became very, very straight. The original flier for Kellys show at the Pyramid Club in 1981. 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. Al Sharpton (right) backstage at Madison Square Garden on June 11, 1974. By my late teens, people used to tell me, You and you sister, its like its your job to go clubbing. Maybe five nights a week Id leave Brooklyn around 8:30 or 9 oclock. Many of its bartenders have gone on to open their own places. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. This was every Friday. We were both rather exotic in each others eyes. Every night was a huge passeggiata with people perusing the blankets. He had intended whatever conversation we were having to go in another direction. Every parent, every grown-up was your mother and father. I never had to show the clothes I was making to a buyer, because they always saw it in the clubs first: at Danceteria, at Roxy, at Kool Lady Blues Friday-night party. Ann Magnuson, actress and performance artist. I went over and started chatting with him, and we became completely engrossed in this conversation about jazz. 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. I had gone to a place when I was a kid called Hamburger Express, and the hamburgers used to come around on a little choo-choo train. Within a few days, he came to my apartment, which is how I wound up doing the arrangements for Lets Dance.. Thats what happened at Club 57 a lot: We told people, This is the theme. So I call LL up and I let her speak to him for a few minutes. By 1968, there were a whopping 85 bars on the Upper East Side, most of them singles bars. The writer Gay Taleses social calendar for October 1983. I really had no business buying my loft on West Broadway in those years. Points of interest include Central Park, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Guggenheim, The Whitney Museum, Hunter College, Gracie Mansion and Carl Schurz Park. There were all these conspiracy theories. The point of ladies night is to get women into bars and get them drunk so that men can score.. Peter lived on the absolute margins he never had anything. Sometimes you would want to go to a Police concert, but you wouldnt want to tell your friends, because they would be, like, Thats so commercial and gross. When it was the Dead Kennedys, Ari Up, The Slits, Public Image Ltd, you were all in full agreement. The landlord turned off the plumbing, so wed defecate into garbage bags and throw them out the window. (And Ski Bar even opened a Ski Bar 2 pop-up at Hunter Mountain during the winter. He said he was going to lunch with some friends, and did I want to join? I would be coming back around 4, 4:30, 5 oclock sometimes 6. Nearby spots like Bear Bar began capitalizing on the traffic by offering their own competing ladies night deals. He claims the resort-area locals didnt know what to do with him when he began offering the same all-you-can-drink, ladies night-type deals. My fantasy was to rent one of these theaters on 42nd Street and show my movie alongside Mad Monkey Kung Fu. They would shy away with confused expressions, whispering to their friends. You couldnt do nothing stupid or bad because your friends mother was your mother, too. He was in his preppy stage in those days, wearing button-downs, which really is hard to imagine now. Sometimes I didnt eat for two days. They were very basic but super interesting. Elsewhere, so he was going back and forth between doing the TV show and the play. I lived above a topless club at White and Church. 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. 1. Arent the both of us up early, I said. 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. Book with OpenTable. I drove up in my Maserati Bora at around 5 oclock in the morning and walked in with Billy Idol, who was a buddy of mine. We always had coke, and many guests brought their own. Photo by James & Karla Murray from their book NEW YORK NIGHTS After its appearance in Woody Allen's 1984 film, Broadway Danny Rose , Carnegie Deli became a classic. I chose a very mournful, elegiac, orchestral piece of music, and I created a gray-scale portrait of three heads: Bills head in the middle, and my two profile heads coming out of either side of his. When I first moved to the city, there was a garbage strike. 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. The ultimate epitome of this wild, boozing-on-the-cheap era, Ski Bar, was located on Second Ave between 94th and 95th. My dormitory was at the corner of East 14th Street and Union Square. The rain came through, so the clothes were all messed up by brown streaks. 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. Where To Drink On The Upper East Side . I slept when I was exhausted and awoke when I was refreshed. Taylor Mead had a running tab at multiple bars. Wheres Joe? Eventually youd realize that he died, and his family came and put his artwork in a dumpster. More likely than not, Id have to go downtown to the garment center to get some fabric or trimming. It was right next to the Chelsea Hotel, where I was living. So wed be starving. Wed spend hours getting our outfits together buying stuff at Canal Plastics Center, stapling photo booth pictures onto our jackets. Back then no one came in and said, Let me see your bar menu, says Block. We went from our home in the East 60s, with Jimmy Carter and me in one car (driven by a member of the Secret Service) and Nan and Rosalynn in another. And by 1991 a good dozen of the neighborhoods bars were offering similar ladies night deals. Can you come back later? Money was secondary to being able to have this playground we could create. And why I got out.. That was Sucker M.C.s., I was still living at home. Thats where youd run into people, share breakfast. It became a whole sh*t show, recalls Keith Block. I really loved those people the heroism of their everyday lives was palpable, and that was woven into the tapestry of the East Village. Amura ($$) Japanese Menu Available. In the early 80s, I had a great loft in the meatpacking district, which at that point was full of meat hanging on hooks and blood running in the streets. And the food at Genroku was really cheap, which was the operative word. Bodega 88 Night Clubs Bars Brew Pubs (19) 8.6 Website (212) 799-1602 573 Columbus Ave New York, NY 10024 CLOSED NOW 2. So in April we held the Rites of Spring Fertility Bacchanal. It's now a Samsung store. In the 60s, it was only open to the high class and the rich, like authors up on the Upper East Side. 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). Broadway 96 [Club Broadway] was more geared to black and Latino youth and that was definitely a wilder place. I was doing A Soldiers Play with the Negro Ensemble Company, working with Denzel [Washington], Adolph Caesar, Larry Riley, James Pickens, Brent Jennings, Cotter Smith. Women would crowd around oil drums turned into tables and, while standing on sawdust floors, pound cheap beer and well liquor. My first photo lab was called Hy Photo. 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. Its a great show. We stared at each other for a moment. You werent afraid of getting it, you were wondering when are the symptoms going to show up. One of his favorite pieces was the Alto Rhapsody of Brahms, sung by Dame Janet Baker. The whole neighborhood was a lower-middle class suburban area. The other was he wouldnt say anything, just [shrug] that meant it was a failure. The whole thing finally fell into place in May of that year when I went on Tom Snyders show on NBC. But this was every week. Whatever Happened to the Singles Bar? - PUNCH This was a luxury ski town, not the Upper East Side, and he had to ultimately tone things down. But at midnight, yes, I was often out. Le Relais, on Madison and 63rd, was more everyone my age and everyone from Europe. I would take my work from that lab it was already mounted with dimensions like 48 by 72 inches, 40 by 60 inches carry it to the E train, down the stairs, then get off at Canal and carry it down to Leonard and up my four flights of stairs. I was preparing that summer to start my first semester at St. Johns University. It was very close to the Forward Building, which housed the important Yiddish newspaper. But it did make me very, very moody there were a lot of underground clubs, and they wouldnt jump off till 1 a.m. That's what Bennigan's, an Irish-themed bar and grill, offered in the 1980s. But where was the battlefield? Galleries and museums didnt exhibit their work at that time. 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 . There were lines around the block the theater starting bumping it up to a second and third screening. As Andy turned the pages, he said things like Oh, thats nice, Oh, that could be larger, Oh At the end of it, he said, Yes, I think we should do your book. Bob introduced us, and Dustin congratulated me on the film and told me my acting was naturalistic. It dawned on me that there are so many different styles of acting and you dont have to adhere to just one. 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. I remember the smell of the theaters so well popcorn and weed. They were spinning on their heads, the cops said. Wednesdays and Thursdays were Ultimate Ladies Night with free Margaritas all evening, not to mention a gratis taco bar during happy hour. These are the moments, large and small, recounted by 36 writers, artists, fashion designers, musicians and more who lived in New York City in the early 80s. Once he came in and told us that something his wife had written was in error and she replied, Jimmy, you wrote your book.