My parents were heroin addicts, beatniks. But were not going to complain.. But I did it anyway. Hed come around maybe at 7 oclock. Block opened it with a partner, Adam Singer, when he was just 22; he had worked at nearby Brother Jimmys for just two weeks before getting fired and deciding he could run a better bar. I will never forget the day, because I didnt tell my mother and father that I was going to make a record. 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. Or his family didnt come, and the landlord put his work in a dumpster. I was 19. But I had no idea what I was photographing. 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. Foursquare. We liked to get there early, which the club promoters loved because wed get the party started. I said, To hell with it! Jasmine Guy auditioned; she wasnt of age yet. 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. I served eggplant parmigiana and a stupendous chocolate cake that everyone always wanted. Amura ($$) Japanese Menu Available. It would be drag queens with punk kids, musicians and artists everyone. 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. Those were days when we ate meat just blissfully. Hed walk in and be perfectly comfortable with the Duke of Edinburgh. 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. Here, notable locals revisit their routes and routines, from lunch on the Upper East to nighttime sojourns to then-emerging neighborhoods like TriBeCa. 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. He slowed and turned around: Yeah, you too.. . Id dance until about two in the morning and then Id go back to work. You could order a pizza anytime. So we were really supporting ourselves! You could feel it turning, the tackiness beginning to creep in. It's now a Samsung store. 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 got so tired of getting mugged on my way home. His name opened every door for me. Sometimes I would read him the weeks work. 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. Sorry.. There are a lot of places to eat eggs and pancakes in the middle of the day on the Upper East Side. The city was different then. Drunk patrons would dance on the bar top, well before Coyote Ugly, which would open in January of 1993, had popularized such shenanigans. Sometimes I didnt eat for two days. Basically, we walk in, get our free drinks, give the scum dirty looks and walk out, a college student named Rebecca said of the Far Out Lounge. It was really like a combination of living theater and installation art, very communal. It was around the corner from another tiny spot called Chandalier. In the lot there are three vehicles. A few blocks away was the Ninth Street Bakery. 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. Id work for 12 hours straight, prepping for my show at Barbara Gladstone Gallery. Every parent, every grown-up was your mother and father. People thought I was a little crazy. It seems we could start later than this. I lived above a topless club at White and Church. To me, the 1980s were incredibly liberating. It was an incredible contrast from the last time I had lived in New York, when I was 17, during the summer of 1981, in a $500-a-month sublet loft that my boyfriend and I had found paging through our bible, the call to another life The Village Voice in his basement in Evanston. In 1972, the New York State Human Rights Commission ruled that reduced-priced ladies days at Yankee Stadium discriminated against men. We decided to live together at her place, 84 Eldridge Street. The venues didn't matter to me. Todd Jorgensen ran the Xerox machine in Jamie Canvas, the art supply store in SoHo everybody went to. I doubt if many artists experienced it that way. They had gotten the idea that it was a very good headquarters. Up the street from my apartment was 8 B.C., a club run by two friends of mine. People would drop change in your hands, turn their heads when you tried to kiss them. It didnt have a name. Broadway 96 [Club Broadway] was more geared to black and Latino youth and that was definitely a wilder place. And Dynasty. Ive never gotten over Dynasty. And then people started dying. A chance encounter with David Bowie at a downtown nightclub. It was chaired by Brendan Gill, a great theater critic and architecture writer. It was a very quiet audience. There were still hookers, male and female, on the street, and vendors selling potted plants and gigantic stuffed animals under the rubble of the West Side Highway at all hours of the night. They paid me like a tenth of what they paid me to do the acting, and it became my whole life. Not only did we dress in wigs and dresses from 14th Street, but we took on personas to match. And they were there illegally. 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. Thurston was a scholar. What if they just let all women drink for free? 1. Ive always been a pretty good cook, and I could make these very good dinners in this tiny kitchen. He was in his preppy stage in those days, wearing button-downs, which really is hard to imagine now. But, pre-AIDS anyway, it was also more diverse. If you wanted fancy, youd go to La Grenouille. My first photo lab was called Hy Photo. 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. 26 places sorted by traveler favorites Clear all filters 1. The Upper West Side has always been a great place to buy food, with terrific places for fish and vegetables. Photograph: Paul Wagtouicz. It was in this desolate area between TriBeCa and Chinatown, and I knew every alley. I would walk around the neighborhood, go down to 42nd Street and do a lot of movie cruising. The apartment, at 1060 Fifth Avenue, at 87th Street, was like a fantasy apartment huge, with a view of the reservoir. Likewise, by the end of the 1990s, the cocktail revival was just about to start in earnest in Manhattan pioneering cocktail bars such as Angels Share and Milk & Honey would open in 1993 and 1999, respectively and the craft beer and brewpub scene was in its infancy, and just about to explode in the aughts. 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. It was a walk-up. The gallerys not open so youll have to come back. 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. 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. Youd have Chinese opera and then some kind of Russian circus act and then a punk band and then a drag queen. We had great people like Billy Nunn [Radio Raheem in Spike Lees Do the Right Thing], Skeeter [Ellis Williams, who was in The Pirates of Penzance on Broadway]. 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. On the east side of Lexington, between 78th and 79th, was the best fishmonger Ive ever known: Rosedale. 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. Things were 50 times as bad in Brooklyn as they were in Manhattan. There were problems, of course; you serve young men and women as much alcohol as they can humanly consume and theres bound to be. In the 60s, it was only open to the high class and the rich, like authors up on the Upper East Side. Id get to the gallery late afternoon. And the rest of us were kinda like, Oh man, what? 25 East 61st street is the rear extension of 673 Madison Avenue, an Italianate brownstone built in 1871 by architect John G. Prague as part of a project for the developer John McCool which included a row of 5 brownstones on Madison Avenue, and 17 houses on 61st street. An unpublished male nude Polaroid from 1981 by photographer Tom Bianchi. When AIDS hit, the lines were drawn: You were either straight or gay. Jean-Michel Basquiat wandered in at some point a neighbor with whom we had a nodding acquaintance. Now nothings open after 11. But this was every week. (And Ski Bar even opened a Ski Bar 2 pop-up at Hunter Mountain during the winter. It was on 35th and Fifth, and it was a place where the sushi came around on a conveyor belt. I saw Jody Watley on television, and I was like, They dont steal silver, Im going to wear those!. Women would crowd around oil drums turned into tables and, while standing on sawdust floors, pound cheap beer and well liquor. By the early 1970s, 20 to 25 percent of American couples had met at a bar, according to Stanford University research. A lot of it was crack. Anyone can read what you share. When youre at a memorial mourning the passing of a friend or a lover and theyre really young, where do you put that stuff? Mom says that your apartment looks like a crack den, my daughter told me once. The painter David Salle in his Manhattan studio, 1983. 1 place sorted by traveler favorites. When Canadian-born club impresario Peter Gatien came to New York City in the early '80s, after. Arent the both of us up early, I said. And the city wasnt so much about money. The weekend that it happened, I got a call at 2 oclock in the morning from the owner of the theater. But at midnight, yes, I was often out. I went over and started chatting with him, and we became completely engrossed in this conversation about jazz. It was nothing but rejection. So when they talked to me about playing the character Lydia Grant, the dance teacher, I said, Yes, I would be so interested if I could also be responsible for the choreography. Because by this time, I had been developing as a choreographer, working with the Henry Street Playhouse and the New York Shakespeare Festival, and I really loved doing it. Youd get into costume, put makeup on, make sure your props were in the right place, talk to the stage manager. You were constantly on the phone: Did you see this in the paper? Back then no one came in and said, Let me see your bar menu, says Block. Dinner on the Upper East Side with a former president of the United States. 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. I was hustling. There were very few artists there. 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. 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. I had this idea I was going to be a writer; if I couldnt, there would be no point to my life. Mozart. I suppose I should have loved New York; things were very good for me. Maybe he could do your book under that contract. So I went to the Factory and stood at a tall table with Andy and Bob, and Andy went through the dummy. 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. Denzel had just gotten St. 1. It felt like there was all this dangerous energy. Brandy's Piano Bar 68 Bars & Clubs Gay Bars Upper East Side Open now A short-lived club in the 1980s East Village. Do you even think about what it was like in Brooklyn? So in April we held the Rites of Spring Fertility Bacchanal. 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. Hey, I said. Other times, it literally meant all-you-could-drink, whatever you wanted to drink, on every single night of the week. The point of ladies night is to get women into bars and get them drunk so that men can score.. Landis shot the models one afternoon on the Upper East Side. The all-you-can-drink deals just dont happen these days, because the rents are so high, says Block. We could each get a full breakfast scrambled eggs, hash browns, whole wheat toast with an endless cup of coffee for $5 with tip. Then we packed up our stuff, went back to the coffee shop to have breakfast and headed home. 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. 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). It was packed every night; it won the Pulitzer Prize that year. The demographics of the tony Upper East Side were likewise going through some radical changes post-1987s Black Monday market crash. Very quickly, I realized it had potential to be a book. Everyone I knew hated Reagan and couldnt wait for him to get out of office. See menus, reviews, ratings and delivery info for the best dining and most popular restaurants in East 80s. I didnt know what I was doing. Are you going to this? It was make coffee, check in and then get busy stripping wood. He wasnt exactly made of money, though he fished through a bucket of change every morning to buy his one meal of the day, a bagel but Block claims this was a time when it didnt cost a ton to open and run a bar in Manhattan. Or worse. Then you would call at 10, or 10 after, to check in with your agent to see if there was anything going that day. Guide. Youd think he would have been the most outrageous-looking person there, but he looked like a businessman. It was raw: It had been a paper storage facility. Peter was so self-possessed and dignified, I never, ever thought of him as poor, even though he had no money. That is something I have never done with anyone else. I was kind of tomboyish, but also pretty poor. Id go for two, three, four hours and have a fairly good time. The original Murray Hill restaurant expanded to this location in 2011, and in 2017 added an upstairs cocktail bar to entice a younger crowd. There was a popular Puerto Rican dance club, Ochentas, and across the street from that was an Afro-Cuban spot, Club Broadway. No ID check, nothing. His show was on at 1 a.m., after Johnny Carson. It wasnt a rich peoples restaurant; it was a restaurant for people Elaine happened to like. 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. On NYCs Upper East Side, Ladies Night Ruled the 90s Until It Didnt | VinePair, https://vinepair.com/articles/ladies-night-wars-nyc/, wbs_cat Spirit, ladies\' night, laws, manhattan, women, Domaine Champalou Vouvray 2019, Loire Valley, France | VinePair, https://vinepair.com/good-wine-reviews/domaine-champalou-vouvray-2019-loire-valley-france/, wbs_cat Wine, wbs_type Vouvray, wbs_brand Domaine Champalou, chenin blanc, good wine, Vouvray. The bodegas played loud salsa music late into the night, as Dominican men played dominoes on the corner. 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. Their approach was direct and curt, no frills not self-consciously art-directed no frills, but Old Country, 19th-century no frills. In those days, there wasnt any downtown, so life was much easier. There was a great camaraderie. Rival crews had been dancing in the subway, and it turned into a fight over who had won. 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. 380 Lafayette St, New York . Afterward, wed go to a club. I made a short performance called Life Without Grace, a kind of eulogy. This bar, deep inside the St. Regis on Fifth Avenue, is one of the few New York hotel bars whose . 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. Where To Drink On The Upper East Side . Everyone was very excited. Id walk to Cooper Union, where I was teaching. Like Clubhouse on York Avenue, which intentionally offered a frat house-like atmosphere. (212) 861-2290. And Silk Road. Certainly at night, few people were there, and few were there on the weekends. 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. After shows at La MaMa, we would go to the gay bar on East Fourth Street and Second Ave. I went from area to area of the performance space, onstage and offstage. It was social, the Upper East Side ladies. I would go to school, come home, clean the house, babysit my second and third cousins, hang out on the stoop, wait for my aunt to come home, have dinner with her and wait until she fell asleep then I broke out. 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. Youd walk in there and all the actors would be sitting around, it was almost like a club, and youd see all these people: Danny Aiello, Warren Beatty. 2. Le Relais, on Madison and 63rd, was more everyone my age and everyone from Europe. You simply traveled to where things were happening. One time a girl a teenager, maybe 15, 16 came in with her dad. It was all happening at the same time; there was a lot of yin and yang. The Mudd Club was right around the corner, going full throttle. I didnt want to fit in. Since no ones making them, they dont.. The early 80s were sort of the beginning of serious gentrification. Someone broke the front glass and stole the poster. I lived on the quiet end of Hollis, Queens. One night, one horrible July Fourth, I invited the board members up to the roof, and I discovered 40 or 50 people at a party that I think Kenny had organized. Part of how they paid us was they had to strip some wood the house had five fireplaces, and the foyer was original, and all wood. I invited him to dinner. Jane Fonda had recently released her workout tapes, and it was the first opportunity a lot of women had to exercise. Sometimes wed have lunch. Friday's location on the Upper East Side. hip-hop open mic nights and more than a few not-entirely-cool bars around the Upper East Side. There was . The first single we ever made [was in 1983]: Sucker M.C.s was the B-side of Its Like That. Its Like That was a record that was talking about all of the things that was going on in communities, society and also the world. Howard was Lili LaLeen, a German film actress in a vintage Mary McFadden. Wednesdays and Thursdays were Ultimate Ladies Night with free Margaritas all evening, not to mention a gratis taco bar during happy hour. They were very basic but super interesting. Our first goal [as Sonic Youth] was getting a gig at CBGB. And by 1991 a good dozen of the neighborhoods bars were offering similar ladies night deals. I tried never to leave my ZIP code. 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). Le Relais, on Madison and 63rd, was more everyone my age and everyone from Europe. It was at Avenue A and St. Marks Place, but the windows looked out on an air shaft, not the park. But those deals enticed 22-year-olds to get out of their apartments. Hearing hip-hop on the street, minimalist new music, free jazz it all added to this fabric that was a landscape. That completely opened my mind. People used to say, The East Village will be gone when theres a Gap, and then, in the late 80s, one opened on the corner of St. Marks and Second Avenue. I would go there every day to write. They called it rocking early breaking, essentially. LaTanya Richardson Jackson (far right) in Spell #7, 1979. Ski Bar would issue custom-made lift tickets good for eight drinks apiece. Alanna Heiss, founder of PS1 and the Clocktower Gallery. The other was he wouldnt say anything, just [shrug] that meant it was a failure. I met David Bowie in 1982 at the Continental on West 25th Street, which had just opened. Wed go to bed among the broken glass, booze and old cigarettes. LL wasnt used to this kind of attention. Points of interest include Central Park, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Guggenheim, The Whitney Museum, Hunter College, Gracie Mansion and Carl Schurz Park. The. They were relatively small, rundown theaters; they tended to have a fair amount of drug use going on. The people who were chic, the downtowners, pretty much just wore black that could instantly give you a look. (I might be the only person who never lived in a scary New York apartment. Jimmy Carters reputation was tarnished by the hostage crisis in Iran, and I feared that perhaps Norman Mailer, an Elaines regular, or some very politically active and argumentative individual, might stop by our table to express some unfavorable comments. Madison Pub was an indispensable local dive. How you doin this morning?, He was young, dressed in jeans, and clearly shocked. 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. Theyre exploiting women by using them to attract men, claimed its spokeswoman, Daveda Copeland. It was almost a surreal experience, because I had the feeling that this person is only vaguely here. Two editors at Simon & Schuster thought it was terrific, but they said, You have to produce this yourself, and we can possibly get you a distribution deal. I was breaking up with somebody a long, slow breakup. If we got too cold or needed coffee, we would go over to 12th Avenue, where there were these old, sort of silver-clad Greek coffee shops that just dont exist anymore. Caribbean Restaurants Restaurants. I loved things coming around and you had to grab them, like getting your luggage off a luggage rack. 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. He was the voice of every commercial on the radio or television at that time, and the richest among us. The silhouette I was doing broad shoulders and thin hip was my way of reinterpreting masculine power, but with humor. She had made a video of herself dancing to LL Cool J. It was still a sort of wild west that far uptown, and the facility was quickly dubbed Dormandie Court for the raucous, college-like atmosphere it had created and then fostered. He had two responses: Pretty good, was high, high praise. And, of course, so did the men. I would often wake up in the middle of the night as the city slept. 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. They were spinning on their heads, the cops said. Then we hit the clubs: Sound Factory, the Roxy, the Fun House. The gallery space was on the first floor; our offices were in the basement. As soon as he opened [his own place] I started working there, alongside Sara Driver [the filmmaker and partner of Jim Jarmusch]. While her friend Sara explained, We dont even like this place. I figure its costing me two bucks to put a girl in my bar for two hours, Reynolds claimed at the time. 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. I started spending a third of my time there. 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. The whole thing finally fell into place in May of that year when I went on Tom Snyders show on NBC. Darryl McDaniels, musician and member of Run-DMC. Nearby spots like Bear Bar began capitalizing on the traffic by offering their own competing ladies night deals. I didnt smoke or drink, and when you dont do those things, you need an outlet. 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.. There were so many actors who lived with us because we had five floors. 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. This was our morning ritual: Wed wake up, and if we had $5 on us wed go to the 103 Restaurant on Second Avenue and Sixth Street. I came here from Europe at age 22 in the 1960s already married and went to Park Avenue.) Wed spend hours getting our outfits together buying stuff at Canal Plastics Center, stapling photo booth pictures onto our jackets. Not surprisingly, it worked. I was part of the backpacker renaissance; you brought a backpack, so youd have a change of clothes. Peter was straight out of Damon Runyon and Weegee. 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. That was the best place to get fresh bread and rugelach and sweets. This kind of activity is highly socially ordered: You dont barge in on other people, thats all part of it. He was like the Jimmy Fallon or Trevor Noah of that era. Her upstairs neighbor was artist Dan Graham, who I knew through the artist-poet Vito Acconci.
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