Other times, it literally meant all-you-could-drink, whatever you wanted to drink, on every single night of the week. I made a short performance called Life Without Grace, a kind of eulogy. Sometimes, after the clubs got out, people would see a kung fu flick on 42nd Street, which we called the Deuce Were going to the Deuce, whats up? 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. Then our leading lady, Susan Berman, broke her leg, and we had to wait for her to get out of the cast. Two weeks later we were begging to let people come watch us rehearse. To me it was all an art project. There was a popular Puerto Rican dance club, Ochentas, and across the street from that was an Afro-Cuban spot, Club Broadway. The silence, as they say, was deafening. One place I went to a lot was the St. Marks Baths. Bars & Music Mama's Bar. He was in his preppy stage in those days, wearing button-downs, which really is hard to imagine now. Here, women can drink all they want all night long for absolutely nothing, wrote The New York Times in covering the phenomenon in April of 1991. Mom says that your apartment looks like a crack den, my daughter told me once. I was living at almost the exact point where the Village meets the East Village, in the Colonnade Row building, right across the street from the Public Theater. It was nothing but rejection. I lived at the Olympic Tower, and Halston was downstairs.. He said, Dap, whats she doing? I said, Shes gasping for air now! And I go attend to her. Its basically the most conscious, relatable record. I had the gallery in L.A., and I had just bought a house in Venice, so I was completely overextended, and it worried me. Todd didnt like the idea that I was doing a fanzine. Then we packed up our stuff, went back to the coffee shop to have breakfast and headed home. The idea of hip-hop hadnt really gelled. Write a Review! The infamous Upper East Side murder has yet to fade from public memory. The artists Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham at their wedding, 1983. Belgian, Crepes, Wine Bar, Coffee Shop Menu Available. But as soon as we walked in, nearly everyone stood and applauded. It made the general public aware that people were dying in Brooklyn, in Harlem, in the Bronx. Next door to my apartment on East Eighth and Avenue C was the Green Oasis Community Garden, and I got involved with that. Before wine bars, bank branches, and sushi restaurants took over the East Village, there were hole-in-the-wall clubs like 8BC, a gallery and performance space on Eighth Street between Avenues B and C. Opened in 1983, the place was over by the end of 1985. The venues didn't matter to me. 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]. I had been starring on Broadway in West Side Story, and I had done the movie Ragtime, which was also coming out, but dance has always been my heartbeat. 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 . 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. We were both rather exotic in each others eyes. There was always someone between apartments or someone coming to town who needed somewhere to stay. It is demeaning to women to be treated this way, claimed Long Island man Richard Savino in 1984. We considered the food too depressingly awful. I was preparing that summer to start my first semester at St. Johns University. Then you would call at 10, or 10 after, to check in with your agent to see if there was anything going that day. As soon as he opened [his own place] I started working there, alongside Sara Driver [the filmmaker and partner of Jim Jarmusch]. I didnt want anything to be more important than the writing. James Brown and the Rev. We were in the habit of throwing parties on Saturday nights. 380 Lafayette St, New York . I mean, thats when Brooklyn was Brooklyn, not some extension of the West Village or a place with good coffee. 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. By 1968, there were a whopping 85 bars on the Upper East Side, most of them singles bars. If you remember Flemings, this event is for you: Saturday, December 4 Fleming's Reunion Party Elsewhere, so he was going back and forth between doing the TV show and the play. People would drop change in your hands, turn their heads when you tried to kiss them. Richard Gere was a fixture, as well as Diana Ross and Princess Caroline. They called it rocking early breaking, essentially. I started JAM in 1974 to show the work of African-American artists and other artists of color. Originally part of the Pillsbury Corp., the restaurant was founded in 1976. Then you checked to see if there was anything in the theater papers for auditions. 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. At night, if I was sitting around and wanted to amuse myself, Id walk down to Columbus and say hello. State records are incomplete. In retrospect, Bowie was ahead of the curve. More likely than not, Id have to go downtown to the garment center to get some fabric or trimming. A restaurant my wife and I definitely did not frequent was Elaines. I had a loft downtown on Walker Street, one of the first buildings that went on loft strike. Open in Google Maps. So the artists would often have free rein, and would sometimes sneak up to the roof, especially for the Fourth of July and other events like that. 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. Hearing hip-hop on the street, minimalist new music, free jazz it all added to this fabric that was a landscape. Her father said, Dap, my daughter, shes driving me crazy. Then it was getting a good time slot at CBGB, so you werent on last and werent on first. Carver came by, down from Syracuse on some publishing business. No one could believe that this B-actor was about to occupy the White House. The quiet and space afforded clarity. 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. Carnegie Deli Carnegie Deli. As told to Kate Guadagnino,Elizabeth Gumport,Merrell Hambleton and Erin Sheehy. I had to be at the theater by 7 oclock so I could start my process and get ready before half-hour call. Within 18 months, several more "singles bars" were opened on 1st Avenue. It was sort of 11 to 7. CBGB was just up the street, and I performed there with my band or as a solo poet many times. My favorite was the Mine Shaft, a very performative kind of sex bar on Little West 12th Street that had a kind of punk, anti-disco vibe. Giuliani sending his goons around to raid things. I just wanted to be in New York. 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. 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). Spanning the late 1980s through the late 1990s, . A few blocks away was the Ninth Street Bakery. A chance encounter with David Bowie at a downtown nightclub. Gracie Terrace, New York, NY (212) 535-3140 (212) 535-3140. Thats where youd run into people, share breakfast. 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. My dormitory was at the corner of East 14th Street and Union Square. 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. We were very, very thin. Sam was doing Ragtime, and then he did A Soldiers Play on Broadway. If you just wanted to grab a sandwich, youd go to Burger Heaven. I really loved those people the heroism of their everyday lives was palpable, and that was woven into the tapestry of the East Village. 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. The sidewalks along St. Marks over to Astor Place were just as lively they were a sort of souk where you could buy back what the junkies had stolen from your apartment. It wasnt a big deal. I couldnt, but I did turn around and walk with him for some blocks to the restaurant. Now nothings open after 11. I doubt if many artists experienced it that way. A cracked bathroom mirror reflecting a sink full of discarded puffs, eyeliner brushes and trays of blush. 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. 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. You werent afraid of getting it, you were wondering when are the symptoms going to show up. It had the best hamburgers and gin martinis. There would be 200 people in there. I would often wake up in the middle of the night as the city slept. Madison Pub was an indispensable local dive. 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 by 1991 a good dozen of the neighborhoods bars were offering similar ladies night deals. Honestly, my mind was empty, but I wanted to be consumed by that emptiness. 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). To me, the 1980s were incredibly liberating. The whole reason I was able to raise money for my causes was because of him. In the mornings, Id walk along 125th Street to the store, which I opened in 82. 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.. At 11 to 12, Id had a nine-hour day. Broadway 96 [Club Broadway] was more geared to black and Latino youth and that was definitely a wilder place. 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. I made a deal for him to do a cheapo job by trading a Brice Marden plus $10,000. 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. They were very basic but super interesting. It was pitch-dark. 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. She and Larry Gagosian had this space, it was a condo loft in a building on West Broadway. Darryl McDaniels, musician and member of Run-DMC. I had this idea I was going to be a writer; if I couldnt, there would be no point to my life. People would bring me their videos to pop in. 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. And why I got out.. 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. Everyone was very excited. (What a loft was, I wasnt entirely sure.) I figure its costing me two bucks to put a girl in my bar for two hours, Reynolds claimed at the time. I didnt want to fit in. Back uptown, Mortimers restaurant was a huge place for me. Linda Goode Bryant, founder of Just Above Midtown Gallery. 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. And then we had Robert Rauschenberg, a rascal and a great man. Wed spend hours getting our outfits together buying stuff at Canal Plastics Center, stapling photo booth pictures onto our jackets. But at midnight, yes, I was often out. Our first goal [as Sonic Youth] was getting a gig at CBGB. 1. And the food at Genroku was really cheap, which was the operative word. I would get back home [from school] at a decent hour, four in the afternoon. I said, To hell with it! Jasmine Guy auditioned; she wasnt of age yet. Some of the best bars on the Upper East Side cultivate the feeling of "Old New York.". The apartment had this old refrigerator that didnt have room for much, so in the winter Id keep everything out on the fire escape. This kind of activity is highly socially ordered: You dont barge in on other people, thats all part of it. Its until you pass out.. I tried never to leave my ZIP code. It was at Avenue A and St. Marks Place, but the windows looked out on an air shaft, not the park. It was all happening at the same time; there was a lot of yin and yang. There's always a striking contrast to what it was and what it is now. I got a loft at Clinton and Stanton, which was far from fashionable. They are not obliged to talk to anyone. It all depended on who was playing. And they said, Yeah, you can have that they werent even thinking about it. It was raw: It had been a paper storage facility. Id walk to Cooper Union, where I was teaching. Id dance until about two in the morning and then Id go back to work. Four days a week, I was studying at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute down on 15th Street. People have bidding wars over apartments that cost millions of dollars. So I flipped on the light and said, Good Morning! Once he came in and told us that something his wife had written was in error and she replied, Jimmy, you wrote your book. Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth performing at CBGB in 1983. Every night was a huge passeggiata with people perusing the blankets. When the sun came up, we would get bagels or pretzels and get back on the train. I didnt smoke or drink, and when you dont do those things, you need an outlet. They put their names all over the mens room! The theater had been trashed. $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. ), When we go out drinking, we go for broke, one man told The Times. Their approach was direct and curt, no frills not self-consciously art-directed no frills, but Old Country, 19th-century no frills. I would be coming back around 4, 4:30, 5 oclock sometimes 6. When I was 15, I was in the clubs. It's now a Samsung store. Al Sharpton (right) backstage at Madison Square Garden on June 11, 1974. When AIDS hit, the lines were drawn: You were either straight or gay. It seems we could start later than this. 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. He and I had dinner every night, and a stream of our friends, including Keith Haring and Debbie Harry, would join. So we were really supporting ourselves! I couldnt work in color because I couldnt afford to make color prints. Jean-Michel Basquiat wandered in at some point a neighbor with whom we had a nodding acquaintance. I would go to this rotary sushi place called Genroku. 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. Drunk patrons would dance on the bar top, well before Coyote Ugly, which would open in January of 1993, had popularized such shenanigans. The room I shared with two other students was on the top floor of the building facing the park. Some of them were lying about their age and I knew it, but I didnt care. It was social, the Upper East Side ladies. By the end of the relationship, I was living there. Points of interest include Central Park, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Guggenheim, The Whitney Museum, Hunter College, Gracie Mansion and Carl Schurz Park. 1983 The Food Marketing Institute reports that 2/3 of all fish consumed in the U.S. is eaten in restaurants. There were others: the Venus, and down in the 14th Street area, the Variety Photoplays, a Spanish one called The Jefferson, The Metropol [Metropolitan]. Brandy's Piano Bar. The rental apartment upstairs from my mother, with the same layout was recently listed for $9900.00 a month. And shoulder pads. If I threw a party, by midnight there was probably an especially good mix of people there. 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). . Like the Womens Christian Temperance Union. Not only did Mr. Brown come on with me, but Muhammad Ali did, too. The original Murray Hill restaurant expanded to this location in 2011, and in 2017 added an upstairs cocktail bar to entice a younger crowd. Hip-hop artist Prince Whipper Whip of the hip-hop group Grand Wizard Theodore & the Fantastic Five at the Sparkle in the Bronx. So I call LL up and I let her speak to him for a few minutes. You could say I was not a considerate neighbor. Or I would throw a party. The Roxy was on Fridays, when the party was Wheels of Steel, which initially started at Negril in the East Village. They would shy away with confused expressions, whispering to their friends. But those deals enticed 22-year-olds to get out of their apartments. Hear Christopher Walken talk about seeing movies during the day: One evening Kenny Scharf and his whole group which included Jean-Michel Basquiat, and certainly Keith Haring were hanging out at the artists studios at the Clocktower Gallery [in the former New York Life Insurance Company Building at Leonard Street and Broadway]. You couldnt do nothing stupid or bad because your friends mother was your mother, too. The Oldest Bars on the Upper East Side East 86th St Association The legendary Tommy Rowles at Bemelman's (photo credit: VictoriaMcGinley.com) The Oldest Bars on the Upper East Side April 08, 2017 Tracking down the oldest bar on the Upper East Side is no easy task! I saw Jody Watley on television, and I was like, They dont steal silver, Im going to wear those!. My primary motive back then was to put on a show, and anything that slowed me down from that had to be curtailed. When I really started hanging out in Manhattan, the primary place for my crew was Rock Steady Park [Happy Warrior Playground] on 98th and Amsterdam. Within a few days, he came to my apartment, which is how I wound up doing the arrangements for Lets Dance.. They were sort of an island unto themselves, and then you went across the park and you had the Pyramid Club and everything else was bars until you got to the Mudd Club way downtown. Hed just been released from prison, and his prison memoir, In the Belly of the Beast, had been published that week. People divided themselves into camps based on which one they favored I liked Odessa better, but Id go to both. 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. Answer (1 of 6): While not classy in haute cuisine, these long-gone restaurants were very popular in the 70s and 80s too: * The Caramba! I got up at anywhere from 3 to 5 in the morning and worked as long as I could. Cities . 1. In a letter about her trip, she wrote, When pages needed to be retyped, Jimmy did the retyping. 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. I did not know what my passions or imagination would lead to. 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. Others would drop by out of curiosity and wonder what was on my mind. I remember this night in particular because of another guest, Jack Henry Abbott, who was living in a halfway house a couple blocks away. Kamalis clothes cleverly combined athletic wear and fabric with high-fashion cuts and silhouettes, perfectly embodying the era. I would write longhand, sit down at the typewriter and type what I had, take those pages across the room to a different chair, sit down and work between the double spaces, do another draft. 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. Thats pretty good.. When Flashdance came out in 1983, Paramount put me up in the Carlyle Hotel to do promotion. I couldnt believe he knew the same stuff I listened to as a kid in Greenwich Village. Sometimes wed have lunch. It needs to be said that, technically, ladies nights were illegal in New York and had been so for quite a time. The Upper East Side isn't the first or second or 12th neighborhood that comes to mind for fun late-night bars, but that doesn't mean you need to head across the park or 70 blocks south just to take 2am shots of tequila with strangers. 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. There were problems, of course; you serve young men and women as much alcohol as they can humanly consume and theres bound to be. 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. There was a place called Columbus, on Columbus Avenue and 69th Street. He goes, What the hell are you doing to my theater? He slowed and turned around: Yeah, you too.. Many of these bars tried to offer a sort of bridge from cheap college boozing to costly, real-world imbibing. My days changed depending on what show I was putting on, what sort of rehearsal schedule I had and how late Id been up the night before, though I had a rule for myself: Always be back before sunrise. 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. 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. It must have been late spring of 1981. These places were used largely by working-class men, white, black and Latino, people who thought of themselves as straight and gay, many of whom were amenable to sexual things. Pretty girls in pajamas peeked in on my occupied space. There was . I was hustling. She had made a video of herself dancing to LL Cool J. After three, four months there, we decided to turn our loft into a nightclub. There is a two drink minimum. Then we had Woody Allen. I was eating very healthfully, which wasnt easy then, seeking out the few macrobiotic restaurants there were. 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. 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. The Upper West Side has always been a great place to buy food, with terrific places for fish and vegetables. Book with OpenTable. Melon I ate a lot of hamburgers there. He said he was going to lunch with some friends, and did I want to join? It wasnt a rich peoples restaurant; it was a restaurant for people Elaine happened to like. It was in this desolate area between TriBeCa and Chinatown, and I knew every alley. Peter was straight out of Damon Runyon and Weegee. No ID check, nothing. They were relatively small, rundown theaters; they tended to have a fair amount of drug use going on. The whole thing finally fell into place in May of that year when I went on Tom Snyders show on NBC. Wed go to bed among the broken glass, booze and old cigarettes. It was like a village, yknow? This morning was no different than any other. I really had no business buying my loft on West Broadway in those years. We were just taken with each other. The elevated West Side Highway, meanwhile, was a place you could ski. Then, I didnt have the kind of formal board that one would today. Today the Upper West Side is considered one of the richest, cleanest, and most expensive places to live in New York City. I didnt know what I was doing. I committed the tapes to memory; I would do them over and over. 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. Caribbean Restaurants Restaurants. My habit must have appeared bizarre to my peers. Sometimes I would read him the weeks work. LL wasnt used to this kind of attention. One day, I was walking uptown to an appointment just before noon, and coming toward me was Robert Duvall. I would get some bus money, some pizza money, some soda money and some money to be able to get into a jam. 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. An unpublished male nude Polaroid from 1981 by photographer Tom Bianchi. They were all drunk and wasted and they were happy. 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. The bakery, located in the front and open 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., is great for an excellent croissant and coffee break. He was the voice of every commercial on the radio or television at that time, and the richest among us. It's just happening.