I remember the smell of the theaters so well popcorn and weed. It wasnt a rich peoples restaurant; it was a restaurant for people Elaine happened to like. I was 19. And by 1991 a good dozen of the neighborhoods bars were offering similar ladies night deals. For a while I lived on the Upper West Side, on the parlor floor of a brownstone on 71st Street between Amsterdam and Columbus. There would be all of the amazing designer clothes that nobody wanted, that were too weird. Brandy's Piano Bar 68 Bars & Clubs Gay Bars Upper East Side Open now 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. Still, he found ladies night ultimately quite profitable. How you doin this morning?, He was young, dressed in jeans, and clearly shocked. Many of these bars tried to offer a sort of bridge from cheap college boozing to costly, real-world imbibing. And they said, Yeah, you can have that they werent even thinking about it. And then eventually some surface decoration with tucks and treatment Id take the fabric and just sew in any direction. Im a child of the Midwestern upper-middle class. The restaurants where mobsters gathered, ate and got murdered I had no reason to stay awake or to fall asleep. And then off wed go! Miller, Edited by Kate Guadagnino and Thessaly La Force. 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. She and Larry Gagosian had this space, it was a condo loft in a building on West Broadway. A WRITER SHARES 1980'S UWS MEMORIES, AND ASKS FOR YOURS - West Side Rag There would be 200 people in there. Guthrie Inn on the other hand perfectly captures how living on the Upper East Side feels in reality; a bit isolated and quiet at times, a haven from downtown at other times, comfortable yet on the rise, and full of an interesting cast of characters. One of my responses was to just keep working. Fleming's was a fun Irish bar on the upper east side in the 1980s & 1990s, up until it closed in 1994. Hip-hop artist Prince Whipper Whip of the hip-hop group Grand Wizard Theodore & the Fantastic Five at the Sparkle in the Bronx. Then we packed up our stuff, went back to the coffee shop to have breakfast and headed home. 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. It was almost a surreal experience, because I had the feeling that this person is only vaguely here. 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.. I couldnt, but I did turn around and walk with him for some blocks to the restaurant. 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. It was a brilliantly sunny day, and standing outside was Dustin Hoffman. I made a deal for him to do a cheapo job by trading a Brice Marden plus $10,000. I was just out of high school. If they didnt give us any food, wed go off to the next person. Thats pretty good.. I suppose I should have loved New York; things were very good for me. Up the street from my apartment was 8 B.C., a club run by two friends of mine. So we were really supporting ourselves! Id work for 12 hours straight, prepping for my show at Barbara Gladstone Gallery. Despite the lack of a cabaret license, DJ Mike would spin soon-to-be-classics of the moment like Salt-N-Pepas Lets Talk About Sex and Color Me Badds I Wanna Sex You Up, while everyone danced. 40 Iconic Restaurants That Are No Longer Around - Delish In the 1980s, the restaurant began to decline, as it switched up menu items in favor of more chicken and fish. This bar, deep inside the St. Regis on Fifth Avenue, is one of the few New York hotel bars whose . The original Murray Hill restaurant expanded to this location in 2011, and in 2017 added an upstairs cocktail bar to entice a younger crowd. We blacked out the skylights and windows and painted most of it gold very Warholian. Police barricades up and down Second Avenue. In the Early 80s, It Made All the Difference, Oral History: Remembering New Yorks Fiorucci Store, New Yorkers and Their 80s Routines Block by Block, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/17/t-magazine/80s-nyc-map.html, Ann Magnuson, actress and performance artist. Peter was straight out of Damon Runyon and Weegee. Bronwyn Thomas, she was like happy feet on her toes. Wed go to bed among the broken glass, booze and old cigarettes. Not only did we dress in wigs and dresses from 14th Street, but we took on personas to match. Meanwhile, 25 new bars had opened between 76th and 96th Streets in the first years of the 1990s as well. Four days a week, I was studying at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute down on 15th Street. 68. 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 knew so many people in Harlem, I kept a second apartment in the Bronx, where I tried to be unseen. It was a kind of a monks cell. And if I missed it, I felt really bad. They were relatively small, rundown theaters; they tended to have a fair amount of drug use going on. It was packed every night; it won the Pulitzer Prize that year. 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. It was all very small town-y. I never saw that before and hed never experienced that. 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. So in April we held the Rites of Spring Fertility Bacchanal. Very quickly, I realized it had potential to be a book. I really had no business buying my loft on West Broadway in those years. Open in Google Maps. 26 places sorted by traveler favorites Clear all filters 1. The other was he wouldnt say anything, just [shrug] that meant it was a failure. There was a popular Puerto Rican dance club, Ochentas, and across the street from that was an Afro-Cuban spot, Club Broadway. Boozy, drug-fueled parties that lasted until dawn. And when she gave me the phone back, she went into [hysterics]. One of his favorite pieces was the Alto Rhapsody of Brahms, sung by Dame Janet Baker. It was pitch-dark. 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]. It had the best hamburgers and gin martinis. 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. Ever since I moved out of my parents house in Astoria to live in the city, Ive always lived within the same two or three blocks of the Upper West Side. The rental apartment upstairs from my mother, with the same layout was recently listed for $9900.00 a month. Bodega 88 Night Clubs Bars Brew Pubs (19) 8.6 Website (212) 799-1602 573 Columbus Ave New York, NY 10024 CLOSED NOW 2. 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. Write a Review! It was frequented by many celebrities, especially actors and authors. My habit must have appeared bizarre to my peers. 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. Elsewhere, so he was going back and forth between doing the TV show and the play. It's now a Samsung store. 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. Of course, it wasnt just rising rents, Mayor Giuliani, and smart phones that would kill ladies night on the Upper East Side. There were all these conspiracy theories. Nearby spots like Bear Bar began capitalizing on the traffic by offering their own competing ladies night deals. When Canadian-born club impresario Peter Gatien came to New York City in the early '80s, after. $5 all-you-can-drink that was my bar menu., 2014 - 2023 VinePair Inc. Made In NYC, Bartenders: Now's Your Chance To Experience Barbados. I lived at the Olympic Tower, and Halston was downstairs.. We did a deep dive into the most avant-garde, atonal jazz. 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. 77 Restaurant memories 1970-90 ideas - Pinterest 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. In 1972, the New York State Human Rights Commission ruled that reduced-priced ladies days at Yankee Stadium discriminated against men. Whats she doing now? She was like [hyperventilating]. 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. It was at Avenue A and St. Marks Place, but the windows looked out on an air shaft, not the park. . 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. It is demeaning to women to be treated this way, claimed Long Island man Richard Savino in 1984. Galleries and museums didnt exhibit their work at that time. Dinner on the Upper East Side with a former president of the United States. We would sit at this coffee table and listen to records for an hour. 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. We recorded at a studio called Greene Street Recording Studio on Greene Street between Houston and Prince. But as soon as we walked in, nearly everyone stood and applauded. He had two responses: Pretty good, was high, high praise. Elaine's was a bar and restaurant in New York City that existed from 1963 to 2011. I slept when I was exhausted and awoke when I was refreshed. By 1968, there were a whopping 85 bars on the Upper East Side, most of them singles bars. He goes, What the hell are you doing to my theater? The gallery space was on the first floor; our offices were in the basement. He was like the Jimmy Fallon or Trevor Noah of that era. These 1980s Restaurants Didn't Stand the Test of Time - Eat This Not That As told to Caroline Bankoff,Heather Corcoran,Nancy Hass and M.H. Youd sit at the bar and someone would say: Hey, were going to Danceteria. Or theyd have a car and youd find yourself in the East Village, which was a total war zone, with junkies passed out and men building fires in trash cans. 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. New York City's Most Classic Restaurants - Town & Country It had a tub in the kitchen, a tiny little toilet bowl in a closet of a room, one narrow hallway room and a slightly bigger front room maybe $210. No one says they have to leave a tip. Money was secondary to being able to have this playground we could create. Delmonico's, 21-23 William Street (1831-1923, intermittently thereafter) In 1831 Swiss brothers John and Peter Delmonico founded the city's first . I doubt if many artists experienced it that way. I was still riding a little bit high off of the Diana Ross album Diana, which had come out in 1980. More likely than not, Id have to go downtown to the garment center to get some fabric or trimming. Then you checked to see if there was anything in the theater papers for auditions. Brandy's Piano Bar. In retrospect, Bowie was ahead of the curve. 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. When I crossed the bridge, I had my Saturday Night Fever moment the city was for the taking. While her friend Sara explained, We dont even like this place. Not all these bars were necessarily beloved. Those were developers terms. Sometimes it could just be too blasting. 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. Sep 13, 2019 - Restaurants that I ate at as a child..most no longer exist. CBGB was just up the street, and I performed there with my band or as a solo poet many times. The Mudd Club was one of my favorite spots to go out thats where I was introduced to James Chance and the Contortions and Talking Heads. I just left the house on a Sunday, went to make the record. See menus, reviews, ratings and delivery info for the best dining and most popular restaurants in East 80s. When me and Run would go to each others houses and rap together, we would go into the attic. There were very few artists there. Those were days when we ate meat just blissfully. It was run by very old Jewish folks. 1. Yorkville, Manhattan photos from the 1980s Yorkville, Upper East Side Manhattan in the 1980's, all photos by Gary Lenhart E. 86th St., NYC [Best_Wordpress_Gallery id="204 gal_title="E 86th St NYC Photos"] York Ave., NYC [Best_Wordpress_Gallery id="205 gal_title="York Ave NYC Photos"] 1st. And Silk Road. I got up at anywhere from 3 to 5 in the morning and worked as long as I could. 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. Bars & Music Mama's Bar. The artists Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham at their wedding, 1983. Upper East Side - New York - The Infatuation Wed spend hours getting our outfits together buying stuff at Canal Plastics Center, stapling photo booth pictures onto our jackets. I knew running back up the stairs was a bad idea. All the music [in the atelier on 125th Street] came from the VCR. It felt like there was all this dangerous energy. 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. Before that it had been pot. [Kim] would work one day, and Id work the next. The Club Kids, led by impresario Michael Alig, turned places like the Limelight into backdrops of drug- and techno-induced drama, while live music dens like the Village Gate presented stages to. For one assignment, the paper sent me to Washington Heights to photograph what it said was a riot. It was around the corner from another tiny spot called Chandalier. The silence, as they say, was deafening. Bars & Clubs Gay Bars. After three, four months there, we decided to turn our loft into a nightclub. Williamsburg is like New York in the 70s. Here are our favorites. If you wanted fancy, youd go to La Grenouille. It made me immobile. We called the area TriBeCa, but we laughed about it the same way we laughed at DUMBO. . You werent afraid of getting it, you were wondering when are the symptoms going to show up. My sense of time was completely distorted. NR is a cocktail bar on the Upper East Side that serves inventive drinks and solid ramen. 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. Dont come ringing my doorbell! I remember we would go from person to person. 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. I asked the kids to demonstrate what theyd been doing. I would just sit there. 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. The Best Historic Bars in Manhattan - PUNCH Where To Drink On The Upper East Side . 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. It was social, the Upper East Side ladies. James Brown and Ali because of them, I basically became a made guy. We considered the food too depressingly awful. We said we were artists, and artists make art. I had no student loans and the housing was still affordable. 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. But I had no idea what I was photographing. 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 returned to New York in 81 after 10 years as an expat. Everyone I knew hated Reagan and couldnt wait for him to get out of office. Id paid high school kids to go on Thursday afternoons after school and hand out fliers. There's always a striking contrast to what it was and what it is now. Next door to my apartment on East Eighth and Avenue C was the Green Oasis Community Garden, and I got involved with that. People like Jean-Michel [Basquiat] would come in, who was somebody you knew from Tier 3 and the Mudd Club; someone your age. The 1980s era of Wall Street expense accounts had evaporated as young professionals, for the first time in a while, actually had to pay for their own drinks. Women would crowd around oil drums turned into tables and, while standing on sawdust floors, pound cheap beer and well liquor. The venues didn't matter to me. We used to have a TV with a VCR on at all times, playing MTV and the guys coming up. I didnt have the scratch to make it livable, but I met this guy named Peter Marino [the architect and designer] in the elevator who was doing a high-end renovation on the top floor and negotiated with him. Today the Upper West Side is considered one of the richest, cleanest, and most expensive places to live in New York City. Upper East Side Aug. 11, 1972 It was a case of mistaken identity, revenge for the sensational rubout of Joey Gallo at Umberto's four months earlier, only this one led to two innocent meat. By the early 1970s, 20 to 25 percent of American couples had met at a bar, according to Stanford University research. 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. 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. Wed eat. A short-lived club in the 1980s East Village. 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? Honestly, my mind was empty, but I wanted to be consumed by that emptiness. All of the cabbies would line up there to get eggs and bacon late at night. It wasnt actually the best place to hear or see bands, but it was always exciting. 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. Normandie Court, a complex of four 34-story beige towers occupying the entire block bounded by East 95th and 96th Streets and Second and Third Avenues, opened around then, offering dirt cheap rent. Having had an alcoholic mother, he did not like being around people who drank much.