Four days a week, I was studying at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute down on 15th Street. I was living with my aunt and one of my cousins in a shotgun apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn. 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. By the early 1970s, 20 to 25 percent of American couples had met at a bar, according to Stanford University research. The Landmarks That Made New York a Cultural Capital, Uptown or Downtown? 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. Pretty girls in pajamas peeked in on my occupied space. I had to be at the theater by 7 oclock so I could start my process and get ready before half-hour call. 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.. James Brown and the Rev. Jean-Michel Basquiat wandered in at some point a neighbor with whom we had a nodding acquaintance. Everyone I knew hated Reagan and couldnt wait for him to get out of office. 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 . Afterward, wed go to a club. I found them very original, underivative of the 60s or 70s they had a cleanness and a strength to them. Once I saw someone selling a broken light bulb. 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. We did a deep dive into the most avant-garde, atonal jazz. I was working at the Whitney and helping to open different museum branches, so I was shuttling between 42nd Street, Stamford, Conn., and the downtown branch, which was just a few blocks from where I lived, on Front Street in the South Street Seaport area. It was on 35th and Fifth, and it was a place where the sushi came around on a conveyor belt. In the 60s, it was only open to the high class and the rich, like authors up on the Upper East Side. The object was to keep stitching no matter what happened to the fabric. 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]. The original flier for Kellys show at the Pyramid Club in 1981. It was like a village, yknow? I would drink quite a lot of wine. 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. We were such fashion victims. [Wild Style] opened in 1983, [at the Embassy 3] on 47th Street and Broadway. I didnt smoke or drink, and when you dont do those things, you need an outlet. You wanted to be there when it was happening, and then youd migrate at around 2:30 to an after-hours club. Upper East Side. Wed spend hours getting our outfits together buying stuff at Canal Plastics Center, stapling photo booth pictures onto our jackets. At Elaines, for instance, you would find people Elaine was floating. It was really like a combination of living theater and installation art, very communal. I had a loft downtown on Walker Street, one of the first buildings that went on loft strike. 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. Then you would call at 10, or 10 after, to check in with your agent to see if there was anything going that day. That's what Bennigan's, an Irish-themed bar and grill, offered in the 1980s. Clear all filters. I would often wake up in the middle of the night as the city slept. One place I went to a lot was the St. Marks Baths. ), When we go out drinking, we go for broke, one man told The Times. Gay and straight people would party together. 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. They put their names all over the mens room! The theater had been trashed. There was a theater called the Capri that I went to a lot. 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 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. Are you going to this? It was make coffee, check in and then get busy stripping wood. Our first goal [as Sonic Youth] was getting a gig at CBGB. There is a two drink minimum. Then later, it became about getting a gig at Danceteria, Mudd Club they were all little milestone achievements. Youd press your lips to the bottom and Slalom Girls would pour a combo Jaeger/tequila shot that would shush down the slope and into your face. But truthfully, I hated it. Before that it had been pot. 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. It was a restaurant a modest place, like an Italian restaurant but really it was an actors hangout. We just called it The Bar, which morphed into Ze Bar, like with a fake French accent. It was all happening at the same time; there was a lot of yin and yang. I asked the kids to demonstrate what theyd been doing. You could order a pizza anytime. Ive gotta go to something, Bob will call you. I took the elevator down to the street and I saw a phone booth and the first thought that came to my mind was, Do not call any of your friends and tell them Andy Warhol is doing your book because I dont think thats for real. And sure enough, he didnt. Have a good day. His hands were in his pockets now. This was every Friday. 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. Everyone writes that I was his tour manager, but thats not what it was. These are the moments, large and small, recounted by 36 writers, artists, fashion designers, musicians and more who. It made the general public aware that people were dying in Brooklyn, in Harlem, in the Bronx. We blacked out the skylights and windows and painted most of it gold very Warholian. When Canadian-born club impresario Peter Gatien came to New York City in the early '80s, after. Youd have Chinese opera and then some kind of Russian circus act and then a punk band and then a drag queen. By the time midnight came around and I knew my parents were sleeping, I would sneak out the window down onto the porch. Everyone was very excited. A walk across the Williamsburg Bridge just to save a subway token. 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. It was just shattering, but of course I had to pretend that this was the surprise that I had brought my board to see. It was before he was onstage and all that; he was just starting out. 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. Everything had my initials on it, or the name of somebody else on it; it was really crazy. Others would drop by out of curiosity and wonder what was on my mind. There were lines around the block the theater starting bumping it up to a second and third screening. In 1972, the New York State Human Rights Commission ruled that reduced-priced ladies days at Yankee Stadium discriminated against men. 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. Then it got to be a habit. This bar, deep inside the St. Regis on Fifth Avenue, is one of the few New York hotel bars whose . When Flashdance came out in 1983, Paramount put me up in the Carlyle Hotel to do promotion. The bodegas played loud salsa music late into the night, as Dominican men played dominoes on the corner. At 11 to 12, Id had a nine-hour day. Thelonious Monk or Nina Simone or Gloria Lynne would stop by to visit them, so I grew up around these real bebop superstars. There was a studio near First Avenue in the 50s that used a dance technique that was a modified version of Pilates. Wed go: Look, even if you dont know how to strip wood, were gonna show you: This gooey mess that you have to brush on the wood, wait till it bubbles, then you scrape it off. Most mornings, we would wake up and check the answering machine. 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. Id been divorced and on my own since 1977 I had started the business with my husband a decade earlier and it felt like women were waking up. 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. The title was an intentional lure the work wasnt about Grace Kelly, but the painter William Schwedler. It was raw: It had been a paper storage facility. 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. It was around the corner from another tiny spot called Chandalier. There were very few places to work out back then. I started JAM in 1974 to show the work of African-American artists and other artists of color. 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. Then we packed up our stuff, went back to the coffee shop to have breakfast and headed home. 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. But I had no idea what I was photographing. And then we said, We gotta do the real hip-hop that were actually doing at the block parties and at the house parties and at the park parties. So we decided to make it all beat no music, just me and Run [Joseph Simmons, another founding member of Run-DMC] doing the real hardcore, just rhyming on this record. Come be a part of it. The doors would open and things would get going by 10, and by midnight it would be raging. And, of course, so did the men. Once he came in and told us that something his wife had written was in error and she replied, Jimmy, you wrote your book. My contemporary, the writer Ed [Edmund] White, had the apartment next door. Thats what I did. Open in Google Maps. The room I shared with two other students was on the top floor of the building facing the park. I just left the house on a Sunday, went to make the record. There would be all of the amazing designer clothes that nobody wanted, that were too weird. Things were 50 times as bad in Brooklyn as they were in Manhattan. I realized I had to leave. The Upper West Side has always been a great place to buy food, with terrific places for fish and vegetables. Jane Fonda had recently released her workout tapes, and it was the first opportunity a lot of women had to exercise. It was the only Xerox machine below 14th Street, so every artist used it. I was doing commercials and Ntozake Shanges For Colored Girls [For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf] I went on tour with that show, as part of the first national company. I unlocked the door. He had always been like a surrogate father to me, and when his manager quit midway through the tour, he called me to come and just make sure people werent ripping him off at the venues every night. I remember thinking, How long can this go on? Sometimes I didnt eat for two days. The old downtown art scene was floundering, while some people, like Robert Mapplethorpe, had risen. Chloe 81 Night Clubs Dance Clubs Bars 6.7 Website Amenities: (212) 677-0067 Amura ($$) Japanese Menu Available. We would get on at the ramp at Chambers Street and ski up to Spring Street to the Ear Inn. 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. 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. I was still riding a little bit high off of the Diana Ross album Diana, which had come out in 1980. I could feel the presence of someone in the room. 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. The mayoral election of Rudy Giuliani in 1994 would favor the NIMBYs, as he sent task forces around to raid bars, enforce cabaret laws with hefty fines, and even enact Operation Last Call, having police officers carry a meter to check noise levels around closing time. Very quickly, I realized it had potential to be a book. It was packed every night; it won the Pulitzer Prize that year. In the summer of 1992, New York Magazine published a photo of the Slalom Shots alongside a brief blurb and, according to Block, That more or less started the anarchy in the neighborhood.. I would walk around the neighborhood, go down to 42nd Street and do a lot of movie cruising. I had glasses, so I put these flip-up sunglass visors on them. I made sure there was a hot tub in there. Madison Pub was an indispensable local dive. 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. The early 80s were sort of the beginning of serious gentrification. My habit must have appeared bizarre to my peers. Its a great show. We stared at each other for a moment. Their approach was direct and curt, no frills not self-consciously art-directed no frills, but Old Country, 19th-century no frills. Silently. Guerrilla art activities took place all over. They were spinning on their heads, the cops said. Le Relais, on Madison and 63rd, was more everyone my age and everyone from Europe. I dont even know if it was named AIDS at that point. He and I had dinner every night, and a stream of our friends, including Keith Haring and Debbie Harry, would join. When AIDS hit, the lines were drawn: You were either straight or gay. To me, the 1980s were incredibly liberating. Whats she doing now? She was like [hyperventilating]. At one end of my block was J.G. Cities . At the end of the night I would walk all the way home. If we werent in a group, I would walk over the bridge, because money was scarce and I wanted to have a token to go back out the next night. 1. Id dance until about two in the morning and then Id go back to work. My life was spiraling downward. 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. 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. The. Sometimes you would cry, but most of the time you were just stunned, like it wasnt real. While her friend Sara explained, We dont even like this place. Hes a Leo all the Leos I know love history. And yet, plenty of ladies were also against them. Adolph would regale us with stories. 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. The ultimate epitome of this wild, boozing-on-the-cheap era, Ski Bar, was located on Second Ave between 94th and 95th. Mornings spent alone, writing in a studio in the West Village. And I just loved that experience. In the lot there are three vehicles. Today the Upper West Side is considered one of the richest, cleanest, and most expensive places to live in New York City. Bronwyn Thomas, she was like happy feet on her toes. So in April we held the Rites of Spring Fertility Bacchanal. 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. You could be a young person in Manhattan back then, Block recalls. 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. . I did shows in there at night, including the first solo show David Salle ever had. Todd didnt like the idea that I was doing a fanzine. Thats where I first met [the late street-style photographer] Bill Cunningham, I think. She knew I was in dire straits; [by 1979] my landlord was getting squirrelly. I got up at anywhere from 3 to 5 in the morning and worked as long as I could. The Upper East Side was the place to party in the early 1990s, recalls Jennifer Capobianco, a bartender from the era. Id go with Andy Warhol, or to dinner and then to Studio 54 afterwards. Carver came by, down from Syracuse on some publishing business. Its basically the most conscious, relatable record. 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. And thats why Block thinks youll never again see an era like the early 1990s on the Upper East Side. 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). I couldnt believe he knew the same stuff I listened to as a kid in Greenwich Village. 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. This was a moment in Manhattan history that had never really been seen before and hasnt been seen since. I got so tired of getting mugged on my way home. Photograph: Paul Wagtouicz. 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. She had made a video of herself dancing to LL Cool J. Nine oclock was the earliest you could go. And Dynasty. Ive never gotten over Dynasty. And then people started dying. As told to Kate Guadagnino,Elizabeth Gumport,Merrell Hambleton and Erin Sheehy. Write a Review! Youd see people that you hadnt seen in months in the street with KS [Kaposis sarcoma] lesions; people would just disappear. 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. The gallerys not open so youll have to come back. 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. We used to have a TV with a VCR on at all times, playing MTV and the guys coming up. So I call LL up and I let her speak to him for a few minutes. A chance encounter with David Bowie at a downtown nightclub. But those deals enticed 22-year-olds to get out of their apartments. People would bring me their videos to pop in. When we went out it was to perform. 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. Miller, Edited by Kate Guadagnino and Thessaly La Force. I had reached 30 and was having to face how hard it was going to be. Jumbo-sized martini glasses smeared with ruby lipstick. The conversation was very interesting. People thought I was a little crazy. That completely opened my mind. I would get some bus money, some pizza money, some soda money and some money to be able to get into a jam. Back then no one came in and said, Let me see your bar menu, says Block. 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 made a short performance called Life Without Grace, a kind of eulogy. Police barricades up and down Second Avenue. We were very, very thin. 1567 2nd Ave, New York, NY Talk to the actors as they drifted in about your day, talk about whos auditioning for what. Best upper east side bars 80\\\'s in New York, NY. Wednesdays and Thursdays were Ultimate Ladies Night with free Margaritas all evening, not to mention a gratis taco bar during happy hour. Id walk to Cooper Union, where I was teaching. Williamsburg is like New York in the 70s. 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. One night I saw Jack Smith do a reading, and I can still remember this line, which kind of sums up that era: The cockroach caravan crosses the rented desert of exotic landlordism.. Mozart. Here, notable locals revisit their routes and routines, from lunch on the Upper East to nighttime sojourns to then-emerging neighborhoods like TriBeCa. An unpublished male nude Polaroid from 1981 by photographer Tom Bianchi. 1 place sorted by traveler favorites. Indeed, many of his customers would come from Normandie Court a block away. Then our leading lady, Susan Berman, broke her leg, and we had to wait for her to get out of the cast. Although it didn't hold up against Chili's, TGI Fridays, and Applebee's, there was a time when it was fairly ubiquitous throughout the states. You couldnt do nothing stupid or bad because your friends mother was your mother, too. We never served any food, but we always had a couple cases of beer and a basic bar. I had no student loans and the housing was still affordable. I had no reason to stay awake or to fall asleep. (Never let on to a dog youre afraid of him, my Uncle Charlie would say.) This kind of activity is highly socially ordered: You dont barge in on other people, thats all part of it. Rival crews had been dancing in the subway, and it turned into a fight over who had won. Back uptown, Mortimers restaurant was a huge place for me. The first club I did with Shawn Hausman, The Club With No Name, was on 25th Street. See more ideas about memories, restaurant, howard johnson's. (How many spinal taps can you give to someone under a refrigeration blanket whose fever wouldnt break?) It wasnt a rich peoples restaurant; it was a restaurant for people Elaine happened to like. I invited him to dinner. And Bowie had no idea that was my background. Dinner on the Upper East Side with a former president of the United States. 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. (212) 861-2290. 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. 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).

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