I tended to feel particularly safe in the theaters. So I call LL up and I let her speak to him for a few minutes. It was on the 13th floor of an old city building, and you had to walk up a whole floor from the 12th, which was the last floor served by an elevator. I knew running back up the stairs was a bad idea. I knew so many people in Harlem, I kept a second apartment in the Bronx, where I tried to be unseen. See menus, reviews, ratings and delivery info for the best dining and most popular restaurants in East 80s. 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. What the hell?. 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. And when my mother asked me where I was at, I just said, Oh, I was in the attic.. The essence of Upper East Side gentility, Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle is also the last public space to display the mural work of Ludwig Bemelmans, creator of the iconic children's book character and prolific illustrator of the 1940s and '50s. We were outside the Mine Shaft [a raunchy 1970s/'80s gay sex club on Washington Street]. The loft was across the street from Castelli [Gallery]. 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. And Dynasty. Ive never gotten over Dynasty. And then people started dying. The robust economy powered unfathomable riches into New York's in the late 90s: In SoHo restaurants, Madison Avenue boutiques, and East Side real-estate offices, no price is too high for the lords . Thats what I did. It was a restaurant a modest place, like an Italian restaurant but really it was an actors hangout. 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]. 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 Dorrians Red Hand with Jennifer Levin before killing her in Central Park later that evening. It didnt have a name. Every parent, every grown-up was your mother and father. AIDS was a very strange situation; starting in 82 you knew very little about it, and then a few years later you suddenly realized it was the largest killer among your personal friends. Peter was straight out of Damon Runyon and Weegee. The Penrose. Courtesy of John Kelly, photograph by John Dugdale, John Kelly, performance and visual artist. Hed just been released from prison, and his prison memoir, In the Belly of the Beast, had been published that week. And then off wed go! At that time, Chelsea was unexplored territory. 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. We would get on at the ramp at Chambers Street and ski up to Spring Street to the Ear Inn. I was living on Eldridge Street between Hester and Grand. 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. He recognized me and stopped to congratulate me on the film. And the food at Genroku was really cheap, which was the operative word. 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. The artists Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham at their wedding, 1983. People have bidding wars over apartments that cost millions of dollars. Or worse. Nobody was talking to him, probably because they didnt recognize him. He was very aware I was using a lot of paper that wasnt being accounted for, so we came to an agreement that I had to pay. 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. It was a brilliantly sunny day, and standing outside was Dustin Hoffman. Things were 50 times as bad in Brooklyn as they were in Manhattan. 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. Xerox art was big then, so people would come in to make photocopies and plaster them all over. I had this idea I was going to be a writer; if I couldnt, there would be no point to my life. 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. Thats what happened at Club 57 a lot: We told people, This is the theme. People would drop change in your hands, turn their heads when you tried to kiss them. And shoulder pads. At Elaines, for instance, you would find people Elaine was floating. When we went out it was to perform. In the 1980s, the restaurant began to decline, as it switched up menu items in favor of more chicken and fish. It was right next to the Chelsea Hotel, where I was living. Whats she doing now? She was like [hyperventilating]. Best upper east side bars 80\\\'s in New York, NY. 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. The bodegas played loud salsa music late into the night, as Dominican men played dominoes on the corner. Ann Magnuson performing at Kenny Scharfs opening atop his Ultima Suprema Deluxa Cadillac on November 14, 1983. 26 places sorted by traveler favorites Clear all filters 1. Guide. But I didnt feel super cool or anything. Thats pretty good.. There were lines around the block the theater starting bumping it up to a second and third screening. We liked to get there early, which the club promoters loved because wed get the party started. We didnt pay rent, but it was meant to be $300 a month. 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. Many of the bars of this era were, in fact, themed, and sometimes cheesily so. This bar, deep inside the St. Regis on Fifth Avenue, is one of the few New York hotel bars whose . But as soon as we walked in, nearly everyone stood and applauded. I had glasses, so I put these flip-up sunglass visors on them. My contemporary, the writer Ed [Edmund] White, had the apartment next door. And by 1991 a good dozen of the neighborhoods bars were offering similar ladies night deals. Police barricades up and down Second Avenue. It was a very quiet audience. I never had to show the clothes I was making to a buyer, because they always saw it in the clubs first: at Danceteria, at Roxy, at Kool Lady Blues Friday-night party. Someone broke the front glass and stole the poster. Tuesday Trivia. Everywhere else it was club kids and b-boys with foxtails hanging from their clothes; I had the shoulder pads and the spiky hair and all that. Chloe 81 Night Clubs Dance Clubs Bars 6.7 Website Amenities: (212) 677-0067 There was a place called Columbus, on Columbus Avenue and 69th Street. 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 would often wake up in the middle of the night as the city slept. There was always someone between apartments or someone coming to town who needed somewhere to stay. For one assignment, the paper sent me to Washington Heights to photograph what it said was a riot. All of the cabbies would line up there to get eggs and bacon late at night. They were spinning on their heads, the cops said. There would be all of the amazing designer clothes that nobody wanted, that were too weird. If you remember Flemings, this event is for you: Saturday, December 4 Fleming's Reunion Party 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. There were all these conspiracy theories. 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. There was a great camaraderie. They could be stimulated by the heterosexual pornography that was on the screen. I was eating very healthfully, which wasnt easy then, seeking out the few macrobiotic restaurants there were. 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 was straight-edge, so if I snuck out, I was all right, because I wasnt hungover the next day like the other kids. And Silk Road. It had no closets, so somebody put up a bar so I could hang clothes. 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. I got up at anywhere from 3 to 5 in the morning and worked as long as I could. She and Larry Gagosian had this space, it was a condo loft in a building on West Broadway. I had no reason to stay awake or to fall asleep. 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. I would get some bus money, some pizza money, some soda money and some money to be able to get into a jam. You would have Rock Steady Crew and Zulu Nation on one side of the room, and this notorious gang called the Ball Busters on the other. They were more McDermotts friends, because my friends were working in fashion and they were like, Oh, get a job, bitch! And I just loved that experience. Jumbo-sized martini glasses smeared with ruby lipstick. She was the ultimate ballerina, and she became that on Fame. I was excited that I would be able to introduce this new band of gypsies to the Hollywood scene. Now nothings open after 11. Lobster Newburg as it looks today. 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. 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 loved things coming around and you had to grab them, like getting your luggage off a luggage rack. 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. The whole reason I was able to raise money for my causes was because of him. You couldnt do nothing stupid or bad because your friends mother was your mother, too. (212) 861-2290. I could wake up in the middle of the night and hear his typewriter going. JAM gallery founder Linda Goode Bryant, circa 1981-82. 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. 2. Carina Finn July 6, 2022. 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. I went over and started chatting with him, and we became completely engrossed in this conversation about jazz. 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. Im a child of the Midwestern upper-middle class. Being at the Carlyle was amazing, but I was still an undergrad at Yale at the time, and the whole thing felt unreal, as though I was living two lives. 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]. No one could believe that this B-actor was about to occupy the White House. They put their names all over the mens room! The theater had been trashed. Usually Id take the bus down to Mickeys [Chinese Chance] at 1 University Place, where Julian Schnabel was the cook. And, of course, so did the men. 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. He was in his preppy stage in those days, wearing button-downs, which really is hard to imagine now. That was Sucker M.C.s., I was still living at home. Steve Landiss photograph for fashion designer Norma Kamalis 1981 Sweats campaign. It seems we could start later than this. Those were days when we ate meat just blissfully. 1567 2nd Ave, New York, NY Then it was getting a good time slot at CBGB, so you werent on last and werent on first. The front window was a queer Mount Rushmore, with the heavyweights looking out onto the street: Rene Ricard, Bill Rice, Peter Hujar, Paul Thek. Once I saw someone selling a broken light bulb. NR is a cocktail bar on the Upper East Side that serves inventive drinks and solid ramen. An unpublished male nude Polaroid from 1981 by photographer Tom Bianchi. In the lot there are three vehicles. After shows at La MaMa, we would go to the gay bar on East Fourth Street and Second Ave. Peter had no small talk at all. Nine oclock was the earliest you could go. Arent the both of us up early, I said. LL wasnt used to this kind of attention. 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. Le Relais, on Madison and 63rd, was more everyone my age and everyone from Europe. 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. And the rest of us were kinda like, Oh man, what? Michael Gira, the frontman of the band Swans, was on the [first] cover. Afterward, wed go to a club. Williamsburg is like New York in the 70s. We blasted Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson. After three, four months there, we decided to turn our loft into a nightclub. There's always a striking contrast to what it was and what it is now. I would go to these obscure classes around the city that were mostly for dancers. 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. I dont even know if it was named AIDS at that point. We had a bar and some makeshift situation where people would collect the door charge, $5 or $10 maybe. A chance encounter with David Bowie at a downtown nightclub. 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. 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. At the end of the night I would walk all the way home. (By the time we filmed Desperately Seeking Susan in 84, New York was already beginning to become more gentrified.) Its basically the most conscious, relatable record. Ski Bar would issue custom-made lift tickets good for eight drinks apiece. (What a loft was, I wasnt entirely sure.) He was the voice of every commercial on the radio or television at that time, and the richest among us. By the end of the relationship, I was living there. $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. This scrappy 16mm movie that people werent sure if it was a story movie or a documentary, everybody looked at it and said, I know that guy! They werent public figures; they were locally known graffiti artists, break-dancers, hip-hop M.C.s or D.J.s. mainstays slimline digital scale manual, best neurosurgeon in brisbane, carnes park whitehall al directions,