I had no reason to stay awake or to fall asleep. We were just taken with each other. 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.. 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. Brandy's Piano Bar. It was a brilliantly sunny day, and standing outside was Dustin Hoffman. 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 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. You could work, then not work for a while, get by. 1442 1st Avenue, New York, NY . The bodegas played loud salsa music late into the night, as Dominican men played dominoes on the corner. That was Sucker M.C.s., I was still living at home. (What a loft was, I wasnt entirely sure.) One time a girl a teenager, maybe 15, 16 came in with her dad. Theyd say, Yo, Dap, listen to that. All the hip-hop artists came [to the atelier]; there wasnt any other place that catered to rappers. 68. David McDermott and Peter McGough, artists. Galleries and museums didnt exhibit their work at that time. Or I would throw a party. I liked to work out in the late afternoon, because in the morning I wanted to save every iota of energy for my work and the store. There were problems, of course; you serve young men and women as much alcohol as they can humanly consume and theres bound to be. He was with his editor Erroll McDonald, a good friend of ours, but he refused to come into the room, remaining near the door with his back against the wall. 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. The room I shared with two other students was on the top floor of the building facing the park. 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. 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. Peter was straight out of Damon Runyon and Weegee. I invited him to dinner. 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. 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. We were both rather exotic in each others eyes. Then it got to be a habit. Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, a boy like me didnt know there was a place for him in the world like that. Hip-hop artist Prince Whipper Whip of the hip-hop group Grand Wizard Theodore & the Fantastic Five at the Sparkle in the Bronx. In a letter about her trip, she wrote, When pages needed to be retyped, Jimmy did the retyping. We didnt know how the virus transmitted. You wanted to be there when it was happening, and then youd migrate at around 2:30 to an after-hours club. Then you checked to see if there was anything in the theater papers for auditions. It was social, the Upper East Side ladies. 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. Today hes in his mid-50s and out of the bar business entirely. The title was an intentional lure the work wasnt about Grace Kelly, but the painter William Schwedler. 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 then either go to work or go to an opening because Macys closed at 8:45 or something, so you had to move on. (By the time we filmed Desperately Seeking Susan in 84, New York was already beginning to become more gentrified.) Denzel had just gotten St. The writer Gay Taleses social calendar for October 1983. The rain came through, so the clothes were all messed up by brown streaks. She and Larry Gagosian had this space, it was a condo loft in a building on West Broadway. There were lines around the block the theater starting bumping it up to a second and third screening. It became a whole sh*t show, recalls Keith Block. 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. Reagan really ruined it for me. I would often wake up in the middle of the night as the city slept. CBs wasnt the best sound; it was such a long and narrow space that if it was crowded you couldnt really see anything, unless you were standing on the side of the stage, and then you just heard the stage sound. Linda Goode Bryant, founder of Just Above Midtown Gallery. Other times, it literally meant all-you-could-drink, whatever you wanted to drink, on every single night of the week. 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. Within 18 months, several more "singles bars" were opened on 1st Avenue. In those days, there wasnt any downtown, so life was much easier. 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 said, Dap, whats she doing? I said, Shes gasping for air now! And I go attend to her. LaTanya Richardson Jackson (far right) in Spell #7, 1979. I had glasses, so I put these flip-up sunglass visors on them. Gay and straight people would party together. Michael Gira, the frontman of the band Swans, was on the [first] cover. No one could believe that this B-actor was about to occupy the White House. Our club-hop starts with the titular Limelight, Gatien's firstand still favoriteNew York club. When AIDS hit, the lines were drawn: You were either straight or gay. Or wed go around to try to get breakfast from our friends, ringing doorbells to see who was up. I remember thinking, How long can this go on? I came here from Europe at age 22 in the 1960s already married and went to Park Avenue.) I remember the smell of the theaters so well popcorn and weed. Sep 13, 2019 - Restaurants that I ate at as a child..most no longer exist. I went from area to area of the performance space, onstage and offstage. The. What the hell?. As told to Kate Guadagnino,Elizabeth Gumport,Merrell Hambleton and Erin Sheehy. Ann Magnuson, actress and performance artist. 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. Bemelman's Bar at The Carlyle 128 Bars & Clubs Upper East Side Open now By M3088GQmarie Yes, the service is excellent, the atmosphere is lovely old fashioned, the music is good and the drinks are superb. Still, he found ladies night ultimately quite profitable. It was sort of 11 to 7. It was hard. You can walk down the. The artists Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham at their wedding, 1983. Like the Womens Christian Temperance Union. You could feel it turning, the tackiness beginning to creep in. Pretty girls in pajamas peeked in on my occupied space. It needs to be said that, technically, ladies nights were illegal in New York and had been so for quite a time. The whole thing finally fell into place in May of that year when I went on Tom Snyders show on NBC. There was always someone between apartments or someone coming to town who needed somewhere to stay. I will never forget the day, because I didnt tell my mother and father that I was going to make a record. People would bring me their videos to pop in. The people who were chic, the downtowners, pretty much just wore black that could instantly give you a look. Have a good day. His hands were in his pockets now. Then later, it became about getting a gig at Danceteria, Mudd Club they were all little milestone achievements. 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. We cant put the money out for something this queer. Then [writer and editor] Bob Colacello saw the project and said, Andy Warhol has a three-book deal with Houghton Mifflin. You could be a young person in Manhattan back then, Block recalls. 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. Nine oclock was the earliest you could go. They had gotten the idea that it was a very good headquarters. Williamsburg is like New York in the 70s. 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. [Wild Style] opened in 1983, [at the Embassy 3] on 47th Street and Broadway. We would get on at the ramp at Chambers Street and ski up to Spring Street to the Ear Inn. Columbia Pictures had given me this SX-70 camera at a conference, and I started documenting life in the Fire Island Pines [an area of Long Island known as a haven for gay life], which just seemed very important to me. It was very close to the Forward Building, which housed the important Yiddish newspaper. After shows at La MaMa, we would go to the gay bar on East Fourth Street and Second Ave. Peter lived on the absolute margins he never had anything. 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. This was every Friday. 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. It was the only Xerox machine below 14th Street, so every artist used it. Of course, it wasnt just rising rents, Mayor Giuliani, and smart phones that would kill ladies night on the Upper East Side. I remember being in someones loft it might have been [artist] Brian Hunts with a group of friends, watching the inauguration on a little black-and-white television. If it was a Thursday, Id be rushing to get all my work done, because that was the night I went dancing. 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. You could order a pizza anytime. Xerox art was big then, so people would come in to make photocopies and plaster them all over. 380 Lafayette St, New York . And the food at Genroku was really cheap, which was the operative word. Women would crowd around oil drums turned into tables and, while standing on sawdust floors, pound cheap beer and well liquor. We would go till 4 a.m. Hell, we would go past 4 a.m. I knew so many people in Harlem, I kept a second apartment in the Bronx, where I tried to be unseen. At one end of my block was J.G. Not only did we dress in wigs and dresses from 14th Street, but we took on personas to match. Todd didnt like the idea that I was doing a fanzine. And yet, Ski Bars five-year run from 1990 until 1995 remains so memorable that close-knit regulars, many with adult children by now, continue to maintain a Facebook group to swap stories, and uniquely 90s photos from the era. Its basically the most conscious, relatable record. Those were days when we ate meat just blissfully. We finished that scene around 6 oclock in the morning. I mean, thats when Brooklyn was Brooklyn, not some extension of the West Village or a place with good coffee. I was still riding a little bit high off of the Diana Ross album Diana, which had come out in 1980. Separated from the commotion of the day, I would stretch my own canvases and start to paint in the dormitorys common room. They were supposed to be 17 or 18. Ive always been a pretty good cook, and I could make these very good dinners in this tiny kitchen. The original flier for Kellys show at the Pyramid Club in 1981. Sometimes I would read him the weeks work. (And Ski Bar even opened a Ski Bar 2 pop-up at Hunter Mountain during the winter. One of many iconic Upper East Side eateries owned by the Santo Family Group . Write a Review! In retrospect, Bowie was ahead of the curve. 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. 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. Bars & Clubs Gay Bars. Sometimes wed have lunch. 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]. 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. East 80s, NY Restaurant Guide. Courtesy of John Kelly, photograph by John Dugdale, John Kelly, performance and visual artist. 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. Could you just call LL so she could just say hi? Everybody knew I knew all the rappers and everything. 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. Upstairs, the formally attired crowd (jackets required, gentlemen) dines on classic fare including the 21 Caesar Salad, Creamy Chicken Hash, and the ever-popular 21 Burger, which has been on the . The silence, as they say, was deafening. Thurston was a scholar. 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. So I flipped on the light and said, Good Morning! Back then no one came in and said, Let me see your bar menu, says Block. Best upper east side bars 80\\\'s in New York, NY. Mozart. 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). Its a great show. We stared at each other for a moment. 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. Steve Landiss photograph for fashion designer Norma Kamalis 1981 Sweats campaign. Within a few days, he came to my apartment, which is how I wound up doing the arrangements for Lets Dance.. I just wanted to be in New York. Then there were the rumors that they were going to make a movie of the play, and naturally we all thought, Oh my god, were gonna be in a movie! But when the time came to make that movie, they only took Denzel, Larry, and Adolph. Others would drop by out of curiosity and wonder what was on my mind. Even if it would attract the ladies, you couldnt give away an $8 IPA, a $15 Old Fashioned for free. Id go with Andy Warhol, or to dinner and then to Studio 54 afterwards. 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. There would be 200 people in there. 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. 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. Amura ($$) Japanese Menu Available. Every night was a huge passeggiata with people perusing the blankets. I figure its costing me two bucks to put a girl in my bar for two hours, Reynolds claimed at the time. . We called the area TriBeCa, but we laughed about it the same way we laughed at DUMBO. He had intended whatever conversation we were having to go in another direction. Their approach was direct and curt, no frills not self-consciously art-directed no frills, but Old Country, 19th-century no frills. Spanning the late 1980s through the late 1990s, . 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. Occasionally, a costumed employee they dubbed Jgerman would appear from the back wielding bottles of the potent German digestif in his hands, which he then free-poured into ladies mouths as the crowd chanted his theme song: Jgerman, Jgerman, if you cant drink it, no one can!, It was like feeding baby birds, recalls Capobianco. 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. Foursquare. This bar, deep inside the St. Regis on Fifth Avenue, is one of the few New York hotel bars whose . Plodding. I didnt want anything to be more important than the writing. So we were really supporting ourselves! I was part of the backpacker renaissance; you brought a backpack, so youd have a change of clothes. Photo by James & Karla Murray from their book NEW YORK NIGHTS After its appearance in Woody Allen's 1984 film, Broadway Danny Rose , Carnegie Deli became a classic. Once he came in and told us that something his wife had written was in error and she replied, Jimmy, you wrote your book. Load more. 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. 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. By 1984, Id put my kids in boarding school and left to live in Paris for five years. I tried to write every single day, first thing in the morning, 10 a.m. The venues didn't matter to me. No ID check, nothing. Richard Gere was a fixture, as well as Diana Ross and Princess Caroline. If you remember Flemings, this event is for you: Saturday, December 4 Fleming's Reunion Party 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 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. 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. Pierre Francillon and Richard Alvarez, both artists and friends of fashion designer Andre Walker, in 1983 at the Middle Collegiate Church, where Walker held a fashion show. Or worse. Peter had no small talk at all.