. Still, he found ladies night ultimately quite profitable. 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. 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. At that time, Chelsea was unexplored territory. Could you just call LL so she could just say hi? Everybody knew I knew all the rappers and everything. And I got in trouble because I didnt get home until like 1 or 2 in the morning. 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. If I were going out that night, Id go see Garren to fix my hair. A lot of the alternative spaces Franklin Furnace, A-Space had music, too. The Roxy was on Fridays, when the party was Wheels of Steel, which initially started at Negril in the East Village. There is a two drink minimum. Other times, it literally meant all-you-could-drink, whatever you wanted to drink, on every single night of the week. 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. Brandy's Piano Bar 68 Bars & Clubs Gay Bars Upper East Side Open now I never wore gold jewelry I didnt want to be a target. 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. Everything was different for me. 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. By ajordahl123. The liquor laws werent as strict Ski Bar didnt have to have a kitchen nor serve any food and rent was cheap, both for bar space and the nearby apartments. 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. I knew running back up the stairs was a bad idea. And yet, plenty of ladies were also against them.
Remembering the Lost Gay Bars of NYC - PAPER Its until you pass out.. 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. So we were really supporting ourselves! The infamous Upper East Side murder has yet to fade from public memory. The straight clubs became very, very straight. That is, until 2008 when Bennigan's went bankrupt. Before that it had been pot. Chloe 81 Night Clubs Dance Clubs Bars 6.7 Website Amenities: (212) 677-0067 Carina Finn July 6, 2022. If it was a Thursday, Id be rushing to get all my work done, because that was the night I went dancing. Thats where youd run into people, share breakfast. 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. It made me immobile. We were very, very thin. No one could believe that this B-actor was about to occupy the White House. Amura ($$) Japanese Menu Available. We would sit at this coffee table and listen to records for an hour. 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). 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. Le Relais, on Madison and 63rd, was more everyone my age and everyone from Europe. 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. Everyone was very excited. He was the voice of every commercial on the radio or television at that time, and the richest among us. And if we didnt have the money, wed go to the matre d it was absurd because this restaurant was in the middle of the slums and say, Can we pay you tomorrow? and theyd let us. We used to have a TV with a VCR on at all times, playing MTV and the guys coming up. But this was every week. 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. Darryl McDaniels, musician and member of Run-DMC. Its a great show. We stared at each other for a moment. We finished that scene around 6 oclock in the morning. As soon as he opened [his own place] I started working there, alongside Sara Driver [the filmmaker and partner of Jim Jarmusch]. And why I got out.. And the rest of us were kinda like, Oh man, what? Caribbean Restaurants Restaurants. You couldnt get people to go to a club before midnight. 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. Not all these bars were necessarily beloved. 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.
Yorkville, Manhattan photos from the 1980s - Alamedainfo He would maybe drink half a glass of wine. The loft was across the street from Castelli [Gallery]. Cities . Landis shot the models one afternoon on the Upper East Side.
16 Best Upper East Side Restaurants - Eater NY 1567 2nd Ave, New York, NY Broadway 96 [Club Broadway] was more geared to black and Latino youth and that was definitely a wilder place. Next door to my apartment on East Eighth and Avenue C was the Green Oasis Community Garden, and I got involved with that. Hed just been released from prison, and his prison memoir, In the Belly of the Beast, had been published that week. He had intended whatever conversation we were having to go in another direction. The object was to keep stitching no matter what happened to the fabric.
East 80s, NY Restaurant Guide - Menus and Reviews - MenuPix New York City More likely than not, Id have to go downtown to the garment center to get some fabric or trimming. Id dance until about two in the morning and then Id go back to work. A crack den lined with books. 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. When we went out it was to perform. I never saw that before and hed never experienced that. Then our leading lady, Susan Berman, broke her leg, and we had to wait for her to get out of the cast. The early 80s were sort of the beginning of serious gentrification. Whether you were struggling, successful or just plain lucky, these stories remind us that in these years New York City dirty, dangerous, derelict, dazzling was the only place to be. 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. This kind of activity is highly socially ordered: You dont barge in on other people, thats all part of it. Police barricades up and down Second Avenue. There were very few artists there. Today the Upper West Side is considered one of the richest, cleanest, and most expensive places to live in New York City. Brandy's Piano Bar. 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. 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 was still riding a little bit high off of the Diana Ross album Diana, which had come out in 1980. Drunk patrons would dance on the bar top, well before Coyote Ugly, which would open in January of 1993, had popularized such shenanigans. Youd see people that you hadnt seen in months in the street with KS [Kaposis sarcoma] lesions; people would just disappear. That completely opened my mind.
These 1980s Restaurants Didn't Stand the Test of Time - Eat This Not That But at midnight, yes, I was often out. 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. 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. (Never let on to a dog youre afraid of him, my Uncle Charlie would say.) Points of interest include Central Park, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Guggenheim, The Whitney Museum, Hunter College, Gracie Mansion and Carl Schurz Park. I invited him to dinner. Wed spend hours getting our outfits together buying stuff at Canal Plastics Center, stapling photo booth pictures onto our jackets. Delmonico's, 21-23 William Street (1831-1923, intermittently thereafter) In 1831 Swiss brothers John and Peter Delmonico founded the city's first .
Iconic Restaurants in NYC That Have Closed - Untapped New York It didnt have a name. Open in Google Maps. I was at the same place I am now, 222 Bowery. 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 could feel the presence of someone in the room. Id walk to Cooper Union, where I was teaching. 1442 1st Avenue, New York, NY . Spanning the late 1980s through the late 1990s, . When I crossed the bridge, I had my Saturday Night Fever moment the city was for the taking. In those days, there wasnt any downtown, so life was much easier. You could be a young person in Manhattan back then, Block recalls. I got up at anywhere from 3 to 5 in the morning and worked as long as I could. At night, if I was sitting around and wanted to amuse myself, Id walk down to Columbus and say hello. Elsewhere, so he was going back and forth between doing the TV show and the play. A restaurant my wife and I definitely did not frequent was Elaines. And then he asked me again: Dap, whats she doing? (By the time we filmed Desperately Seeking Susan in 84, New York was already beginning to become more gentrified.) There was a theater called the Capri that I went to a lot. 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. There was always someone between apartments or someone coming to town who needed somewhere to stay. Sam [Samuel L. Jackson] and I bought a brownstone in Harlem around 1981. Hed come around maybe at 7 oclock. There was a great camaraderie. Nobody was talking to him, probably because they didnt recognize him. JAM gallery founder Linda Goode Bryant, circa 1981-82. Money was secondary to being able to have this playground we could create. I slept when I was exhausted and awoke when I was refreshed. Steve Landiss photograph for fashion designer Norma Kamalis 1981 Sweats campaign. It felt like there was all this dangerous energy. I tended to feel particularly safe in the theaters. And Dynasty. Ive never gotten over Dynasty. And then people started dying. Here are our favorites. 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. His name opened every door for me. I was just out of high school. One of my responses was to just keep working. 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. This bar, deep inside the St. Regis on Fifth Avenue, is one of the few New York hotel bars whose . Youd think he would have been the most outrageous-looking person there, but he looked like a businessman. And Bowie had no idea that was my background. As told to Caroline Bankoff,Heather Corcoran,Nancy Hass and M.H. Those were days when we ate meat just blissfully. 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. 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. You were constantly on the phone: Did you see this in the paper?
East Village 1980s | Ephemeral New York You couldnt do nothing stupid or bad because your friends mother was your mother, too. It wasnt actually the best place to hear or see bands, but it was always exciting. 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. You did a lot of the auditions immediately. Load more. We just called it The Bar, which morphed into Ze Bar, like with a fake French accent. I was breaking up with somebody a long, slow breakup. If you remember Flemings, this event is for you: Saturday, December 4 Fleming's Reunion Party
Where To Drink On The Upper East Side - The Infatuation He slowed and turned around: Yeah, you too.. And the food at Genroku was really cheap, which was the operative word. Write a Review! One day, I was walking uptown to an appointment just before noon, and coming toward me was Robert Duvall. 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. Maxi Cohen, Area, 1985, Ladies Rooms Around The World, Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio and Chambers Fine Art. 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. People would drop change in your hands, turn their heads when you tried to kiss them. It changed everything. I mean, thats when Brooklyn was Brooklyn, not some extension of the West Village or a place with good coffee. hip-hop open mic nights and more than a few not-entirely-cool bars around the Upper East Side. Thurston Moore would take me to see hardcore groups like Black Flag. And shoulder pads. 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. 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. Wendy Wild made magic mushroom punch. 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. But where was the battlefield? Once he came in and told us that something his wife had written was in error and she replied, Jimmy, you wrote your book. At one end of my block was J.G. Then later, it became about getting a gig at Danceteria, Mudd Club they were all little milestone achievements. Nan Goldin was a block up, and William Burroughs lived downstairs. They were relatively small, rundown theaters; they tended to have a fair amount of drug use going on. I went from area to area of the performance space, onstage and offstage. The other was he wouldnt say anything, just [shrug] that meant it was a failure. I was preparing that summer to start my first semester at St. Johns University. Sometimes it could just be too blasting. It was around the corner from another tiny spot called Chandalier. 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.. Having had an alcoholic mother, he did not like being around people who drank much. It was packed every night; it won the Pulitzer Prize that year. Youd have Chinese opera and then some kind of Russian circus act and then a punk band and then a drag queen. NR is a cocktail bar on the Upper East Side that serves inventive drinks and solid ramen. 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. By 1984, Id put my kids in boarding school and left to live in Paris for five years. Even though every single record Id put out up until then was gold, platinum or multiple platinum, Diana was the first time Id ever worked with a big star. Everyone writes that I was his tour manager, but thats not what it was. 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. There were very few places to work out back then. Or his family didnt come, and the landlord put his work in a dumpster. 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. And then off wed go! Michael Gira, the frontman of the band Swans, was on the [first] cover. Or worse. Veselka was the go-to place to eat and get cake the lemon bundt or the mohn. We were just taken with each other. Some of them were open 24 hours a day, or they were closed maybe four hours a day for cleaning. I didnt smoke or drink, and when you dont do those things, you need an outlet. Up the street from my apartment was 8 B.C., a club run by two friends of mine. Book with OpenTable.
The restaurants where mobsters gathered, ate and got murdered In 1981, I suggested a bacchanal a night of pagan merriment as spring was coming. 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. 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. 1. Everyone associates me with Jesse Jackson, but actually James Brown is the person I consider most like a mentor. Four days a week, I was studying at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute down on 15th Street.
New Yorkers and Their '80s Routines Block by Block 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. Wednesdays and Thursdays were Ultimate Ladies Night with free Margaritas all evening, not to mention a gratis taco bar during happy hour. Usually Id take the bus down to Mickeys [Chinese Chance] at 1 University Place, where Julian Schnabel was the cook. Belgian, Crepes, Wine Bar, Coffee Shop Menu Available. (212) 861-2290. James Brown and Ali because of them, I basically became a made guy. They were more McDermotts friends, because my friends were working in fashion and they were like, Oh, get a job, bitch! There were others: the Venus, and down in the 14th Street area, the Variety Photoplays, a Spanish one called The Jefferson, The Metropol [Metropolitan]. Or wed go around to try to get breakfast from our friends, ringing doorbells to see who was up. The whole neighborhood was a lower-middle class suburban area. 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. 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. 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. Open in Google Maps. My sense of time was completely distorted. Once I saw someone selling a broken light bulb. This was a moment in Manhattan history that had never really been seen before and hasnt been seen since. 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. I made a deal for him to do a cheapo job by trading a Brice Marden plus $10,000. The silence, as they say, was deafening.
New York City's Most Classic Restaurants - Town & Country The landlord turned off the plumbing, so wed defecate into garbage bags and throw them out the window. 2. Fleming's was a fun Irish bar on the upper east side in the 1980s & 1990s, up until it closed in 1994. It was sort of 11 to 7. I would stay in the clubs, but I wouldnt dance. To me, the 1980s were incredibly liberating.
Rich New York in the late 90s | Vanity Fair Hearing hip-hop on the street, minimalist new music, free jazz it all added to this fabric that was a landscape. Sometimes that meant dispensing a free keg or two of Bud Light until it ran out during a traditional off-night, like Tuesday or Wednesday. Many of its bartenders have gone on to open their own places. To me it was all an art project. 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. Whats she doing now? She was like [hyperventilating]. 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. 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. Im a child of the Midwestern upper-middle class. I had to be at the theater by 7 oclock so I could start my process and get ready before half-hour call. 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. Thats pretty good.. It was a small scene, people like writer Stephen Saban, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel [Basquiat] and Kenny Scharf. David McDermott and Peter McGough, artists. 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 would often wake up in the middle of the night as the city slept. It was all very small town-y. Hear Eric Goode remember when he found out about AIDS: I enrolled at the Parsons School of Design in 1982. 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. I came here from Europe at age 22 in the 1960s already married and went to Park Avenue.) I knew so many people in Harlem, I kept a second apartment in the Bronx, where I tried to be unseen. I returned to New York in 81 after 10 years as an expat. The title was an intentional lure the work wasnt about Grace Kelly, but the painter William Schwedler. An unpublished male nude Polaroid from 1981 by photographer Tom Bianchi. Hes a Leo all the Leos I know love history. I asked the kids to demonstrate what theyd been doing. But as soon as we walked in, nearly everyone stood and applauded. The bathroom of Area nightclub, which was located on 157 Hudson Street and opened in 1983. It was just shattering, but of course I had to pretend that this was the surprise that I had brought my board to see. Their approach was direct and curt, no frills not self-consciously art-directed no frills, but Old Country, 19th-century no frills. But those deals enticed 22-year-olds to get out of their apartments. If they didnt give us any food, wed go off to the next person. Pizza with Duck Sausage wins quick stardom. The all-you-can-drink deals just dont happen these days, because the rents are so high, says Block. 1982 Having introduced nouvelle cuisine at Ma Maison in Los Angeles, Chef Wolfgang Puck presents "California cuisine" to patrons of his new chic-casual Sunset Strip restaurant, Spago. Wheres Joe? Eventually youd realize that he died, and his family came and put his artwork in a dumpster. Then, I didnt have the kind of formal board that one would today. I had just moved the gallery to Franklin Street in TriBeCa from West 57th Street. Everyone I knew hated Reagan and couldnt wait for him to get out of office. Hear Rosie Perez talk about her first time at CBGB: Six days a week I arrived every morning between 7:30 a.m. and 8 a.m. East 80s, NY Restaurant Guide. We would get on at the ramp at Chambers Street and ski up to Spring Street to the Ear Inn. It was a walk-up. It was kind of a raffish crossroads. 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. I just wanted to be in New York. Hey, I said. 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. 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. There is no limit to it. In the early 80s, I had a great loft in the meatpacking district, which at that point was full of meat hanging on hooks and blood running in the streets. I tried to write every single day, first thing in the morning, 10 a.m. Courtesy of John Kelly, photograph by John Dugdale, John Kelly, performance and visual artist. The people who were chic, the downtowners, pretty much just wore black that could instantly give you a look. The gallerys not open so youll have to come back. 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! This was our morning ritual: Wed wake up, and if we had $5 on us wed go to the 103 Restaurant on Second Avenue and Sixth Street. It was before he was onstage and all that; he was just starting out. And when she gave me the phone back, she went into [hysterics]. There was a popular Puerto Rican dance club, Ochentas, and across the street from that was an Afro-Cuban spot, Club Broadway. It had no closets, so somebody put up a bar so I could hang clothes. This was every Friday. It was in this desolate area between TriBeCa and Chinatown, and I knew every alley. 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. His show was on at 1 a.m., after Johnny Carson.
The 10 Best Bars On The Upper East Side - Culture Trip They were all drunk and wasted and they were happy.