Spankys, a sports bar on 75th Street, attracted the young Republican crowd that had begun to invade the area. 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 . 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 remember the smell of the theaters so well popcorn and weed. There was a popular Puerto Rican dance club, Ochentas, and across the street from that was an Afro-Cuban spot, Club Broadway. I was sneaking out. Landis shot the models one afternoon on the Upper East Side. Other times, it literally meant all-you-could-drink, whatever you wanted to drink, on every single night of the week. There was a studio near First Avenue in the 50s that used a dance technique that was a modified version of Pilates. Within a few days, he came to my apartment, which is how I wound up doing the arrangements for Lets Dance.. But as soon as we walked in, nearly everyone stood and applauded. I couldnt believe he knew the same stuff I listened to as a kid in Greenwich Village. I was living with my parents in the Alfred E. Smith projects on the Lower East Sides waterfront. Or I would throw a party. (212) 861-2290. I was also a regular at this neighborhood salon presided over by a Mr. Steve, who wore big, Coke-bottle thick glasses and was practically blind. Do you even think about what it was like in Brooklyn? Denzel had just gotten St. Pretty girls in pajamas peeked in on my occupied space. Ave., NYC Alanna Heiss, founder of PS1 and the Clocktower Gallery. upper east side bars 1980s - Binuli.ge I dont even know if it was named AIDS at that point. Hip-hop artist Prince Whipper Whip of the hip-hop group Grand Wizard Theodore & the Fantastic Five at the Sparkle in the Bronx. Thats where youd run into people, share breakfast. One of many iconic Upper East Side eateries owned by the Santo Family Group . It didnt have a name. Jumbo-sized martini glasses smeared with ruby lipstick. It was in this desolate area between TriBeCa and Chinatown, and I knew every alley. It was a restaurant a modest place, like an Italian restaurant but really it was an actors hangout. I had no reason to stay awake or to fall asleep. Peter lived on the absolute margins he never had anything. So I call LL up and I let her speak to him for a few minutes. Patsy Cline. Veselka was the go-to place to eat and get cake the lemon bundt or the mohn. Elaine's - Wikipedia Chloe 81 Night Clubs Dance Clubs Bars 6.7 Website Amenities: (212) 677-0067 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! But those deals enticed 22-year-olds to get out of their apartments. It was sort of 11 to 7. Shan among its residents. At 11 to 12, Id had a nine-hour day. I did shows in there at night, including the first solo show David Salle ever had. 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. I never wore gold jewelry I didnt want to be a target. As told to Caroline Bankoff,Heather Corcoran,Nancy Hass and M.H. It must have been late spring of 1981. There are a lot of places to eat eggs and pancakes in the middle of the day on the Upper East Side. Our club-hop starts with the titular Limelight, Gatien's firstand still favoriteNew York club. There was an interest beyond becoming ladies who lunch. Everyone talks about the 1970s as being the birth of feminism, but for me, the 80s were really about feminism in practical use. My apartment was four stories up, and I got a place on the floor below for Kim Gordon. I invited him to dinner. 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. When he got sick, we were in a downward spiral for a year and a half. I could wake up in the middle of the night and hear his typewriter going. Separated from the commotion of the day, I would stretch my own canvases and start to paint in the dormitorys common room. 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. Wednesdays and Thursdays were Ultimate Ladies Night with free Margaritas all evening, not to mention a gratis taco bar during happy hour. 1442 1st Avenue, New York, NY . 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]. We blasted Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson. Howard was Lili LaLeen, a German film actress in a vintage Mary McFadden. 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. Wheres Joe? Eventually youd realize that he died, and his family came and put his artwork in a dumpster. This morning was no different than any other. The original flier for Kellys show at the Pyramid Club in 1981. 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.. 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. We would go till 4 a.m. Hell, we would go past 4 a.m. I was still riding a little bit high off of the Diana Ross album Diana, which had come out in 1980. All the music [in the atelier on 125th Street] came from the VCR. The idea of hip-hop hadnt really gelled. Usually Id take the bus down to Mickeys [Chinese Chance] at 1 University Place, where Julian Schnabel was the cook. Id work for 12 hours straight, prepping for my show at Barbara Gladstone Gallery. Rapping and fashion were being born at the same time. 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. Upper East Side - New York - The Infatuation And Bowie had no idea that was my background. Galleries and museums didnt exhibit their work at that time. Beware salivating yuppie swells there for Ladies Night, the magazine wrote (fondly) of Mannys Car Wash, a Chicago-style blues club on East 87th Street. We would sit at this coffee table and listen to records for an hour. The Club Kids, led by impresario Michael Alig, turned places like the Limelight into backdrops of drug- and techno-induced drama, while live music dens like the Village Gate presented stages to. When I first moved to the city, there was a garbage strike. 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. And yet, plenty of ladies were also against them. New Yorkers and Their '80s Routines Block by Block 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. It was at Avenue A and St. Marks Place, but the windows looked out on an air shaft, not the park. This kind of activity is highly socially ordered: You dont barge in on other people, thats all part of it. Sometimes wed have lunch. The weekend that it happened, I got a call at 2 oclock in the morning from the owner of the theater. There were others: the Venus, and down in the 14th Street area, the Variety Photoplays, a Spanish one called The Jefferson, The Metropol [Metropolitan]. Many of its bartenders have gone on to open their own places. Bars would battle to get people in the doors., Then a bar on First Avenue, Far Out Lounge, came up with a gimmick that would change everything, with the ultimate idea to draw in the skirts that bring in the suits.. It was just shattering, but of course I had to pretend that this was the surprise that I had brought my board to see. There was a thing I did every Friday night because my boyfriend [now husband, artist Carroll Dunham] worked at Time magazine, so I wasnt out looking for guys. People have bidding wars over apartments that cost millions of dollars. Elsewhere, so he was going back and forth between doing the TV show and the play. Thats what happened at Club 57 a lot: We told people, This is the theme. 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. 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. Its basically the most conscious, relatable record. Theyre exploiting women by using them to attract men, claimed its spokeswoman, Daveda Copeland. I met David Bowie in 1982 at the Continental on West 25th Street, which had just opened. Block had learned of high-octane fish bowl cocktails during his brief Brother Jimmys stint and Ski Bar served its own versions with names like the Worldcup. If it was a Thursday, Id be rushing to get all my work done, because that was the night I went dancing. 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. I got up at anywhere from 3 to 5 in the morning and worked as long as I could. Did you come to see the show? Where To Drink On The Upper East Side - The Infatuation I would drink quite a lot of wine. 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. 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. 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.. People divided themselves into camps based on which one they favored I liked Odessa better, but Id go to both. There was a place called Columbus, on Columbus Avenue and 69th Street. Id go with Andy Warhol, or to dinner and then to Studio 54 afterwards. I spent a decade in New York City like that. Load more. But I had no idea what I was photographing. It made the general public aware that people were dying in Brooklyn, in Harlem, in the Bronx. The conversation was very interesting. A cracked bathroom mirror reflecting a sink full of discarded puffs, eyeliner brushes and trays of blush. The oppressively hot and always jam-packed Ski Bar was so crazy The New York Times compared its atmosphere to that of a beer commercial, and nightly there were sweaty singles dancing and drinking with unbridled enthusiasm. Her upstairs neighbor was artist Dan Graham, who I knew through the artist-poet Vito Acconci. 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. How the Original TGI Fridays Helped Create the Singles Bar - InsideHook East Side Extra: Footloose: A virtual walk through the 1980s Upper East 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. I didnt know what I was doing. Sometimes I didnt eat for two days. There was always someone between apartments or someone coming to town who needed somewhere to stay. By the end of the relationship, I was living there. We liked to get there early, which the club promoters loved because wed get the party started. Harrys Hula Hut had bamboo walls, palm trees, and Nerf basketball available, plus all-you-can-drink beer. I was eating very healthfully, which wasnt easy then, seeking out the few macrobiotic restaurants there were. What New York Was Like in the Early '80s Hour by Hour It was [at the Pyramid Club] just one night, October of 1982, before the floodgates opened. We did a deep dive into the most avant-garde, atonal jazz. Anyone can read what you share. If you just wanted to grab a sandwich, youd go to Burger Heaven. They called it rocking early breaking, essentially. At Elaines, for instance, you would find people Elaine was floating. It was social, the Upper East Side ladies. There was a lot of crossover, because ours would go to 6 or 7 in the morning some god-awful time. It made me immobile. It was a total nexus. What are some legendary restaurants in New York City in the 70s - Quora . People like Jean-Michel [Basquiat] would come in, who was somebody you knew from Tier 3 and the Mudd Club; someone your age. This bar, deep inside the St. Regis on Fifth Avenue, is one of the few New York hotel bars whose . $5 all-you-can-drink that was my bar menu., 2014 - 2023 VinePair Inc. Made In NYC, Bartenders: Now's Your Chance To Experience Barbados. I 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. There were no movie theaters, bookstores, galleries or photocopy shops, so my entrepreneurial idea, which failed, was to open one, Chelsea Copy. So in April we held the Rites of Spring Fertility Bacchanal. When I was 15, I was in the clubs. May 6, 2009. Many of the bars of this era were, in fact, themed, and sometimes cheesily so. 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. I lived above a topless club at White and Church. A chance encounter with David Bowie at a downtown nightclub. At the end of the night I would walk all the way home. I worked part-time for gallerist Annina Nosei. Drunk patrons would dance on the bar top, well before Coyote Ugly, which would open in January of 1993, had popularized such shenanigans. A guy in a black cocktail dress teetering precariously on the sill of an open window in a rear apartment (Room 410) of the Chelsea Hotel, screaming into the night. We were just taken with each other. The old downtown art scene was floundering, while some people, like Robert Mapplethorpe, had risen. Wed bring the coffee back to the lot and keep filming. 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. A group of artists, friends and a few colleagues, including Marcia Tucker, the founder of the New Museum, demolished what remained of a former meatpacking company and converted it into JAMs new space. You can walk down the. It was chaired by Brendan Gill, a great theater critic and architecture writer. I was very attached to the Madison Avenue Bookshop, because of my Harvard connection to its owner, Arthur Lehman Loeb, and its excellence. The Best Historic Bars in Manhattan - PUNCH 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. I met Peter Hujar through Susan Sontag. 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. So we were really supporting ourselves! And then eventually some surface decoration with tucks and treatment Id take the fabric and just sew in any direction. When Flashdance came out in 1983, Paramount put me up in the Carlyle Hotel to do promotion. So were in this abandoned lot on a corner of 11th Avenue, somewhere in the high 40s or low 50s and not far from the old deserted elevated slate railroad that became the Highline. 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. Afternoon workouts. 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. Four days a week, I was studying at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute down on 15th Street. I tended to feel particularly safe in the theaters. The gallerys not open so youll have to come back. Adolph would regale us with stories. I would go to these obscure classes around the city that were mostly for dancers. There was likewise Brother Jimmys, a Southern BBQ joint that served overproof punch out of rubber garbage pails. And Silk Road. I just wanted to be in New York. 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 . It wasnt a rich peoples restaurant; it was a restaurant for people Elaine happened to like. It was run by very old Jewish folks. But I didnt feel super cool or anything. Xerox art was big then, so people would come in to make photocopies and plaster them all over. Our 10 Best NYC Restaurants of the Last Two Centuries Owner Sean Fleming's band was among the many popular bands that would perform there. I committed the tapes to memory; I would do them over and over. I lived on the quiet end of Hollis, Queens. Flemings Reunion Party - MurphGuide: NYC Bar Guide All of the cabbies would line up there to get eggs and bacon late at night. When I really started hanging out in Manhattan, the primary place for my crew was Rock Steady Park [Happy Warrior Playground] on 98th and Amsterdam. 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.