They are not obliged to talk to anyone. 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. At 11 to 12, Id had a nine-hour day. And when she gave me the phone back, she went into [hysterics]. Money was secondary to being able to have this playground we could create. And if I missed it, I felt really bad. To me it was all an art project. It was on 35th and Fifth, and it was a place where the sushi came around on a conveyor belt. Adolph would regale us with stories. And thats why Block thinks youll never again see an era like the early 1990s on the Upper East Side. So I call LL up and I let her speak to him for a few minutes. People divided themselves into camps based on which one they favored I liked Odessa better, but Id go to both. Once he came in and told us that something his wife had written was in error and she replied, Jimmy, you wrote your book. The writer Gay Taleses social calendar for October 1983. And then we had Robert Rauschenberg, a rascal and a great man. There were all these conspiracy theories. I remember this night in particular because of another guest, Jack Henry Abbott, who was living in a halfway house a couple blocks away. I said, Im very happy for you, youre selling a lot of tickets. In the 60s, it was only open to the high class and the rich, like authors up on the Upper East Side. Its a great show. We stared at each other for a moment. But at midnight, yes, I was often out. Spankys, a sports bar on 75th Street, attracted the young Republican crowd that had begun to invade the area. An unpublished male nude Polaroid from 1981 by photographer Tom Bianchi. By the end of the relationship, I was living there. Stunning Photos From 1990s Favorite NYC Nightclub - Patch At the end of the night I would walk all the way home. You could work, then not work for a while, get by. And we had Tina Chow, who had such unearthly beauty she would come into a room and just drift. There were very few artists there. I would get back home [from school] at a decent hour, four in the afternoon. And they were there illegally. I couldnt believe he knew the same stuff I listened to as a kid in Greenwich Village. We used to have a TV with a VCR on at all times, playing MTV and the guys coming up. Sometimes you would cry, but most of the time you were just stunned, like it wasnt real. The silence, as they say, was deafening. Can you come back later? It was a very different kind of neighborhood from the one I grew up in in Harlem just starting to be gentrified. Thats pretty good.. 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. upper east side bars 1980s - Binuli.ge Other times, it literally meant all-you-could-drink, whatever you wanted to drink, on every single night of the week. Sorry.. Flemings Reunion Party - MurphGuide: NYC Bar Guide The ultimate epitome of this wild, boozing-on-the-cheap era, Ski Bar, was located on Second Ave between 94th and 95th. Taylor Mead had a running tab at multiple bars. Studio 54 was over after the owners, Steve [Rubell] and Ian [Schrager], got arrested in 1980, so we all migrated to the Mudd Club, on White Street. 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. It became a whole sh*t show, recalls Keith Block. The area was really no-mans land. 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. 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. The restaurants where mobsters gathered, ate and got murdered 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. It wasnt a rich peoples restaurant; it was a restaurant for people Elaine happened to like. The Penrose. Rich New York in the late 90s | Vanity Fair I didnt know anything. We blasted Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson. Elsewhere, so he was going back and forth between doing the TV show and the play. 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. 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.. When our gallery, Gracie Mansion, started, both Gracie and I had other jobs, so we would switch off. You could feel it turning, the tackiness beginning to creep in. Giuliani sending his goons around to raid things. Not only did Mr. Brown come on with me, but Muhammad Ali did, too. I was one of the champions of the golden age of promiscuity, though that all ended with AIDS. What New York Was Like in the Early '80s Hour by Hour They were relatively small, rundown theaters; they tended to have a fair amount of drug use going on. There was a lot of crossover, because ours would go to 6 or 7 in the morning some god-awful time. They were on 51st or 52nd between Fifth and Madison. I remember thinking, How long can this go on? Id walk to Cooper Union, where I was teaching. 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. 1442 1st Avenue, New York, NY . Then you checked to see if there was anything in the theater papers for auditions. And the rest of us were kinda like, Oh man, what? Al Sharpton (right) backstage at Madison Square Garden on June 11, 1974. Do you even think about what it was like in Brooklyn? Photograph: Paul Wagtouicz. When me and Run would go to each others houses and rap together, we would go into the attic. It was a total nexus. 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. Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth performing at CBGB in 1983. He was in his preppy stage in those days, wearing button-downs, which really is hard to imagine now. 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 didnt smoke or drink, and when you dont do those things, you need an outlet. 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. I was kind of tomboyish, but also pretty poor. A crack den lined with books. 1. I would drink quite a lot of wine. Hear Kim Gordon recount her first impressions of New York City: People say that Manhattan was dirty and dangerous in the early 80s, and I just have to laugh. There is no limit to it. It was very close to the Forward Building, which housed the important Yiddish newspaper. Miller, Edited by Kate Guadagnino and Thessaly La Force. We called the area TriBeCa, but we laughed about it the same way we laughed at DUMBO. It was really like a combination of living theater and installation art, very communal. One day, I was walking uptown to an appointment just before noon, and coming toward me was Robert Duvall. Nobody was talking to him, probably because they didnt recognize him. Maxi Cohen, Area, 1985, Ladies Rooms Around The World, Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio and Chambers Fine Art. 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 . So we were really supporting ourselves! By the time midnight came around and I knew my parents were sleeping, I would sneak out the window down onto the porch. When Flashdance came out in 1983, Paramount put me up in the Carlyle Hotel to do promotion. Todd didnt like the idea that I was doing a fanzine. We always had coke, and many guests brought their own. Four days a week, I was studying at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute down on 15th Street. Then we hit the clubs: Sound Factory, the Roxy, the Fun House. Many of the bars of this era were, in fact, themed, and sometimes cheesily so. One time a girl a teenager, maybe 15, 16 came in with her dad. Like Geronimos Bamba Bay Cafe (a.k.a. $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. If I were going out that night, Id go see Garren to fix my hair. The straight clubs became very, very straight. Book with OpenTable. But it did make me very, very moody there were a lot of underground clubs, and they wouldnt jump off till 1 a.m. He needed someone he trusted. Originally part of the Pillsbury Corp., the restaurant was founded in 1976. The whole thing finally fell into place in May of that year when I went on Tom Snyders show on NBC. 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. They would shy away with confused expressions, whispering to their friends. 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. This kind of activity is highly socially ordered: You dont barge in on other people, thats all part of it. May 6, 2009. That's what Bennigan's, an Irish-themed bar and grill, offered in the 1980s. Remembering the Lost Gay Bars of NYC - PAPER We were then escorted to a quiet table in the rear by the smiling proprietress herself, Ms. Elaine Kaufman, and joined by her good friend, the gregarious publicist Bobby Zarem, a city slicker born in Savannah, Georgia, who told Mr. Carter: Your brother Billy once called me a Yankee because Savannah is north of Plains. Norman Mailer wasnt there that night. I had no student loans and the housing was still affordable. Here, notable locals revisit their routes and routines, from lunch on the Upper East to nighttime sojourns to then-emerging neighborhoods like TriBeCa. I tried to write every single day, first thing in the morning, 10 a.m. And I got in trouble because I didnt get home until like 1 or 2 in the morning. 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. He was like the Jimmy Fallon or Trevor Noah of that era. It didnt have a name. There are a lot of places to eat eggs and pancakes in the middle of the day on the Upper East Side. Thats what happened at Club 57 a lot: We told people, This is the theme. But I had no idea what I was photographing. 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. I was living with my parents in the Alfred E. Smith projects on the Lower East Sides waterfront. 26 places sorted by traveler favorites Clear all filters 1. Wed bring the coffee back to the lot and keep filming. draw in the skirts that bring in the suits. You simply traveled to where things were happening. People used to say, The East Village will be gone when theres a Gap, and then, in the late 80s, one opened on the corner of St. Marks and Second Avenue. 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. 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. You can walk down the. It was all exposed wood and brick, and it had a tiny fireplace, a futon, my books, a sink and a stove.