We considered the food too depressingly awful. I would be coming back around 4, 4:30, 5 oclock sometimes 6. I had to be at the theater by 7 oclock so I could start my process and get ready before half-hour call. In a letter about her trip, she wrote, When pages needed to be retyped, Jimmy did the retyping. People would drop change in your hands, turn their heads when you tried to kiss them. And they said, Yeah, you can have that they werent even thinking about it. The whole thing finally fell into place in May of that year when I went on Tom Snyders show on NBC. 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. I worked part-time for gallerist Annina Nosei. A lot of the alternative spaces Franklin Furnace, A-Space had music, too. I was like, Oh cool, youre doing art too? Bands would put up fliers all over SoHo; there were wheat-paste fliers everywhere. Home; . 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. My first photo lab was called Hy Photo. Spanning the late 1980s through the late 1990s, . Across the street from my apartment was the McBurney Y.M.C.A., so that was my gym, and halfway down the block was something called the Squat Theatre, home to an avant-garde Hungarian troupe, and kind of a drug spot. Now nothings open after 11. Nine oclock was the earliest you could go. The apartment was big, but the hall was in very bad repair, or at least looked it. It was raw: It had been a paper storage facility. I could feel the presence of someone in the room. 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 was still riding a little bit high off of the Diana Ross album Diana, which had come out in 1980. 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. What the hell?. The elevated West Side Highway, meanwhile, was a place you could ski. 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. The front window was a queer Mount Rushmore, with the heavyweights looking out onto the street: Rene Ricard, Bill Rice, Peter Hujar, Paul Thek. One place I went to a lot was the St. Marks Baths. Thats why I started wearing silver hoop earrings. Id make sure everything was in place and see what the new orders were. I didnt know anything. Nobody was talking to him, probably because they didnt recognize him. There was a great camaraderie. In the '80s, 25 East 61st st. was home to B. Harris & Sons, jeweler to the stars! I saw Jody Watley on television, and I was like, They dont steal silver, Im going to wear those!. It wasnt a rich peoples restaurant; it was a restaurant for people Elaine happened to like. Arent the both of us up early, I said. Bronwyn Thomas, she was like happy feet on her toes. So in April we held the Rites of Spring Fertility Bacchanal. 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 was kind of tomboyish, but also pretty poor. Not surprisingly, it worked. They paid me like a tenth of what they paid me to do the acting, and it became my whole life. At night, if I was sitting around and wanted to amuse myself, Id walk down to Columbus and say hello. By 1981, I was no longer the manager at [the East Village performance space] Club 57, but I still helped out and performed there a lot. I went over and started chatting with him, and we became completely engrossed in this conversation about jazz. 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. Id get to the gallery late afternoon. I would just sit there. It was social, the Upper East Side ladies. And we had Tina Chow, who had such unearthly beauty she would come into a room and just drift. Richard Gere was a fixture, as well as Diana Ross and Princess Caroline. And yet, plenty of ladies were also against them. He goes, What the hell are you doing to my theater? There is a two drink minimum. We just called it The Bar, which morphed into Ze Bar, like with a fake French accent. 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! Howard was Lili LaLeen, a German film actress in a vintage Mary McFadden. The quiet and space afforded clarity. The early 80s were sort of the beginning of serious gentrification. When our gallery, Gracie Mansion, started, both Gracie and I had other jobs, so we would switch off. The rental apartment upstairs from my mother, with the same layout was recently listed for $9900.00 a month. The night was such a hoot we tried to reprise it a few times, but the tenor slid from hilarity to melodrama, and, like so many ecstasies of the era, soon just crumbled and fell apart. I had reached 30 and was having to face how hard it was going to be. I suppose I should have loved New York; things were very good for me. 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. Alanna Heiss, founder of PS1 and the Clocktower Gallery. While her friend Sara explained, We dont even like this place. I would take my work from that lab it was already mounted with dimensions like 48 by 72 inches, 40 by 60 inches carry it to the E train, down the stairs, then get off at Canal and carry it down to Leonard and up my four flights of stairs. Hey, I said. When we went out it was to perform. Some of them were lying about their age and I knew it, but I didnt care. Thats where I first met [the late street-style photographer] Bill Cunningham, I think. Maxi Cohen, Area, 1985, Ladies Rooms Around The World, Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio and Chambers Fine Art. And, of course, so did the men. 1. I committed the tapes to memory; I would do them over and over. On July 11, the guests included novelists Harold Brodkey, Mona Simpson, Richard Price and Scott Sommer (who might be better known if he hadnt died at 42). The manager, Dorian Mecir, had a heart of gold. Wheres Joe? Eventually youd realize that he died, and his family came and put his artwork in a dumpster. Poets ruled the evening Tim Dlugos, still a few years from writing his haunting G-9 poem about an AIDS ward, was Bernadette of Lourdes. By 1968, there were a whopping 85 bars on the Upper East Side, most of them singles bars. (What a loft was, I wasnt entirely sure.) Many of these bars tried to offer a sort of bridge from cheap college boozing to costly, real-world imbibing. Friday's location on the Upper East Side. I tried to write every single day, first thing in the morning, 10 a.m. Many of its bartenders have gone on to open their own places. In 1981, I lived on 79th and West End; it was tiny but very comfortable. During this period, Manhattan was where the action was, but there were exceptions to the rule: The Bronx: The Writers Bench, a meeting point where graffiti writers would watch passing trains adorned with their work; Disco Fever, the hip-hop club where Run-DMC played their first show; Fashion Moda, a community-minded art space that showed work by emerging artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lady Pink and Jane Dickson. Darryl McDaniels, musician and member of Run-DMC. Brandy's Piano Bar 68 Bars & Clubs Gay Bars Upper East Side Open now But truthfully, I hated it. Or his family didnt come, and the landlord put his work in a dumpster. Back then no one came in and said, Let me see your bar menu, says Block. It didnt have a name. And the director, Charles Fuller, was like, No, youre not really ready you just think you are! Everybody was anxious to do it for an audience, so by the time we opened, it was amazing. The infamous Upper East Side murder has yet to fade from public memory. The landlord turned off the plumbing, so wed defecate into garbage bags and throw them out the window. The area was really no-mans land. 380 Lafayette St, New York . A restaurant my wife and I definitely did not frequent was Elaines. But I had a new Mercedes-Benz, and Id leave it in front of the store when I was in Harlem so people knew they could reach me. Then we had Woody Allen. Then I would go to Macys and go to the $10 rack. The writer Gay Taleses social calendar for October 1983. Sometimes I didnt eat for two days. Mozart. 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. Once he came in and told us that something his wife had written was in error and she replied, Jimmy, you wrote your book. A lot of very creative, brilliant people were living in rough places downtown, which was dangerous but cheap, but I never did. Block says it was the first non-nightclub bar on the Upper East Side to have a DJ booth, in this case a ski lift gondola repurposed from Killington Ski Resort. . Thats what happened at Club 57 a lot: We told people, This is the theme. For one assignment, the paper sent me to Washington Heights to photograph what it said was a riot. It was all happening at the same time; there was a lot of yin and yang. But it did make me very, very moody there were a lot of underground clubs, and they wouldnt jump off till 1 a.m. The Landmarks That Made New York a Cultural Capital, Uptown or Downtown? 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. On the east side of Lexington, between 78th and 79th, was the best fishmonger Ive ever known: Rosedale. Youd press your lips to the bottom and Slalom Girls would pour a combo Jaeger/tequila shot that would shush down the slope and into your face. The idea of hip-hop hadnt really gelled. I would often wake up in the middle of the night as the city slept. I just wanted to be in New York. Money was secondary to being able to have this playground we could create. And when she gave me the phone back, she went into [hysterics]. Bars & Music Mama's Bar. 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. There were very few places to work out back then. I could wake up in the middle of the night and hear his typewriter going. It was on 35th and Fifth, and it was a place where the sushi came around on a conveyor belt. During the day, Id get my paints at Canal Hardware or Pearl Paint. 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. 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. To me it was all an art project. Those were developers terms. Lobster Newburg as it looks today. 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. hip-hop open mic nights and more than a few not-entirely-cool bars around the Upper East Side. Fleming's was a fun Irish bar on the upper east side in the 1980s & 1990s, up until it closed in 1994. Team Infatuation August 19, 2022. James Brown and the Rev. Our club-hop starts with the titular Limelight, Gatien's firstand still favoriteNew York club. An important place to have breakfast was Buffas, on the corner of Lafayette and Prince youd see Jim Jarmusch and Jonathan Demme in the booths there. Their approach was direct and curt, no frills not self-consciously art-directed no frills, but Old Country, 19th-century no frills. I tried never to leave my ZIP code. It was crazy. Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth performing at CBGB in 1983. I knew running back up the stairs was a bad idea. And then we had Robert Rauschenberg, a rascal and a great man. 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. When me and Run would go to each others houses and rap together, we would go into the attic. Afterward, wed go to a club. Sometimes, after the clubs got out, people would see a kung fu flick on 42nd Street, which we called the Deuce Were going to the Deuce, whats up? It must have been late spring of 1981. 1983 The Food Marketing Institute reports that 2/3 of all fish consumed in the U.S. is eaten in restaurants. Boozy, drug-fueled parties that lasted until dawn. And then he asked me again: Dap, whats she doing? All the music [in the atelier on 125th Street] came from the VCR. 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 couldnt work in color because I couldnt afford to make color prints. I tried to focus on my art. We always had coke, and many guests brought their own. If you wanted fancy, youd go to La Grenouille. Stephanie Chernikowski/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images. Rival crews had been dancing in the subway, and it turned into a fight over who had won. My parents were heroin addicts, beatniks. 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. But some places were so beloved theyre still talked about fondly today. The bathroom of Area nightclub, which was located on 157 Hudson Street and opened in 1983. He was like the Jimmy Fallon or Trevor Noah of that era. He was in his preppy stage in those days, wearing button-downs, which really is hard to imagine now. I remember thinking, How long can this go on? It was frequented by many celebrities, especially actors and authors. It was kind of a raffish crossroads. Somebody might have called during the night to say they might have job opportunities, so you always checked your machine. It was hard. My contemporary, the writer Ed [Edmund] White, had the apartment next door. But I didnt feel super cool or anything. I probably dont need to tell you that bar owners like Reynolds werent letting women (or ladies) drink for free out of the goodness of their hearts. . Certainly at night, few people were there, and few were there on the weekends. Our first goal [as Sonic Youth] was getting a gig at CBGB. Williamsburg is like New York in the 70s. People have bidding wars over apartments that cost millions of dollars. Or with only a few comments in between. 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. I asked the kids to demonstrate what theyd been doing. I would write longhand, sit down at the typewriter and type what I had, take those pages across the room to a different chair, sit down and work between the double spaces, do another draft. We decided to live together at her place, 84 Eldridge Street. The straight clubs became very, very straight. You could say I was not a considerate neighbor. 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. I was just out of high school. This was a moment in Manhattan history that had never really been seen before and hasnt been seen since. 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. I was 16 when we started going to the Roxy, and my guest list was 100 people, and we were kind of like the ornaments on the tree. Landis shot the models one afternoon on the Upper East Side. 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. They were all drunk and wasted and they were happy. But, pre-AIDS anyway, it was also more diverse. I doubt if many artists experienced it that way. Honestly, my mind was empty, but I wanted to be consumed by that emptiness. Courtesy of John Kelly, photograph by John Dugdale, John Kelly, performance and visual artist. Steve Landiss photograph for fashion designer Norma Kamalis 1981 Sweats campaign. We were very, very thin. And shoulder pads. If you just wanted to grab a sandwich, youd go to Burger Heaven. I mean, thats when Brooklyn was Brooklyn, not some extension of the West Village or a place with good coffee. I would go to these obscure classes around the city that were mostly for dancers.