We finished that scene around 6 oclock in the morning. Not surprisingly, it worked. And Dynasty. Ive never gotten over Dynasty. And then people started dying. Certainly at night, few people were there, and few were there on the weekends. 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. The loft was across the street from Castelli [Gallery]. Best Upper East Side bars in NYC. I figure its costing me two bucks to put a girl in my bar for two hours, Reynolds claimed at the time. I would drink quite a lot of wine. Then we hit the clubs: Sound Factory, the Roxy, the Fun House. 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. Since no ones making them, they dont.. 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. Some of the best bars on the Upper East Side cultivate the feeling of "Old New York.". There were lines around the block the theater starting bumping it up to a second and third screening. Id go for two, three, four hours and have a fairly good time. 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 pretty good.. 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. When we went out it was to perform. It was very close to the Forward Building, which housed the important Yiddish newspaper. draw in the skirts that bring in the suits. Then you checked to see if there was anything in the theater papers for auditions. Mom says that your apartment looks like a crack den, my daughter told me once. I met Peter Hujar through Susan Sontag. The infamous Upper East Side murder has yet to fade from public memory. Howard was Lili LaLeen, a German film actress in a vintage Mary McFadden. The straight clubs became very, very straight. When youre at a memorial mourning the passing of a friend or a lover and theyre really young, where do you put that stuff? A short-lived club in the 1980s East Village. The rain came through, so the clothes were all messed up by brown streaks. Jane Fonda had recently released her workout tapes, and it was the first opportunity a lot of women had to exercise. I slept when I was exhausted and awoke when I was refreshed. So I flipped on the light and said, Good Morning! The Upper East Side was the place to party in the early 1990s, recalls Jennifer Capobianco, a bartender from the era. It was just shattering, but of course I had to pretend that this was the surprise that I had brought my board to see. I drove up in my Maserati Bora at around 5 oclock in the morning and walked in with Billy Idol, who was a buddy of mine. Normandie Court, a complex of four 34-story beige towers occupying the entire block bounded by East 95th and 96th Streets and Second and Third Avenues, opened around then, offering dirt cheap rent. I didnt want to fit in. We would sit at this coffee table and listen to records for an hour. 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. Ive always been a pretty good cook, and I could make these very good dinners in this tiny kitchen. My favorite was the Mine Shaft, a very performative kind of sex bar on Little West 12th Street that had a kind of punk, anti-disco vibe. Carver came by, down from Syracuse on some publishing business. It was hard. And then he asked me again: Dap, whats she doing? Tuesday Trivia. 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. Taylor Mead had a running tab at multiple bars. 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 . The silence, as they say, was deafening. Everyone associates me with Jesse Jackson, but actually James Brown is the person I consider most like a mentor. Many of these bars tried to offer a sort of bridge from cheap college boozing to costly, real-world imbibing. It wasnt a big deal. We would go till 4 a.m. Hell, we would go past 4 a.m. They were all drunk and wasted and they were happy. James Brown and Ali because of them, I basically became a made guy. It was still a sort of wild west that far uptown, and the facility was quickly dubbed Dormandie Court for the raucous, college-like atmosphere it had created and then fostered. Usually Id take the bus down to Mickeys [Chinese Chance] at 1 University Place, where Julian Schnabel was the cook. 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. Melon I ate a lot of hamburgers there. My first loss was my partner, around the time Grace Kelly died in 1982. 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. There was . I invited him to dinner. Youd have Chinese opera and then some kind of Russian circus act and then a punk band and then a drag queen. When Canadian-born club impresario Peter Gatien came to New York City in the early '80s, after. He was very aware I was using a lot of paper that wasnt being accounted for, so we came to an agreement that I had to pay. Pretty girls in pajamas peeked in on my occupied space. A crack den lined with books. I was living with my parents in the Alfred E. Smith projects on the Lower East Sides waterfront. 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. After three, four months there, we decided to turn our loft into a nightclub. I was 19. There was a popular Puerto Rican dance club, Ochentas, and across the street from that was an Afro-Cuban spot, Club Broadway. Or worse. (212) 861-2290. They were very basic but super interesting. I was just out of high school. The conversation was very interesting. I tried never to leave my ZIP code. Jean-Michel Basquiat wandered in at some point a neighbor with whom we had a nodding acquaintance. We liked to get there early, which the club promoters loved because wed get the party started. Sometimes wed have lunch. 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. 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. 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. We always had coke, and many guests brought their own. Dont come ringing my doorbell! I remember we would go from person to person. It was packed every night; it won the Pulitzer Prize that year. But this was every week. Honestly, my mind was empty, but I wanted to be consumed by that emptiness. In 80, I got a job at Todds Copy on Mott Street. Best upper east side bars 80\\\'s in New York, NY. I decided to start a music fanzine around 82; I called it Killer. When Todd wasnt looking, Id be running off copies and stapling them together. May 6, 2009. The bathroom of Area nightclub, which was located on 157 Hudson Street and opened in 1983. It was a total nexus. Upper East Side. 2. I didnt have the scratch to make it livable, but I met this guy named Peter Marino [the architect and designer] in the elevator who was doing a high-end renovation on the top floor and negotiated with him. Sometimes you would want to go to a Police concert, but you wouldnt want to tell your friends, because they would be, like, Thats so commercial and gross. When it was the Dead Kennedys, Ari Up, The Slits, Public Image Ltd, you were all in full agreement. Open in Google Maps. He has one book but he doesnt have the next two. I had glasses, so I put these flip-up sunglass visors on them. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 is sometimes used as a marker of the beginning of the end of the art world as it was then known, as if the two were somehow related, as if an election ushered in some new aesthetic permission, a new vulgarity, which is really a kind of negative magical thinking. We said we were artists, and artists make art. Theyre exploiting women by using them to attract men, claimed its spokeswoman, Daveda Copeland. So we were really supporting ourselves! When me and Run would go to each others houses and rap together, we would go into the attic. When I was 15, I was in the clubs. But, pre-AIDS anyway, it was also more diverse. In the Early 80s, It Made All the Difference, Oral History: Remembering New Yorks Fiorucci Store, New Yorkers and Their 80s Routines Block by Block, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/17/t-magazine/80s-nyc-map.html, Ann Magnuson, actress and performance artist. Like the Womens Christian Temperance Union. The manager, Dorian Mecir, had a heart of gold. Initially, owner Klay Reynolds had allowed ladies to drink whatever they desired; then he went through more Baileys Irish Cream in the first month he offered the deal than he would have expected to go through for all of 1991. 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. The Landmarks That Made New York a Cultural Capital, Uptown or Downtown? 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. I served eggplant parmigiana and a stupendous chocolate cake that everyone always wanted. $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. The painter David Salle in his Manhattan studio, 1983. Blocks bar was ski-themed, natch, with a Ski-Doo hanging from the ceiling, bartenders wearing neon-colored ski pants in the winter and bathrooms labeled Unload Here (mens) and Grooming in Process (womens). Lobster Newburg as it looks today. I said, Im very happy for you, youre selling a lot of tickets. Peter was straight out of Damon Runyon and Weegee. 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. These parties inevitably blur together in my mind, but I remember that night because a week later, Abbott stabbed and killed a waiter at the Binibon cafe, a few doors down the block. Wed bring the coffee back to the lot and keep filming. Spankys, a sports bar on 75th Street, attracted the young Republican crowd that had begun to invade the area. The city was different then. I lived at the Olympic Tower, and Halston was downstairs.. 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]. 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. It had no closets, so somebody put up a bar so I could hang clothes. One time a girl a teenager, maybe 15, 16 came in with her dad. But I did it anyway. Im a child of the Midwestern upper-middle class. Open in Google Maps. You did a lot of the auditions immediately. And then we said, We gotta do the real hip-hop that were actually doing at the block parties and at the house parties and at the park parties. So we decided to make it all beat no music, just me and Run [Joseph Simmons, another founding member of Run-DMC] doing the real hardcore, just rhyming on this record. Others would drop by out of curiosity and wonder what was on my mind. Id get to the gallery late afternoon. It was frequented by many celebrities, especially actors and authors. I would stay in the clubs, but I wouldnt dance. The Mudd Club was right around the corner, going full throttle. The old downtown art scene was floundering, while some people, like Robert Mapplethorpe, had risen. Maxi Cohen, Area, 1985, Ladies Rooms Around The World, Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio and Chambers Fine Art. 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. The landlord turned off the plumbing, so wed defecate into garbage bags and throw them out the window. ), When we go out drinking, we go for broke, one man told The Times. We had a studio on Bleecker near Seventh Avenue. They put their names all over the mens room! The theater had been trashed. Did you come to see the show? It was run by very old Jewish folks. Sometimes I would read him the weeks work. 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. Could you just call LL so she could just say hi? Everybody knew I knew all the rappers and everything. It was a small scene, people like writer Stephen Saban, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel [Basquiat] and Kenny Scharf. It is demeaning to women to be treated this way, claimed Long Island man Richard Savino in 1984. 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. I would be coming back around 4, 4:30, 5 oclock sometimes 6. Our first goal [as Sonic Youth] was getting a gig at CBGB. I was kind of tomboyish, but also pretty poor. LaTanya Richardson Jackson (far right) in Spell #7, 1979. Points of interest include Central Park, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Guggenheim, The Whitney Museum, Hunter College, Gracie Mansion and Carl Schurz Park. Xerox art was big then, so people would come in to make photocopies and plaster them all over. 380 Lafayette St, New York . I had half of the third floor, which was sort of the high-ceilinged fancy room, though it had long, long since stopped being fancy. I remember this night in particular because of another guest, Jack Henry Abbott, who was living in a halfway house a couple blocks away. Then our leading lady, Susan Berman, broke her leg, and we had to wait for her to get out of the cast. It was a very quiet audience. Up the street from my apartment was 8 B.C., a club run by two friends of mine. I didnt know anything. I was living with my aunt and one of my cousins in a shotgun apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The silhouette I was doing broad shoulders and thin hip was my way of reinterpreting masculine power, but with humor. Hed come around maybe at 7 oclock. I would go there every day to write. It was around the corner from another tiny spot called Chandalier. And thats why Block thinks youll never again see an era like the early 1990s on the Upper East Side. Miller, Edited by Kate Guadagnino and Thessaly La Force. My contemporary, the writer Ed [Edmund] White, had the apartment next door. Mozart. He said he was going to lunch with some friends, and did I want to join? Home; . She and Larry Gagosian had this space, it was a condo loft in a building on West Broadway. 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. 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? I said, To hell with it! Jasmine Guy auditioned; she wasnt of age yet. By my late teens, people used to tell me, You and you sister, its like its your job to go clubbing. Maybe five nights a week Id leave Brooklyn around 8:30 or 9 oclock. Block opened it with a partner, Adam Singer, when he was just 22; he had worked at nearby Brother Jimmys for just two weeks before getting fired and deciding he could run a better bar. 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. It was a very different kind of neighborhood from the one I grew up in in Harlem just starting to be gentrified. Bars & Music Mama's Bar. Steve Landiss photograph for fashion designer Norma Kamalis 1981 Sweats campaign. And if I missed it, I felt really bad. It was chaired by Brendan Gill, a great theater critic and architecture writer. Even if it would attract the ladies, you couldnt give away an $8 IPA, a $15 Old Fashioned for free. 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. It changed everything. In 1981, I lived on 79th and West End; it was tiny but very comfortable. I didnt know what I was doing. At 11 to 12, Id had a nine-hour day. Sometimes it was just me and my sister walking up to the velvet rope or the bouncers, or it would be a group of us, and they would let us right in. 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. I was sneaking out. 1567 2nd Ave, New York, NY 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. But it did make me very, very moody there were a lot of underground clubs, and they wouldnt jump off till 1 a.m. Then we packed up our stuff, went back to the coffee shop to have breakfast and headed home. 80s Night Clubs in New York City, NY About Search Results Sort: Default All BBB Rated A+/A Coupons View all businesses that are OPEN 24 Hours 1. Wheres Joe? Eventually youd realize that he died, and his family came and put his artwork in a dumpster. By 1968, 85 bars called the neighborhood home, like Gleason's, slightly further uptown near Yorkville, and similarly decorated to Friday's, with Tiffany lamps and the ornate wooden bar that had graced the Schaefer Beer pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair. By 1968, there were a whopping 85 bars on the Upper East Side, most of them singles bars. Every night was a huge passeggiata with people perusing the blankets. It felt like there was all this dangerous energy. Courtesy of John Kelly, photograph by John Dugdale, John Kelly, performance and visual artist. You could say I was not a considerate neighbor. Load more. It must have been late spring of 1981. 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. The original Murray Hill restaurant expanded to this location in 2011, and in 2017 added an upstairs cocktail bar to entice a younger crowd. I would walk around the neighborhood, go down to 42nd Street and do a lot of movie cruising. 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 remember I was drawn to the ad for the loft because it was in a place that sounded like trifecta; my father had taken me to the track, so that seemed comforting and familiar. Fleming's was a fun Irish bar on the upper east side in the 1980s & 1990s, up until it closed in 1994. 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! There was a studio near First Avenue in the 50s that used a dance technique that was a modified version of Pilates. 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. And the rest of us were kinda like, Oh man, what? In 1981, I suggested a bacchanal a night of pagan merriment as spring was coming. And yet, plenty of ladies were also against them. No ID check, nothing. Ski Bar would issue custom-made lift tickets good for eight drinks apiece. Thats where youd run into people, share breakfast. 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. Separated from the commotion of the day, I would stretch my own canvases and start to paint in the dormitorys common room. The artist David McDermott shot by his then-partner, the artist Peter McGough, East Village, 1983. (By the time we filmed Desperately Seeking Susan in 84, New York was already beginning to become more gentrified.) Not only did Mr. Brown come on with me, but Muhammad Ali did, too. No one could believe that this B-actor was about to occupy the White House. Amura ($$) Japanese Menu Available. Being at the Carlyle was amazing, but I was still an undergrad at Yale at the time, and the whole thing felt unreal, as though I was living two lives. Veselka was the go-to place to eat and get cake the lemon bundt or the mohn. 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. I found them very original, underivative of the 60s or 70s they had a cleanness and a strength to them. 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. Things were 50 times as bad in Brooklyn as they were in Manhattan. Here, notable locals revisit their routes and routines, from lunch on the Upper East to nighttime sojourns to then-emerging neighborhoods like TriBeCa. I returned to New York in 81 after 10 years as an expat. 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. I dont even know if it was named AIDS at that point. People would drop change in your hands, turn their heads when you tried to kiss them. The weekend that it happened, I got a call at 2 oclock in the morning from the owner of the theater. (How many spinal taps can you give to someone under a refrigeration blanket whose fever wouldnt break?) One of many iconic Upper East Side eateries owned by the Santo Family Group . Rapping and fashion were being born at the same time. I would get some bus money, some pizza money, some soda money and some money to be able to get into a jam. The elevated West Side Highway, meanwhile, was a place you could ski. Hey, lets go get drunk at a bar.. And Im not a corporate client, so please give me a break. 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. They were on 51st or 52nd between Fifth and Madison. And Silk Road. An unpublished male nude Polaroid from 1981 by photographer Tom Bianchi. I met Kim [Gordon] through a mutual friend. In the 60s, it was only open to the high class and the rich, like authors up on the Upper East Side. My dormitory was at the corner of East 14th Street and Union Square. Bars & Clubs Gay Bars. 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. Id go with Andy Warhol, or to dinner and then to Studio 54 afterwards. Harrys Hula Hut had bamboo walls, palm trees, and Nerf basketball available, plus all-you-can-drink beer. Rival crews had been dancing in the subway, and it turned into a fight over who had won. PM: We refused to take a job. It was a brilliantly sunny day, and standing outside was Dustin Hoffman. Alanna Heiss, founder of PS1 and the Clocktower Gallery. It was a restaurant a modest place, like an Italian restaurant but really it was an actors hangout. My fantasy was to rent one of these theaters on 42nd Street and show my movie alongside Mad Monkey Kung Fu. 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. 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. Meanwhile, 25 new bars had opened between 76th and 96th Streets in the first years of the 1990s as well. So in April we held the Rites of Spring Fertility Bacchanal. Thurston Moore would take me to see hardcore groups like Black Flag. His shoulders dropped and he said, Yeah. We looked at each other again when I opened the door for him; we were each wondering what had just happened. 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. 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. 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. Book with OpenTable. Wed spend hours getting our outfits together buying stuff at Canal Plastics Center, stapling photo booth pictures onto our jackets. And when my mother asked me where I was at, I just said, Oh, I was in the attic.. 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. Sometimes you would cry, but most of the time you were just stunned, like it wasnt real. I started going to local clubs in Brooklyn at about 14 years old.