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 city was different then. 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. You can walk down the. Even if it would attract the ladies, you couldnt give away an $8 IPA, a $15 Old Fashioned for free. I really loved those people the heroism of their everyday lives was palpable, and that was woven into the tapestry of the East Village. Are you going to this? It was make coffee, check in and then get busy stripping wood. Our first goal [as Sonic Youth] was getting a gig at CBGB. They would shy away with confused expressions, whispering to their friends. The deal with him was he never had to come and he never had to give any money, but he would give his name and a recommendation. Afterward, wed go to a club. One of his favorite pieces was the Alto Rhapsody of Brahms, sung by Dame Janet Baker. Shan among its residents. We decided to live together at her place, 84 Eldridge Street. Nearby spots like Bear Bar began capitalizing on the traffic by offering their own competing ladies night deals. 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. Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth performing at CBGB in 1983. Her upstairs neighbor was artist Dan Graham, who I knew through the artist-poet Vito Acconci. 2. A cracked bathroom mirror reflecting a sink full of discarded puffs, eyeliner brushes and trays of blush. I tried to write every single day, first thing in the morning, 10 a.m. 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. We never served any food, but we always had a couple cases of beer and a basic bar. Its a great show. We stared at each other for a moment. Miller, Edited by Kate Guadagnino and Thessaly La Force. You couldnt get people to go to a club before midnight. $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. That is, until 2008 when Bennigan's went bankrupt. Hed just been released from prison, and his prison memoir, In the Belly of the Beast, had been published that week. 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. Bronwyn Thomas, she was like happy feet on her toes. Guide. The original Murray Hill restaurant expanded to this location in 2011, and in 2017 added an upstairs cocktail bar to entice a younger crowd. Those were developers terms. We were in the habit of throwing parties on Saturday nights. We considered the food too depressingly awful. Youd have Chinese opera and then some kind of Russian circus act and then a punk band and then a drag queen. Al Sharpton (right) backstage at Madison Square Garden on June 11, 1974. Thats pretty good.. I would walk around the neighborhood, go down to 42nd Street and do a lot of movie cruising. Reagan really ruined it for me. draw in the skirts that bring in the suits. Todd Jorgensen ran the Xerox machine in Jamie Canvas, the art supply store in SoHo everybody went to. It needs to be said that, technically, ladies nights were illegal in New York and had been so for quite a time. His name opened every door for me. In 1980, I was working as a staff photographer for the New York Post. Peter had no small talk at all. If they didnt give us any food, wed go off to the next person. I had reached 30 and was having to face how hard it was going to be. It was frequented by many celebrities, especially actors and authors. 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. Hey, lets go get drunk at a bar.. 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.. These places were used largely by working-class men, white, black and Latino, people who thought of themselves as straight and gay, many of whom were amenable to sexual things. The Upper East Side was the place to party in the early 1990s, recalls Jennifer Capobianco, a bartender from the era. I was part of the backpacker renaissance; you brought a backpack, so youd have a change of clothes. As soon as he opened [his own place] I started working there, alongside Sara Driver [the filmmaker and partner of Jim Jarmusch]. Some of the best bars on the Upper East Side cultivate the feeling of "Old New York.". But I didnt feel super cool or anything. 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. 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. Courtesy of John Kelly, photograph by John Dugdale, John Kelly, performance and visual artist. We used to have a TV with a VCR on at all times, playing MTV and the guys coming up. It was social, the Upper East Side ladies. A few blocks away was the Ninth Street Bakery. You could work, then not work for a while, get by. We did a deep dive into the most avant-garde, atonal jazz. Then we had Woody Allen. 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. 26 places sorted by traveler favorites Clear all filters 1. 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. And the food at Genroku was really cheap, which was the operative word. Darryl McDaniels, musician and member of Run-DMC. I came here from Europe at age 22 in the 1960s already married and went to Park Avenue.) At the end of the night I would walk all the way home. Hed walk in and be perfectly comfortable with the Duke of Edinburgh. And thats why Block thinks youll never again see an era like the early 1990s on the Upper East Side. 68. I got so tired of getting mugged on my way home. I was breaking up with somebody a long, slow breakup. It was sort of 11 to 7. She and Larry Gagosian had this space, it was a condo loft in a building on West Broadway. He had two responses: Pretty good, was high, high praise. 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. When I was 15, I was in the clubs. The era might have been old New Yorks last real gasp a time when the very streets, dirty and unsafe as they were, seemed infused with possibility. I would just sit there. 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 . Maxi Cohen, Area, 1985, Ladies Rooms Around The World, Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio and Chambers Fine Art. 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. I knew running back up the stairs was a bad idea. The elevated West Side Highway, meanwhile, was a place you could ski. Before that it had been pot. When me and Run would go to each others houses and rap together, we would go into the attic. I saw Jody Watley on television, and I was like, They dont steal silver, Im going to wear those!. It's just happening. [Kim] would work one day, and Id work the next. My apartment was four stories up, and I got a place on the floor below for Kim Gordon. There were problems, of course; you serve young men and women as much alcohol as they can humanly consume and theres bound to be. 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. I lived at the Olympic Tower, and Halston was downstairs. It became a whole sh*t show, recalls Keith Block. We always had coke, and many guests brought their own. 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. I did not know what my passions or imagination would lead to. The venues didn't matter to me. It seems we could start later than this. 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. I started going to local clubs in Brooklyn at about 14 years old. I figure its costing me two bucks to put a girl in my bar for two hours, Reynolds claimed at the time. Theyre exploiting women by using them to attract men, claimed its spokeswoman, Daveda Copeland. It was on 35th and Fifth, and it was a place where the sushi came around on a conveyor belt. Next door to my apartment on East Eighth and Avenue C was the Green Oasis Community Garden, and I got involved with that. 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. 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. The only place that designated who you were was the Upper East Side. The artists Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham at their wedding, 1983. Wheres Joe? Eventually youd realize that he died, and his family came and put his artwork in a dumpster. Fleming's was a fun Irish bar on the upper east side in the 1980s & 1990s, up until it closed in 1994. People like Jean-Michel [Basquiat] would come in, who was somebody you knew from Tier 3 and the Mudd Club; someone your age. I will never forget the day, because I didnt tell my mother and father that I was going to make a record. A walk across the Williamsburg Bridge just to save a subway token. Then later, it became about getting a gig at Danceteria, Mudd Club they were all little milestone achievements. Adolph would regale us with stories. The demographics of the tony Upper East Side were likewise going through some radical changes post-1987s Black Monday market crash. Today the Upper West Side is considered one of the richest, cleanest, and most expensive places to live in New York City. If I were going out that night, Id go see Garren to fix my hair. I would get some bus money, some pizza money, some soda money and some money to be able to get into a jam. Some of them were open 24 hours a day, or they were closed maybe four hours a day for cleaning. 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. Then it got to be a habit. I suppose I should have loved New York; things were very good for me. 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.