Originally part of the Pillsbury Corp., the restaurant was founded in 1976. After three, four months there, we decided to turn our loft into a nightclub. The apartment had this old refrigerator that didnt have room for much, so in the winter Id keep everything out on the fire escape. Can you come back later? People have bidding wars over apartments that cost millions of dollars. So we were really supporting ourselves! 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. Jean-Michel Basquiat wandered in at some point a neighbor with whom we had a nodding acquaintance. Wheres Joe? Eventually youd realize that he died, and his family came and put his artwork in a dumpster. I would just sit there. In 1980, I was working as a staff photographer for the New York Post. And the food at Genroku was really cheap, which was the operative word. It was kind of a raffish crossroads. It was the tale of two cities back then, and I was in my late 20s, trying to get the message out, running the National Youth Movement out of an office in St. Marys Hospital in Bed-Stuy. The bakery, located in the front and open 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., is great for an excellent croissant and coffee break. I was always worried about getting a dirty shirt or chipping a tooth., Ski Bars biggest attraction was the Slalom Shot, a four-foot-long slab of ice with a twisting trail cut into it. 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. Likewise, by the end of the 1990s, the cocktail revival was just about to start in earnest in Manhattan pioneering cocktail bars such as Angels Share and Milk & Honey would open in 1993 and 1999, respectively and the craft beer and brewpub scene was in its infancy, and just about to explode in the aughts. This morning was no different than any other. It was an incredible contrast from the last time I had lived in New York, when I was 17, during the summer of 1981, in a $500-a-month sublet loft that my boyfriend and I had found paging through our bible, the call to another life The Village Voice in his basement in Evanston. She was the ultimate ballerina, and she became that on Fame. I was excited that I would be able to introduce this new band of gypsies to the Hollywood scene. 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. We could each get a full breakfast scrambled eggs, hash browns, whole wheat toast with an endless cup of coffee for $5 with tip. One night, one horrible July Fourth, I invited the board members up to the roof, and I discovered 40 or 50 people at a party that I think Kenny had organized. Before that it had been pot. I invited him to dinner. He was in his preppy stage in those days, wearing button-downs, which really is hard to imagine now. I was staying in Garys loft on East Fifth Street between Bowery and Second, on summer break from the writing program at Syracuse, where Id been studying with Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff. JAM gallery founder Linda Goode Bryant, circa 1981-82. Lobster Newburg as it looks today. It was very close to the Forward Building, which housed the important Yiddish newspaper. Then we had Woody Allen. They were very basic but super interesting. 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. upper east side bars 1980s - Binuli.ge Mornings spent alone, writing in a studio in the West Village. They would shy away with confused expressions, whispering to their friends. Now nothings open after 11. 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 met Peter Hujar through Susan Sontag. It needs to be said that, technically, ladies nights were illegal in New York and had been so for quite a time. But, most women slugging free beers at Brother Jimmys or complimentary Champagne at Jungle Jims or on-the-house Slalom Shots at Ski Bar arguably enjoyed these ladies night deals. I worked part-time for gallerist Annina Nosei. This was a luxury ski town, not the Upper East Side, and he had to ultimately tone things down. It was just shattering, but of course I had to pretend that this was the surprise that I had brought my board to see. 40 Iconic Restaurants That Are No Longer Around - Delish It was a restaurant a modest place, like an Italian restaurant but really it was an actors hangout. So wed be starving. 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. The bathroom of Area nightclub, which was located on 157 Hudson Street and opened in 1983. Where To Drink On The Upper East Side - The Infatuation He slowed and turned around: Yeah, you too.. Best Upper East Side bars in NYC. Or wed go around to try to get breakfast from our friends, ringing doorbells to see who was up. I would stay in the clubs, but I wouldnt dance. It was all happening at the same time; there was a lot of yin and yang. I was preparing that summer to start my first semester at St. Johns University. 2. 380 Lafayette St, New York . I liked to work out in the late afternoon, because in the morning I wanted to save every iota of energy for my work and the store. PM: We refused to take a job. Nobody was talking to him, probably because they didnt recognize him. It was really like a combination of living theater and installation art, very communal. 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. He goes, What the hell are you doing to my theater? Bodega 88 Night Clubs Bars Brew Pubs (19) 8.6 Website (212) 799-1602 573 Columbus Ave New York, NY 10024 CLOSED NOW 2. Carina Finn July 6, 2022. An unpublished male nude Polaroid from 1981 by photographer Tom Bianchi. Her upstairs neighbor was artist Dan Graham, who I knew through the artist-poet Vito Acconci. Come be a part of it. The doors would open and things would get going by 10, and by midnight it would be raging. Other times, it literally meant all-you-could-drink, whatever you wanted to drink, on every single night of the week. Upper East Side - New York - The Infatuation I was 19. You simply traveled to where things were happening. I would go there every day to write. Nearby spots like Bear Bar began capitalizing on the traffic by offering their own competing ladies night deals. A chance encounter with David Bowie at a downtown nightclub. One (Instagram) showing somebody stumbling out of your bar and youre out of business, he believes. Ski Bar turned into a Taco Bell and Block moved to Telluride, Colo., where he and Singer opened a similar bar, Poachers Pub. 'The 1970s club scene in New York was special': Nicky Siano No one could believe that this B-actor was about to occupy the White House. Pretty girls in pajamas peeked in on my occupied space. 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. By 1984, Id put my kids in boarding school and left to live in Paris for five years. I was one of the champions of the golden age of promiscuity, though that all ended with AIDS. 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 was just out of high school. It made the general public aware that people were dying in Brooklyn, in Harlem, in the Bronx. 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. I went over and started chatting with him, and we became completely engrossed in this conversation about jazz. 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). Honestly, my mind was empty, but I wanted to be consumed by that emptiness. You were constantly on the phone: Did you see this in the paper? 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. I was eating very healthfully, which wasnt easy then, seeking out the few macrobiotic restaurants there were. When I first moved to the city, there was a garbage strike. The landlord turned off the plumbing, so wed defecate into garbage bags and throw them out the window. Or worse. 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. The early 80s were sort of the beginning of serious gentrification. I got my apartment through Stanley Strychacki, the founder of Club 57. Photo by James & Karla Murray from their book NEW YORK NIGHTS After its appearance in Woody Allen's 1984 film, Broadway Danny Rose , Carnegie Deli became a classic. Indeed, many of his customers would come from Normandie Court a block away. Mom says that your apartment looks like a crack den, my daughter told me once. Youd get into costume, put makeup on, make sure your props were in the right place, talk to the stage manager. Then it was getting a good time slot at CBGB, so you werent on last and werent on first. Book with OpenTable. You couldnt get people to go to a club before midnight. She was very busy editing books of her own, among them Jane Fondas Workout Book, Thomas Keneallys Schindlers List, Margaret Atwoods Bluebeards Egg and Rosalynn Carters memoir First Lady From Plains. At one point Nan traveled to the Carters home in Plains, Georgia, an ordinary split-level with an imperial iron fence that had been Richard Nixons from Key Biscayne (the Carters didnt believe in waste). Points of interest include Central Park, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Guggenheim, The Whitney Museum, Hunter College, Gracie Mansion and Carl Schurz Park. My primary motive back then was to put on a show, and anything that slowed me down from that had to be curtailed. Not only did Mr. Brown come on with me, but Muhammad Ali did, too. And, of course, so did the men. We would go till 4 a.m. Hell, we would go past 4 a.m. I tried to write every single day, first thing in the morning, 10 a.m. 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. 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. This was every Friday. Write a Review! Linda Goode Bryant, founder of Just Above Midtown Gallery. I existed like a soldier preparing for combat. What the hell?. Back uptown, Mortimers restaurant was a huge place for me. What if they just let all women drink for free? Xerox art was big then, so people would come in to make photocopies and plaster them all over. My parents were heroin addicts, beatniks. The object was to keep stitching no matter what happened to the fabric. We were very, very thin. Some of the best bars on the Upper East Side cultivate the feeling of "Old New York.". They put their names all over the mens room! The theater had been trashed. I made a deal for him to do a cheapo job by trading a Brice Marden plus $10,000. The only place that designated who you were was the Upper East Side. Then we hit the clubs: Sound Factory, the Roxy, the Fun House. Wed go to bed among the broken glass, booze and old cigarettes. I was doing commercials and Ntozake Shanges For Colored Girls [For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf] I went on tour with that show, as part of the first national company. Carver came by, down from Syracuse on some publishing business. Silently. Next door to my apartment on East Eighth and Avenue C was the Green Oasis Community Garden, and I got involved with that. How the Original TGI Fridays Helped Create the Singles Bar - InsideHook Bars & Music Mama's Bar. My habit must have appeared bizarre to my peers. Ann Magnuson, actress and performance artist. 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. My dormitory was at the corner of East 14th Street and Union Square. As Andy turned the pages, he said things like Oh, thats nice, Oh, that could be larger, Oh At the end of it, he said, Yes, I think we should do your book. I asked the kids to demonstrate what theyd been doing. In the 60s, it was only open to the high class and the rich, like authors up on the Upper East Side. 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. Like the Womens Christian Temperance Union. The idea of hip-hop hadnt really gelled. My life was spiraling downward. During the day, Id get my paints at Canal Hardware or Pearl Paint. Clear all filters. It was pitch-dark. The Penrose. I returned to New York in 81 after 10 years as an expat. Did you come to see the show? In the summer of 1981 I was living with Gary Fisketjon, my best friend from college and my future editor at Random House. 2. 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 . There was a studio near First Avenue in the 50s that used a dance technique that was a modified version of Pilates. Nine oclock was the earliest you could go.