One day, I was walking uptown to an appointment just before noon, and coming toward me was Robert Duvall. I tended to feel particularly safe in the theaters. They paid me like a tenth of what they paid me to do the acting, and it became my whole life. 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. The original Murray Hill restaurant expanded to this location in 2011, and in 2017 added an upstairs cocktail bar to entice a younger crowd. The painter David Salle in his Manhattan studio, 1983. I would go to school, come home, clean the house, babysit my second and third cousins, hang out on the stoop, wait for my aunt to come home, have dinner with her and wait until she fell asleep then I broke out. We had great people like Billy Nunn [Radio Raheem in Spike Lees Do the Right Thing], Skeeter [Ellis Williams, who was in The Pirates of Penzance on Broadway]. By 1984, Id put my kids in boarding school and left to live in Paris for five years. Although it didn't hold up against Chili's, TGI Fridays, and Applebee's, there was a time when it was fairly ubiquitous throughout the states. It was all exposed wood and brick, and it had a tiny fireplace, a futon, my books, a sink and a stove. To me, the 1980s were incredibly liberating. See menus, reviews, ratings and delivery info for the best dining and most popular restaurants in East 80s. I met Peter Hujar through Susan Sontag. Learn more about historic floods. 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. Then I would go to Macys and go to the $10 rack. Certainly at night, few people were there, and few were there on the weekends. Police barricades up and down Second Avenue. It had no closets, so somebody put up a bar so I could hang clothes. 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. We made an altar to a llama, and everyone dressed in kind of Greco-Roman outfits I wore a toga with sequins. Bodega 88 Night Clubs Bars Brew Pubs (19) 8.6 Website (212) 799-1602 573 Columbus Ave New York, NY 10024 CLOSED NOW 2. My first loss was my partner, around the time Grace Kelly died in 1982. 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! It's just happening. But, pre-AIDS anyway, it was also more diverse. 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. Ski Bar would issue custom-made lift tickets good for eight drinks apiece. Guide. Even if it would attract the ladies, you couldnt give away an $8 IPA, a $15 Old Fashioned for free. No one could believe that this B-actor was about to occupy the White House. 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 would get back home [from school] at a decent hour, four in the afternoon. Hes a Leo all the Leos I know love history. It felt like there was all this dangerous energy. ), When we go out drinking, we go for broke, one man told The Times. The gallery space was on the first floor; our offices were in the basement. There were so many actors who lived with us because we had five floors. We called the area TriBeCa, but we laughed about it the same way we laughed at DUMBO. I came here from Europe at age 22 in the 1960s already married and went to Park Avenue.) That was the start of the end of this era, says Block. 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. And yet, over the years, bars continued to try to offer ladies night deals (whether discounted or completely free drinks) and various factions had tried to stop them. I remember thinking, How long can this go on? It was like a village, yknow? I was living uptown really the classic uptown, which, because I was young, seemed a little wild to some people with my kids and my mother (also, at that time I was in love with a Brazilian man Id met in Bali). Id walk to Cooper Union, where I was teaching. The Upper West Side has always been a great place to buy food, with terrific places for fish and vegetables. That is something I have never done with anyone else. Indeed, many of his customers would come from Normandie Court a block away. And why I got out.. I doubt if many artists experienced it that way. Those were developers terms. I did not know what my passions or imagination would lead to. At Elaines, for instance, you would find people Elaine was floating. 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. I couldnt work in color because I couldnt afford to make color prints. The bathroom of Area nightclub, which was located on 157 Hudson Street and opened in 1983. It was on 35th and Fifth, and it was a place where the sushi came around on a conveyor belt. Photograph: Paul Wagtouicz. And then eventually some surface decoration with tucks and treatment Id take the fabric and just sew in any direction. Hed just been released from prison, and his prison memoir, In the Belly of the Beast, had been published that week. Everybody was happy for him and saying, O.K., its possible, were in the right place, were doing the right thing., I remember the first time we went in and read A Soldiers Play out loud, we were all just staring at each other going, Oh my god, this is amazing. Two days later, Adolph came in, threw his script down, and said, Im ready! And we all looked at him like, Okay, fine! So we all threw our scripts down, too, because everybody had learned the play in like two days. I mean, thats when Brooklyn was Brooklyn, not some extension of the West Village or a place with good coffee. 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. It was a very different kind of neighborhood from the one I grew up in in Harlem just starting to be gentrified. Youd establish dialogue with great artists like Lawrence Weiner. An unpublished male nude Polaroid from 1981 by photographer Tom Bianchi. We blasted Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson. 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. By ajordahl123. Chloe 81 Night Clubs Dance Clubs Bars 6.7 Website Amenities: (212) 677-0067 Its basically the most conscious, relatable record. When I was working at Newsweek, I often got out of work at two or three in the morning, and I would walk home up Madison Avenue often in stilettos from 49th to 74th and Lex. 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.. 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. She rehabilitated a homeless man who panhandled outside the shop, and he became a model salesman. I remember going to a gay club, and I totally bit their look: Daisy Duke shorts, combat boots and the half T-shirt all I did was add fishnet stockings. Wed bring the coffee back to the lot and keep filming. David McDermott and Peter McGough, artists. It wasnt a big deal. There were all these conspiracy theories. It changed everything. Tuesday Trivia. Elsewhere, so he was going back and forth between doing the TV show and the play. But where was the battlefield? The rain came through, so the clothes were all messed up by brown streaks. Peter was straight out of Damon Runyon and Weegee. We would get on at the ramp at Chambers Street and ski up to Spring Street to the Ear Inn. Michael Gira, the frontman of the band Swans, was on the [first] cover. My sense of time was completely distorted. 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. You could feel it turning, the tackiness beginning to creep in. Do you even think about what it was like in Brooklyn? At night, if I was sitting around and wanted to amuse myself, Id walk down to Columbus and say hello. Le Relais, on Madison and 63rd, was more everyone my age and everyone from Europe. The Oldest Bars on the Upper East Side East 86th St Association The legendary Tommy Rowles at Bemelman's (photo credit: VictoriaMcGinley.com) The Oldest Bars on the Upper East Side April 08, 2017 Tracking down the oldest bar on the Upper East Side is no easy task! My apartment was four stories up, and I got a place on the floor below for Kim Gordon. CBGB was just up the street, and I performed there with my band or as a solo poet many times. This was every Friday. Thats why I started wearing silver hoop earrings. There was a great camaraderie. 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 was 19. Hey, lets go get drunk at a bar.. I remember the smell of the theaters so well popcorn and weed. 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. We became sort of like brothers. I will never forget the day, because I didnt tell my mother and father that I was going to make a record. 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. Broadway 96 [Club Broadway] was more geared to black and Latino youth and that was definitely a wilder place. I got up at anywhere from 3 to 5 in the morning and worked as long as I could. That is, until 2008 when Bennigan's went bankrupt. The city was different then. Home; . I suppose I should have loved New York; things were very good for me. Sometimes wed have lunch. A crack den lined with books. Many of the bars of this era were, in fact, themed, and sometimes cheesily so. One place I went to a lot was the St. Marks Baths. It had the best hamburgers and gin martinis. 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. It cut down a great number of the people who were out there doing it, but at the same time, the ones who were left were much more intense about it. But I didnt feel super cool or anything. The area was really no-mans land. Drunk patrons would dance on the bar top, well before Coyote Ugly, which would open in January of 1993, had popularized such shenanigans. 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. Kamalis clothes cleverly combined athletic wear and fabric with high-fashion cuts and silhouettes, perfectly embodying the era. Giuliani sending his goons around to raid things. The all-you-can-drink deals just dont happen these days, because the rents are so high, says Block. The bodegas played loud salsa music late into the night, as Dominican men played dominoes on the corner. Best upper east side bars 80\\\'s in New York, NY. I had to be at the theater by 7 oclock so I could start my process and get ready before half-hour call. And when she gave me the phone back, she went into [hysterics]. When youre at a memorial mourning the passing of a friend or a lover and theyre really young, where do you put that stuff? I tried never to leave my ZIP code. Sam [Samuel L. Jackson] and I bought a brownstone in Harlem around 1981. I had this idea I was going to be a writer; if I couldnt, there would be no point to my life. His name opened every door for me. Today hes in his mid-50s and out of the bar business entirely. Nine oclock was the earliest you could go. Fleming's was a fun Irish bar on the upper east side in the 1980s & 1990s, up until it closed in 1994. I lived on the quiet end of Hollis, Queens. There is no limit to it. 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. Melon I ate a lot of hamburgers there. The apartment, at 1060 Fifth Avenue, at 87th Street, was like a fantasy apartment huge, with a view of the reservoir. 1. I saw Jody Watley on television, and I was like, They dont steal silver, Im going to wear those!. After shows at La MaMa, we would go to the gay bar on East Fourth Street and Second Ave. You can walk down the. The point of ladies night is to get women into bars and get them drunk so that men can score.. Bar owners argued that they should be able to capitalize on the marketplace however they could and that only the State Liquor Authority could outlaw such ladies night deals. In the summer of 1981 I was living with Gary Fisketjon, my best friend from college and my future editor at Random House. There was a studio near First Avenue in the 50s that used a dance technique that was a modified version of Pilates. Williamsburg is like New York in the 70s. May 6, 2009. Sometimes I didnt eat for two days. We could each get a full breakfast scrambled eggs, hash browns, whole wheat toast with an endless cup of coffee for $5 with tip. I didnt want anything to be more important than the writing. Sometimes it could just be too blasting. The silhouette I was doing broad shoulders and thin hip was my way of reinterpreting masculine power, but with humor. Wendy Wild made magic mushroom punch. Not surprisingly, it worked. The artists Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham at their wedding, 1983. There were lines around the block the theater starting bumping it up to a second and third screening. We didnt bother to get any filming permits; the city was just coming out of its bankruptcy crisis, and I dont even know if the mayors film office was up and running. The sidewalks along St. Marks over to Astor Place were just as lively they were a sort of souk where you could buy back what the junkies had stolen from your apartment. Now nothings open after 11. 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. Up the street from my apartment was 8 B.C., a club run by two friends of mine. Shan among its residents. Amura ($$) Japanese Menu Available. (What a loft was, I wasnt entirely sure.) 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. And by 1991 a good dozen of the neighborhoods bars were offering similar ladies night deals. Like Clubhouse on York Avenue, which intentionally offered a frat house-like atmosphere. 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. Next door to my apartment on East Eighth and Avenue C was the Green Oasis Community Garden, and I got involved with that.