Bars & Music Mama's Bar. I had reached 30 and was having to face how hard it was going to be. Dont come ringing my doorbell! I remember we would go from person to person. [The clothes] were really like one-plus-one, big squares with holes, basically. Lobster Newburg as it looks today. There were no movie theaters, bookstores, galleries or photocopy shops, so my entrepreneurial idea, which failed, was to open one, Chelsea Copy. There is a two drink minimum. And Im not a corporate client, so please give me a break. We would sit at this coffee table and listen to records for an hour. Separated from the commotion of the day, I would stretch my own canvases and start to paint in the dormitorys common room. 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. So in April we held the Rites of Spring Fertility Bacchanal. I did shows in there at night, including the first solo show David Salle ever had. I would be coming back around 4, 4:30, 5 oclock sometimes 6. I was living on Eldridge Street between Hester and Grand. It was a kind of a monks cell. I remember this night in particular because of another guest, Jack Henry Abbott, who was living in a halfway house a couple blocks away. People like Jean-Michel [Basquiat] would come in, who was somebody you knew from Tier 3 and the Mudd Club; someone your age. $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. Todd Jorgensen ran the Xerox machine in Jamie Canvas, the art supply store in SoHo everybody went to. I returned to New York in 81 after 10 years as an expat. 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. There was a lot of crossover, because ours would go to 6 or 7 in the morning some god-awful time. Its a great show. We stared at each other for a moment. Not surprisingly, it worked. Foursquare. 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 . My first photo lab was called Hy Photo. Thats pretty good.. Up the street from my apartment was 8 B.C., a club run by two friends of mine. If we got too cold or needed coffee, we would go over to 12th Avenue, where there were these old, sort of silver-clad Greek coffee shops that just dont exist anymore. Certainly at night, few people were there, and few were there on the weekends. Caribbean Restaurants Restaurants. Sam [Samuel L. Jackson] and I bought a brownstone in Harlem around 1981. Hear Rosie Perez talk about her first time at CBGB: Six days a week I arrived every morning between 7:30 a.m. and 8 a.m. The landlord turned off the plumbing, so wed defecate into garbage bags and throw them out the window. 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. Wed go to bed among the broken glass, booze and old cigarettes. 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. He had intended whatever conversation we were having to go in another direction. 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. He said, Dap, whats she doing? I said, Shes gasping for air now! And I go attend to her. Ive always been a pretty good cook, and I could make these very good dinners in this tiny kitchen. 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. Live Psychic on East 84th offered free drinks and $10 tarot card readings from, yes, live psychics on a platform to the left of the dance floor, while single ladies shimmied to songs like Right Said Freds Im Too Sexy. While American Trash, a biker-themed bar, had literal garbage on the walls and ceiling. Or his family didnt come, and the landlord put his work in a dumpster. Since no ones making them, they dont.. The other was he wouldnt say anything, just [shrug] that meant it was a failure. 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. The first club I did with Shawn Hausman, The Club With No Name, was on 25th Street. Bronwyn Thomas, she was like happy feet on her toes. We were both rather exotic in each others eyes. We blasted Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson. Thats why I started wearing silver hoop earrings. We used to have a TV with a VCR on at all times, playing MTV and the guys coming up. Theyre exploiting women by using them to attract men, claimed its spokeswoman, Daveda Copeland. I would get back home [from school] at a decent hour, four in the afternoon. It was a very quiet audience. Zipped into a distressed red velvet number, I was the wacky blonde June Buntt, who liked to say the second T is silent. I was married to the astronaut Brad Buntt, who liked to say hed been in space for years now. The writer Dennis Cooper, in blue jean coveralls, was Mavis Purvis, a lesbian farmer living on a rural commune with her girlfriend. And thats why Block thinks youll never again see an era like the early 1990s on the Upper East Side. His show was on at 1 a.m., after Johnny Carson. Hes a Leo all the Leos I know love history. Wendy Wild made magic mushroom punch. I got my apartment through Stanley Strychacki, the founder of Club 57. What if they just let all women drink for free? And if I missed it, I felt really bad. When I crossed the bridge, I had my Saturday Night Fever moment the city was for the taking. Giuliani sending his goons around to raid things. I had no reason to stay awake or to fall asleep. The essence of Upper East Side gentility, Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle is also the last public space to display the mural work of Ludwig Bemelmans, creator of the iconic children's book character and prolific illustrator of the 1940s and '50s. Nan Goldin was a block up, and William Burroughs lived downstairs. There was a popular Puerto Rican dance club, Ochentas, and across the street from that was an Afro-Cuban spot, Club Broadway. I got my first loft in what was called Lower Manhattan before it was renamed the Triangle Below Canal, which was the realtors term that became TriBeCa, in 1967. The ultimate epitome of this wild, boozing-on-the-cheap era, Ski Bar, was located on Second Ave between 94th and 95th. 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 apartment was big, but the hall was in very bad repair, or at least looked it. It was 1990 on Manhattans Upper East Side and, after the extravagant 1980s, the neighborhood was in the throes of a countrywide recession and unemployment was on the rise. I just left the house on a Sunday, went to make the record. I couldnt believe he knew the same stuff I listened to as a kid in Greenwich Village. I just wanted to be in New York. I knew running back up the stairs was a bad idea. 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. Those were developers terms. I existed like a soldier preparing for combat. When the sun came up, we would get bagels or pretzels and get back on the train. CBGB was just up the street, and I performed there with my band or as a solo poet many times. 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). Ave., NYC I knew so many people in Harlem, I kept a second apartment in the Bronx, where I tried to be unseen. Anyone can read what you share. Their approach was direct and curt, no frills not self-consciously art-directed no frills, but Old Country, 19th-century no frills. A chance encounter with David Bowie at a downtown nightclub. As told to Kate Guadagnino,Elizabeth Gumport,Merrell Hambleton and Erin Sheehy. I couldnt work in color because I couldnt afford to make color prints. 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. Drunk patrons would dance on the bar top, well before Coyote Ugly, which would open in January of 1993, had popularized such shenanigans. Brandy's Piano Bar. Sometimes I would read him the weeks work. Nearby spots like Bear Bar began capitalizing on the traffic by offering their own competing ladies night deals. You were constantly on the phone: Did you see this in the paper? May 6, 2009. I was still riding a little bit high off of the Diana Ross album Diana, which had come out in 1980. It was a restaurant a modest place, like an Italian restaurant but really it was an actors hangout. (Never let on to a dog youre afraid of him, my Uncle Charlie would say.) I met David Bowie in 1982 at the Continental on West 25th Street, which had just opened. Pretty girls in pajamas peeked in on my occupied space. 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. Wed go: Look, even if you dont know how to strip wood, were gonna show you: This gooey mess that you have to brush on the wood, wait till it bubbles, then you scrape it off. Most mornings, we would wake up and check the answering machine. The area was really no-mans land. On the east side of Lexington, between 78th and 79th, was the best fishmonger Ive ever known: Rosedale. It was all very small town-y. Many of these bars tried to offer a sort of bridge from cheap college boozing to costly, real-world imbibing. In the summer of 1981 I was living with Gary Fisketjon, my best friend from college and my future editor at Random House. They were more McDermotts friends, because my friends were working in fashion and they were like, Oh, get a job, bitch! 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. He would maybe drink half a glass of wine. 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. Jean-Michel Basquiat wandered in at some point a neighbor with whom we had a nodding acquaintance. It was very close to the Forward Building, which housed the important Yiddish newspaper. Mom says that your apartment looks like a crack den, my daughter told me once. Hed just been released from prison, and his prison memoir, In the Belly of the Beast, had been published that week. The people who were chic, the downtowners, pretty much just wore black that could instantly give you a look. It was around the corner from another tiny spot called Chandalier. Afterward, wed go to a club. 380 Lafayette St, New York . It was social, the Upper East Side ladies. Peter was straight out of Damon Runyon and Weegee. Youd have Chinese opera and then some kind of Russian circus act and then a punk band and then a drag queen. But it did make me very, very moody there were a lot of underground clubs, and they wouldnt jump off till 1 a.m. Write a Review! No ID check, nothing. I could wake up in the middle of the night and hear his typewriter going. Wednesdays and Thursdays were Ultimate Ladies Night with free Margaritas all evening, not to mention a gratis taco bar during happy hour. One of many iconic Upper East Side eateries owned by the Santo Family Group . It made the general public aware that people were dying in Brooklyn, in Harlem, in the Bronx. I was at the same place I am now, 222 Bowery. They were very basic but super interesting. Rival crews had been dancing in the subway, and it turned into a fight over who had won. It wasnt actually the best place to hear or see bands, but it was always exciting. 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. It needs to be said that, technically, ladies nights were illegal in New York and had been so for quite a time. The demographics of the tony Upper East Side were likewise going through some radical changes post-1987s Black Monday market crash. It wasnt a big deal. NR is a cocktail bar on the Upper East Side that serves inventive drinks and solid ramen. 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]. 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. Madison Pub was an indispensable local dive. 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. Plodding. It was kind of a raffish crossroads. After three, four months there, we decided to turn our loft into a nightclub. [By 1 a.m.] Id be somewhere like [the TriBeCa No Wave club] Tier 3, seeing [the electronic Berlin band] Malaria!, and then walking over to Daves Luncheonette. I was 19. It all depended on who was playing. The elevated West Side Highway, meanwhile, was a place you could ski. We considered the food too depressingly awful. My contemporary, the writer Ed [Edmund] White, had the apartment next door. By 1984, Id put my kids in boarding school and left to live in Paris for five years. At the end of the night I would walk all the way home. But truthfully, I hated it. I would often wake up in the middle of the night as the city slept. When our gallery, Gracie Mansion, started, both Gracie and I had other jobs, so we would switch off. We were very, very thin. Two weeks later we were begging to let people come watch us rehearse. Thurston was a scholar. In the 60s, it was only open to the high class and the rich, like authors up on the Upper East Side. Next door to my apartment on East Eighth and Avenue C was the Green Oasis Community Garden, and I got involved with that. We were shooting the pilot, and I was trying to find the best dancers I could. Peter had no small talk at all. [Wild Style] opened in 1983, [at the Embassy 3] on 47th Street and Broadway. And they said, Yeah, you can have that they werent even thinking about it. I had a horrible graveyard shift at a coffee shop, one of the only places to eat in Chelsea, open 24 hours super crickets, deserted. It was at Avenue A and St. Marks Place, but the windows looked out on an air shaft, not the park.