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. I lived at the Olympic Tower, and Halston was downstairs.. 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. Nearby spots like Bear Bar began capitalizing on the traffic by offering their own competing ladies night deals. The gallery space was on the first floor; our offices were in the basement. He had two responses: Pretty good, was high, high praise. The silhouette I was doing broad shoulders and thin hip was my way of reinterpreting masculine power, but with humor. In those days, there wasnt any downtown, so life was much easier. Caribbean Restaurants Restaurants. There was a studio near First Avenue in the 50s that used a dance technique that was a modified version of Pilates. 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! See more ideas about memories, restaurant, howard johnson's. I was hustling. Anyone can read what you share. He slowed and turned around: Yeah, you too.. I would get some bus money, some pizza money, some soda money and some money to be able to get into a jam. NR is a cocktail bar on the Upper East Side that serves inventive drinks and solid ramen. I was part of the backpacker renaissance; you brought a backpack, so youd have a change of clothes. See menus, reviews, ratings and delivery info for the best dining and most popular restaurants in East 80s. Cities . Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth performing at CBGB in 1983. Somebody might have called during the night to say they might have job opportunities, so you always checked your machine. 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. 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. I met Kim [Gordon] through a mutual friend. 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. Hey, I said. His name opened every door for me. 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. In the lot there are three vehicles. For one assignment, the paper sent me to Washington Heights to photograph what it said was a riot. If you wanted fancy, youd go to La Grenouille. Within a few days, he came to my apartment, which is how I wound up doing the arrangements for Lets Dance.. It needs to be said that, technically, ladies nights were illegal in New York and had been so for quite a time. I tried to write every single day, first thing in the morning, 10 a.m. And I just loved that experience. A lot of it was crack. There were others: the Venus, and down in the 14th Street area, the Variety Photoplays, a Spanish one called The Jefferson, The Metropol [Metropolitan]. I saw Jody Watley on television, and I was like, They dont steal silver, Im going to wear those!. I would then either go to work or go to an opening because Macys closed at 8:45 or something, so you had to move on. Rapping and fashion were being born at the same time. hip-hop open mic nights and more than a few not-entirely-cool bars around the Upper East Side. 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. The artists Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham at their wedding, 1983. ), When we go out drinking, we go for broke, one man told The Times. She had made a video of herself dancing to LL Cool J. Do you even think about what it was like in Brooklyn? 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). A few blocks away was the Ninth Street Bakery. Usually Id take the bus down to Mickeys [Chinese Chance] at 1 University Place, where Julian Schnabel was the cook. I never wore gold jewelry I didnt want to be a target. Kyle: It has a window with LED lights around it, and a tourist was in the window and seemed to be making a humping motion. 68. It was a brilliantly sunny day, and standing outside was Dustin Hoffman. It was nothing but rejection. And the food at Genroku was really cheap, which was the operative word. (I might be the only person who never lived in a scary New York apartment. 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. 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. Id paid high school kids to go on Thursday afternoons after school and hand out fliers. 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. Having had an alcoholic mother, he did not like being around people who drank much. Linda Goode Bryant, founder of Just Above Midtown Gallery. 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. There was . Lobster Newburg as it looks today. The crass reason, of course, is because since the beginning of time, straight men have wanted to be drinking in the same place women are drinking because, yes, men are pigs. It was right next to the Chelsea Hotel, where I was living. There would be all of the amazing designer clothes that nobody wanted, that were too weird. 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. 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. Hed walk in and be perfectly comfortable with the Duke of Edinburgh. We did a deep dive into the most avant-garde, atonal jazz. Where To Drink On The Upper East Side . 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. Bronwyn Thomas, she was like happy feet on her toes. 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 . They are not obliged to talk to anyone. She rehabilitated a homeless man who panhandled outside the shop, and he became a model salesman. They were relatively small, rundown theaters; they tended to have a fair amount of drug use going on. 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. Wed been working on the film for a year in dribs and drabs. I never saw that before and hed never experienced that. 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. Theyd say, Yo, Dap, listen to that. All the hip-hop artists came [to the atelier]; there wasnt any other place that catered to rappers. Meanwhile, 25 new bars had opened between 76th and 96th Streets in the first years of the 1990s as well. In school, I never fit in at all. You could be a young person in Manhattan back then, Block recalls. Thurston Moore would take me to see hardcore groups like Black Flag. Talk to the actors as they drifted in about your day, talk about whos auditioning for what. Two weeks later we were begging to let people come watch us rehearse. AIDS was a very strange situation; starting in 82 you knew very little about it, and then a few years later you suddenly realized it was the largest killer among your personal friends. One of my responses was to just keep working. The gallerys not open so youll have to come back. But this was every week. 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. This morning was no different than any other. 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]. We didnt know how the virus transmitted. My apartment was four stories up, and I got a place on the floor below for Kim Gordon. 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. The landlord turned off the plumbing, so wed defecate into garbage bags and throw them out the window. 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. Youd think he would have been the most outrageous-looking person there, but he looked like a businessman. State records are incomplete. In a way, its ironic Ski Bar continues to have such a strong presence on social media as Block figures social media is the very reason why you dont see these types of bars and binge-a-rific drinking deals any more. Thurston was a scholar. I lived at the Olympic Tower, and Halston was downstairs. We would sit at this coffee table and listen to records for an hour. I would go there every day to write. She knew I was in dire straits; [by 1979] my landlord was getting squirrelly. 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. In 1981, I lived on 79th and West End; it was tiny but very comfortable. Since no ones making them, they dont.. I went over and started chatting with him, and we became completely engrossed in this conversation about jazz. Certainly at night, few people were there, and few were there on the weekends. And they were there illegally. We were shooting the pilot, and I was trying to find the best dancers I could. I asked the kids to demonstrate what theyd been doing. Not surprisingly, it worked. The venues didn't matter to me. The whole thing finally fell into place in May of that year when I went on Tom Snyders show on NBC. I tried never to leave my ZIP code. It was social, the Upper East Side ladies. Points of interest include Central Park, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Guggenheim, The Whitney Museum, Hunter College, Gracie Mansion and Carl Schurz Park. There were problems, of course; you serve young men and women as much alcohol as they can humanly consume and theres bound to be. Spanning the late 1980s through the late 1990s, . Al Sharpton (right) backstage at Madison Square Garden on June 11, 1974. It seems we could start later than this. The mayoral election of Rudy Giuliani in 1994 would favor the NIMBYs, as he sent task forces around to raid bars, enforce cabaret laws with hefty fines, and even enact Operation Last Call, having police officers carry a meter to check noise levels around closing time. Some of them were lying about their age and I knew it, but I didnt care. Not all these bars were necessarily beloved. In the mornings, usually around 11 a.m., Id go to one of the coffee shops around the corner on Avenue A. Odessa was one, and Leshkos was the other. Foursquare. I was eating very healthfully, which wasnt easy then, seeking out the few macrobiotic restaurants there were. I remember the smell of the theaters so well popcorn and weed. The Landmarks That Made New York a Cultural Capital, Uptown or Downtown? But I had a new Mercedes-Benz, and Id leave it in front of the store when I was in Harlem so people knew they could reach me. There was always someone between apartments or someone coming to town who needed somewhere to stay. The idea of hip-hop hadnt really gelled. When we went out it was to perform. Hed just been released from prison, and his prison memoir, In the Belly of the Beast, had been published that week. This bar, deep inside the St. Regis on Fifth Avenue, is one of the few New York hotel bars whose . Le Relais, on Madison and 63rd, was more everyone my age and everyone from Europe. I would just sit there. Taylor Mead had a running tab at multiple bars. (And Ski Bar even opened a Ski Bar 2 pop-up at Hunter Mountain during the winter. 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 . Richard Gere was a fixture, as well as Diana Ross and Princess Caroline. Wed say, Theyre not up in the morning, so dont go to them or They have kids, so maybe theyre up because the kids wake up. Wed visit people in the morning, early. If I were going out that night, Id go see Garren to fix my hair. My parents were heroin addicts, beatniks. We were then escorted to a quiet table in the rear by the smiling proprietress herself, Ms. Elaine Kaufman, and joined by her good friend, the gregarious publicist Bobby Zarem, a city slicker born in Savannah, Georgia, who told Mr. Carter: Your brother Billy once called me a Yankee because Savannah is north of Plains. Norman Mailer wasnt there that night. I lived above a topless club at White and Church. Thats what I did. I said, Im very happy for you, youre selling a lot of tickets. And thats why Block thinks youll never again see an era like the early 1990s on the Upper East Side. But it had started with a simple idea: What if a bar just let women drink for free? 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. 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. Still, he found ladies night ultimately quite profitable. 1. The old downtown art scene was floundering, while some people, like Robert Mapplethorpe, had risen. I would stay in the clubs, but I wouldnt dance. Maybe he could do your book under that contract. So I went to the Factory and stood at a tall table with Andy and Bob, and Andy went through the dummy. Mornings spent alone, writing in a studio in the West Village. Everything had my initials on it, or the name of somebody else on it; it was really crazy. I made a deal for him to do a cheapo job by trading a Brice Marden plus $10,000. There was an interest beyond becoming ladies who lunch. Everyone talks about the 1970s as being the birth of feminism, but for me, the 80s were really about feminism in practical use. Or his family didnt come, and the landlord put his work in a dumpster. 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. Id go with Andy Warhol, or to dinner and then to Studio 54 afterwards. 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. And then off wed go! Those were days when we ate meat just blissfully. Here, notable locals revisit their routes and routines, from lunch on the Upper East to nighttime sojourns to then-emerging neighborhoods like TriBeCa. Next door to my apartment on East Eighth and Avenue C was the Green Oasis Community Garden, and I got involved with that. One of many iconic Upper East Side eateries owned by the Santo Family Group . 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. Their approach was direct and curt, no frills not self-consciously art-directed no frills, but Old Country, 19th-century no frills. Peter lived on the absolute margins he never had anything. 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. I remember being in someones loft it might have been [artist] Brian Hunts with a group of friends, watching the inauguration on a little black-and-white television. The original Murray Hill restaurant expanded to this location in 2011, and in 2017 added an upstairs cocktail bar to entice a younger crowd. 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. People thought I was a little crazy. Patsy Cline. We just called it The Bar, which morphed into Ze Bar, like with a fake French accent. 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. In the summer of 1981 I was living with Gary Fisketjon, my best friend from college and my future editor at Random House. Mozart. Sam was doing Ragtime, and then he did A Soldiers Play on Broadway. Then it got to be a habit. Tuesday Trivia. They were sort of an island unto themselves, and then you went across the park and you had the Pyramid Club and everything else was bars until you got to the Mudd Club way downtown. I would go to these obscure classes around the city that were mostly for dancers. There was a great camaraderie. Brandy's Piano Bar 68 Bars & Clubs Gay Bars Upper East Side Open now 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. Then it was getting a good time slot at CBGB, so you werent on last and werent on first. By the time midnight came around and I knew my parents were sleeping, I would sneak out the window down onto the porch. I had been starring on Broadway in West Side Story, and I had done the movie Ragtime, which was also coming out, but dance has always been my heartbeat. The Penrose. But those deals enticed 22-year-olds to get out of their apartments. 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. He and I had dinner every night, and a stream of our friends, including Keith Haring and Debbie Harry, would join. The Times considered it a a bit of a fallen Disneyworld, chalking that up to the eras young singles having no pretensions to hipness and a perhaps commendable lack of irony.. After shows at La MaMa, we would go to the gay bar on East Fourth Street and Second Ave. 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. This was a moment in Manhattan history that had never really been seen before and hasnt been seen since. And then we had Robert Rauschenberg, a rascal and a great man. [Wild Style] opened in 1983, [at the Embassy 3] on 47th Street and Broadway. How you doin this morning?, He was young, dressed in jeans, and clearly shocked. My primary motive back then was to put on a show, and anything that slowed me down from that had to be curtailed. 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. Chloe 81 Night Clubs Dance Clubs Bars 6.7 Website Amenities: (212) 677-0067 That is something I have never done with anyone else. Write a Review! I would walk around the neighborhood, go down to 42nd Street and do a lot of movie cruising. So I call LL up and I let her speak to him for a few minutes. The first club I did with Shawn Hausman, The Club With No Name, was on 25th Street. 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. People have bidding wars over apartments that cost millions of dollars. I said, To hell with it! Jasmine Guy auditioned; she wasnt of age yet. One day, I was walking uptown to an appointment just before noon, and coming toward me was Robert Duvall. Bodega 88 Night Clubs Bars Brew Pubs (19) 8.6 Website (212) 799-1602 573 Columbus Ave New York, NY 10024 CLOSED NOW 2. When Canadian-born club impresario Peter Gatien came to New York City in the early '80s, after. So we were really supporting ourselves! 1. The rental apartment upstairs from my mother, with the same layout was recently listed for $9900.00 a month. She and Larry Gagosian had this space, it was a condo loft in a building on West Broadway. Peter was straight out of Damon Runyon and Weegee. And we had Tina Chow, who had such unearthly beauty she would come into a room and just drift. I worked part-time for gallerist Annina Nosei. Brandy's Piano Bar. I came here from Europe at age 22 in the 1960s already married and went to Park Avenue.) Adolph would regale us with stories. The whole neighborhood was a lower-middle class suburban area. 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. At that time, Chelsea was unexplored territory. There were lines around the block the theater starting bumping it up to a second and third screening. When I was 15, I was in the clubs. More likely than not, Id have to go downtown to the garment center to get some fabric or trimming. The area was really no-mans land. I could feel the presence of someone in the room. CBs wasnt the best sound; it was such a long and narrow space that if it was crowded you couldnt really see anything, unless you were standing on the side of the stage, and then you just heard the stage sound. 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. Open in Google Maps. I didnt want to fit in. At night, if I was sitting around and wanted to amuse myself, Id walk down to Columbus and say hello. It was raw: It had been a paper storage facility. Our first goal [as Sonic Youth] was getting a gig at CBGB. And Dynasty. Ive never gotten over Dynasty. And then people started dying. Guerrilla art activities took place all over. By the end of the relationship, I was living there. Everything was different for me. It was sort of 11 to 7. It wasnt actually the best place to hear or see bands, but it was always exciting. 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.