In 1980, I was working as a staff photographer for the New York Post. The Upper East Side isn't the first or second or 12th neighborhood that comes to mind for fun late-night bars, but that doesn't mean you need to head across the park or 70 blocks south just to take 2am shots of tequila with strangers. 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. Wed bring the coffee back to the lot and keep filming. It was pitch-dark. I could feel the presence of someone in the room. The venues didn't matter to me. [1] 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. 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. Four days a week, I was studying at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute down on 15th Street. Clear all filters. But something wasnt right. Thats what happened at Club 57 a lot: We told people, This is the theme. I would stay in the clubs, but I wouldnt dance. There were still hookers, male and female, on the street, and vendors selling potted plants and gigantic stuffed animals under the rubble of the West Side Highway at all hours of the night. When youre at a memorial mourning the passing of a friend or a lover and theyre really young, where do you put that stuff? And thats why Block thinks youll never again see an era like the early 1990s on the Upper East Side. We finished that scene around 6 oclock in the morning. By 1981, I was no longer the manager at [the East Village performance space] Club 57, but I still helped out and performed there a lot. The elevated West Side Highway, meanwhile, was a place you could ski. In 1981, I lived on 79th and West End; it was tiny but very comfortable. We made an altar to a llama, and everyone dressed in kind of Greco-Roman outfits I wore a toga with sequins. Its until you pass out.. Yorkville, Manhattan photos from the 1980s Yorkville, Upper East Side Manhattan in the 1980's, all photos by Gary Lenhart E. 86th St., NYC [Best_Wordpress_Gallery id="204 gal_title="E 86th St NYC Photos"] York Ave., NYC [Best_Wordpress_Gallery id="205 gal_title="York Ave NYC Photos"] 1st. These are the moments, large and small, recounted by 36 writers, artists, fashion designers, musicians and more who. I unlocked the door. We cant put the money out for something this queer. Then [writer and editor] Bob Colacello saw the project and said, Andy Warhol has a three-book deal with Houghton Mifflin. 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. One of his favorite pieces was the Alto Rhapsody of Brahms, sung by Dame Janet Baker. It was [at the Pyramid Club] just one night, October of 1982, before the floodgates opened. There were no movie theaters, bookstores, galleries or photocopy shops, so my entrepreneurial idea, which failed, was to open one, Chelsea Copy. We were outside the Mine Shaft [a raunchy 1970s/'80s gay sex club on Washington Street]. Wednesdays and Thursdays were Ultimate Ladies Night with free Margaritas all evening, not to mention a gratis taco bar during happy hour. The early 80s were sort of the beginning of serious gentrification. Some of the best bars on the Upper East Side cultivate the feeling of "Old New York.". 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 gallery space was on the first floor; our offices were in the basement. It was just shattering, but of course I had to pretend that this was the surprise that I had brought my board to see. draw in the skirts that bring in the suits. As told to Kate Guadagnino,Elizabeth Gumport,Merrell Hambleton and Erin Sheehy. I remember the smell of the theaters so well popcorn and weed. There were lines around the block the theater starting bumping it up to a second and third screening. Otherwise neighborhood wasnt as important as finding a space one guy I knew, the photographer Patrick McMullan, lived in the coat-check room of a former hotel. Or his family didnt come, and the landlord put his work in a dumpster. Before that it had been pot. I was kind of tomboyish, but also pretty poor. Everyone associates me with Jesse Jackson, but actually James Brown is the person I consider most like a mentor. 26 places sorted by traveler favorites Clear all filters 1. It was at Avenue A and St. Marks Place, but the windows looked out on an air shaft, not the park. 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. LaTanya Richardson Jackson (far right) in Spell #7, 1979. I was eating very healthfully, which wasnt easy then, seeking out the few macrobiotic restaurants there were. I had glasses, so I put these flip-up sunglass visors on them. Today the Upper West Side is considered one of the richest, cleanest, and most expensive places to live in New York City. Arent the both of us up early, I said. The artists Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham at their wedding, 1983. There would be 200 people in there. He claims the resort-area locals didnt know what to do with him when he began offering the same all-you-can-drink, ladies night-type deals. The manager, Dorian Mecir, had a heart of gold. Like Clubhouse on York Avenue, which intentionally offered a frat house-like atmosphere. In the 1980s, the restaurant began to decline, as it switched up menu items in favor of more chicken and fish. Im a child of the Midwestern upper-middle class. I lived on the quiet end of Hollis, Queens. And the food at Genroku was really cheap, which was the operative word. Linda Goode Bryant, founder of Just Above Midtown Gallery. My dormitory was at the corner of East 14th Street and Union Square. I had just moved the gallery to Franklin Street in TriBeCa from West 57th Street. East 80s, NY Restaurant Guide. Many of its bartenders have gone on to open their own places. Elsewhere, so he was going back and forth between doing the TV show and the play. In 1981, I suggested a bacchanal a night of pagan merriment as spring was coming. Between 1981 and 1983 I was commuting between New York and a rented apartment in Rome, researching a book about my Italian ancestry that would be called Unto the Sons. My wife, Nan, would visit me in Italy as often as she could, but always briefly. I would write longhand, sit down at the typewriter and type what I had, take those pages across the room to a different chair, sit down and work between the double spaces, do another draft. Thats where youd run into people, share breakfast. After three, four months there, we decided to turn our loft into a nightclub. Lobster Newburg as it looks today. For a while I lived on the Upper West Side, on the parlor floor of a brownstone on 71st Street between Amsterdam and Columbus. The point of ladies night is to get women into bars and get them drunk so that men can score.. hip-hop open mic nights and more than a few not-entirely-cool bars around the Upper East Side. (How many spinal taps can you give to someone under a refrigeration blanket whose fever wouldnt break?) Honestly, my mind was empty, but I wanted to be consumed by that emptiness. There was a studio near First Avenue in the 50s that used a dance technique that was a modified version of Pilates. 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. I had to be at the theater by 7 oclock so I could start my process and get ready before half-hour call. I started spending a third of my time there. My habit must have appeared bizarre to my peers. Youd think he would have been the most outrageous-looking person there, but he looked like a businessman. 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. ), When we go out drinking, we go for broke, one man told The Times. 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. Money was secondary to being able to have this playground we could create. I was preparing that summer to start my first semester at St. Johns University. 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. 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. Guide. My fantasy was to rent one of these theaters on 42nd Street and show my movie alongside Mad Monkey Kung Fu. The demographics of the tony Upper East Side were likewise going through some radical changes post-1987s Black Monday market crash. Are you going to this? It was make coffee, check in and then get busy stripping wood. We were just taken with each other. The bathroom of Area nightclub, which was located on 157 Hudson Street and opened in 1983. 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. Delmonico's, 21-23 William Street (1831-1923, intermittently thereafter) In 1831 Swiss brothers John and Peter Delmonico founded the city's first . Dinner on the Upper East Side with a former president of the United States. The Landmarks That Made New York a Cultural Capital, Uptown or Downtown? And then he asked me again: Dap, whats she doing? In 1981, I had just gotten back from six months on the road with James Brown. The liquor laws werent as strict Ski Bar didnt have to have a kitchen nor serve any food and rent was cheap, both for bar space and the nearby apartments. Team Infatuation August 19, 2022. 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. A group of artists, friends and a few colleagues, including Marcia Tucker, the founder of the New Museum, demolished what remained of a former meatpacking company and converted it into JAMs new space. 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. Id make sure everything was in place and see what the new orders were. Then we hit the clubs: Sound Factory, the Roxy, the Fun House. 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. In the 60s, it was only open to the high class and the rich, like authors up on the Upper East Side. There were problems, of course; you serve young men and women as much alcohol as they can humanly consume and theres bound to be. 1. 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. We were in the habit of throwing parties on Saturday nights. 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. In the '80s, 25 East 61st st. was home to B. Harris & Sons, jeweler to the stars! You could feel it turning, the tackiness beginning to creep in. My first photo lab was called Hy Photo. There was a theater called the Capri that I went to a lot. And Bowie had no idea that was my background. David McDermott and Peter McGough, artists. This was the scene at 2 a.m. on a Friday night in the spring of 1983 when my lover (as we called ourselves then), the film director Howard Brookner, and I threw the first of our preposterous Ladies Parties. 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.
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