[1] I was breaking up with somebody a long, slow breakup. Id go with Andy Warhol, or to dinner and then to Studio 54 afterwards. Up the street from my apartment was 8 B.C., a club run by two friends of mine. It was crazy. When Flashdance came out in 1983, Paramount put me up in the Carlyle Hotel to do promotion. I had glasses, so I put these flip-up sunglass visors on them. She rehabilitated a homeless man who panhandled outside the shop, and he became a model salesman. Everyone writes that I was his tour manager, but thats not what it was. Amura ($$) Japanese Menu Available. Thats what I did. Sorry.. It became a whole sh*t show, recalls Keith Block. Kamalis clothes cleverly combined athletic wear and fabric with high-fashion cuts and silhouettes, perfectly embodying the era. We became sort of like brothers. Originally part of the Pillsbury Corp., the restaurant was founded in 1976. And then he asked me again: Dap, whats she doing? It was pitch-dark. Al Sharpton (right) backstage at Madison Square Garden on June 11, 1974. Courtesy of John Kelly, photograph by John Dugdale, John Kelly, performance and visual artist. We had a studio on Bleecker near Seventh Avenue. In the 60s, it was only open to the high class and the rich, like authors up on the Upper East Side. We had a bar and some makeshift situation where people would collect the door charge, $5 or $10 maybe. If you just wanted to grab a sandwich, youd go to Burger Heaven. This kind of activity is highly socially ordered: You dont barge in on other people, thats all part of it. 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. Points of interest include Central Park, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Guggenheim, The Whitney Museum, Hunter College, Gracie Mansion and Carl Schurz Park. Come be a part of it. The doors would open and things would get going by 10, and by midnight it would be raging. This morning was no different than any other. Peter was straight out of Damon Runyon and Weegee. If I were going out that night, Id go see Garren to fix my hair. I never wore gold jewelry I didnt want to be a target. 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. And, of course, so did the men. 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. At one end of my block was J.G. I worked in my office at home, an eight-room walk-up on the Upper West Side. Upper East Side. It didnt have a name. A few blocks away was the Ninth Street Bakery. 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. 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. Hey, lets go get drunk at a bar.. 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. 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. Theyre exploiting women by using them to attract men, claimed its spokeswoman, Daveda Copeland. See more ideas about memories, restaurant, howard johnson's. People would drop change in your hands, turn their heads when you tried to kiss them. Then I would go to Macys and go to the $10 rack. Team Infatuation August 19, 2022. Peter lived on the absolute margins he never had anything. It was just shattering, but of course I had to pretend that this was the surprise that I had brought my board to see. My fantasy was to rent one of these theaters on 42nd Street and show my movie alongside Mad Monkey Kung Fu. 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. 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. And then we had Robert Rauschenberg, a rascal and a great man. Some of them were lying about their age and I knew it, but I didnt care. Id get to the gallery late afternoon. I was sneaking out. It was almost a surreal experience, because I had the feeling that this person is only vaguely here. In 1980, I was working as a staff photographer for the New York Post. 1442 1st Avenue, New York, NY . I was straight-edge, so if I snuck out, I was all right, because I wasnt hungover the next day like the other kids. As told to Caroline Bankoff,Heather Corcoran,Nancy Hass and M.H. 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. The artists Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham at their wedding, 1983. We didnt know how the virus transmitted. I lived on the quiet end of Hollis, Queens. And Im not a corporate client, so please give me a break. Spanning the late 1980s through the late 1990s, . Once I saw someone selling a broken light bulb. Its until you pass out.. Someone broke the front glass and stole the poster. 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! 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. Some of them were open 24 hours a day, or they were closed maybe four hours a day for cleaning. Todd Jorgensen ran the Xerox machine in Jamie Canvas, the art supply store in SoHo everybody went to. The Ladies Auxiliary of the Lower East Side sort of a punk rock version of my mothers Junior League group, which I started with some other girls from the East Village hosted several events at the club. The old downtown art scene was floundering, while some people, like Robert Mapplethorpe, had risen. Or wed go around to try to get breakfast from our friends, ringing doorbells to see who was up. Even though every single record Id put out up until then was gold, platinum or multiple platinum, Diana was the first time Id ever worked with a big star. Id paid high school kids to go on Thursday afternoons after school and hand out fliers. The apartment, at 1060 Fifth Avenue, at 87th Street, was like a fantasy apartment huge, with a view of the reservoir. Guthrie Inn on the other hand perfectly captures how living on the Upper East Side feels in reality; a bit isolated and quiet at times, a haven from downtown at other times, comfortable yet on the rise, and full of an interesting cast of characters. They were more McDermotts friends, because my friends were working in fashion and they were like, Oh, get a job, bitch! Pizza with Duck Sausage wins quick stardom. How you doin this morning?, He was young, dressed in jeans, and clearly shocked. Certainly at night, few people were there, and few were there on the weekends. Carver came by, down from Syracuse on some publishing business. 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.. An important place to have breakfast was Buffas, on the corner of Lafayette and Prince youd see Jim Jarmusch and Jonathan Demme in the booths there. Many of the bars of this era were, in fact, themed, and sometimes cheesily so. 1567 2nd Ave, New York, NY Fleming's was a fun Irish bar on the upper east side in the 1980s & 1990s, up until it closed in 1994. 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. Hearing hip-hop on the street, minimalist new music, free jazz it all added to this fabric that was a landscape. There were very few artists there. Meanwhile, 25 new bars had opened between 76th and 96th Streets in the first years of the 1990s as well. And if I missed it, I felt really bad. Not only did we dress in wigs and dresses from 14th Street, but we took on personas to match. And we had Tina Chow, who had such unearthly beauty she would come into a room and just drift. Then you checked to see if there was anything in the theater papers for auditions. When he got sick, we were in a downward spiral for a year and a half. Thats where youd run into people, share breakfast. Their approach was direct and curt, no frills not self-consciously art-directed no frills, but Old Country, 19th-century no frills. Like the Womens Christian Temperance Union. Id been divorced and on my own since 1977 I had started the business with my husband a decade earlier and it felt like women were waking up. It was frequented by many celebrities, especially actors and authors. And Silk Road. I was in my early 30s, and I had Tatiana and Alex, my children, so I didnt stay out until dawn like I had in the 1970s. 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. Things were 50 times as bad in Brooklyn as they were in Manhattan. In 1981, I lived on 79th and West End; it was tiny but very comfortable. Studio 54 was over after the owners, Steve [Rubell] and Ian [Schrager], got arrested in 1980, so we all migrated to the Mudd Club, on White Street. People like Jean-Michel [Basquiat] would come in, who was somebody you knew from Tier 3 and the Mudd Club; someone your age. David McDermott and Peter McGough, artists. 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. Gay and straight people would party together. You would have Rock Steady Crew and Zulu Nation on one side of the room, and this notorious gang called the Ball Busters on the other. The Upper East Side was the place to party in the early 1990s, recalls Jennifer Capobianco, a bartender from the era. The idea of hip-hop hadnt really gelled. 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]. I would get some bus money, some pizza money, some soda money and some money to be able to get into a jam. A chance encounter with David Bowie at a downtown nightclub. 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. I lived at the Olympic Tower, and Halston was downstairs.. 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. 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. Beware salivating yuppie swells there for Ladies Night, the magazine wrote (fondly) of Mannys Car Wash, a Chicago-style blues club on East 87th Street. The elevated West Side Highway, meanwhile, was a place you could ski. We would go till 4 a.m. Hell, we would go past 4 a.m. It was raw: It had been a paper storage facility. Thurston Moore would take me to see hardcore groups like Black Flag. It's now a Samsung store. I really had no business buying my loft on West Broadway in those years. 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. I had a loft downtown on Walker Street, one of the first buildings that went on loft strike. I would go to these obscure classes around the city that were mostly for dancers. 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. Dinner on the Upper East Side with a former president of the United States. Youd have Chinese opera and then some kind of Russian circus act and then a punk band and then a drag queen. $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. We had a prom, a debutante ball, a ladies wrestling night. And I just loved that experience. Id make sure everything was in place and see what the new orders were. I got so tired of getting mugged on my way home. My primary motive back then was to put on a show, and anything that slowed me down from that had to be curtailed. There were no movie theaters, bookstores, galleries or photocopy shops, so my entrepreneurial idea, which failed, was to open one, Chelsea Copy. Carina Finn July 6, 2022. There was a place called Columbus, on Columbus Avenue and 69th Street. I got my apartment through Stanley Strychacki, the founder of Club 57. 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. 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.