Sometimes it could just be too blasting. It was a very different kind of neighborhood from the one I grew up in in Harlem just starting to be gentrified. A lot of very creative, brilliant people were living in rough places downtown, which was dangerous but cheap, but I never did. Id go for two, three, four hours and have a fairly good time. James Brown and the Rev. Steve Landiss photograph for fashion designer Norma Kamalis 1981 Sweats campaign. It was before he was onstage and all that; he was just starting out. I didnt want to fit in. Hear Eric Goode remember when he found out about AIDS: I enrolled at the Parsons School of Design in 1982. And then eventually some surface decoration with tucks and treatment Id take the fabric and just sew in any direction. So the artists would often have free rein, and would sometimes sneak up to the roof, especially for the Fourth of July and other events like that. It would be drag queens with punk kids, musicians and artists everyone. We considered the food too depressingly awful. 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. Come be a part of it. The doors would open and things would get going by 10, and by midnight it would be raging. People like Jean-Michel [Basquiat] would come in, who was somebody you knew from Tier 3 and the Mudd Club; someone your age. I lived and still live in a large duplex at the corner of Park Avenue and 80th Street, in a 1907 building designed by Delano and Aldrich. The demographics of the tony Upper East Side were likewise going through some radical changes post-1987s Black Monday market crash. Hed walk in and be perfectly comfortable with the Duke of Edinburgh. It was all happening at the same time; there was a lot of yin and yang. I made sure there was a hot tub in there. My contemporary, the writer Ed [Edmund] White, had the apartment next door. I couldnt work in color because I couldnt afford to make color prints. I lived above a topless club at White and Church. Lobster Newburg as it looks today. And I just loved that experience. I committed the tapes to memory; I would do them over and over. 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. It made me immobile. I came here from Europe at age 22 in the 1960s already married and went to Park Avenue.) My habit must have appeared bizarre to my peers. It is demeaning to women to be treated this way, claimed Long Island man Richard Savino in 1984. It needs to be said that, technically, ladies nights were illegal in New York and had been so for quite a time. 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. Queens: PS1, the site of the era-defining exhibit New York/New Wave (1981); Queensbridge Houses, public housing that counted Juice Crew founder Marley Marl and rapper members Roxanne Shant and M.C. Remembering the Lost Gay Bars of NYC - PAPER I found them very original, underivative of the 60s or 70s they had a cleanness and a strength to them. We went from our home in the East 60s, with Jimmy Carter and me in one car (driven by a member of the Secret Service) and Nan and Rosalynn in another. East 80s, NY Restaurant Guide - Menus and Reviews - MenuPix New York City My first photo lab was called Hy Photo. It was an incredible contrast from the last time I had lived in New York, when I was 17, during the summer of 1981, in a $500-a-month sublet loft that my boyfriend and I had found paging through our bible, the call to another life The Village Voice in his basement in Evanston. Ann Magnuson, actress and performance artist. Im a child of the Midwestern upper-middle class. 16 Best Upper East Side Restaurants - Eater NY I was like, Oh cool, youre doing art too? Bands would put up fliers all over SoHo; there were wheat-paste fliers everywhere. Upper East Side. Block opened it with a partner, Adam Singer, when he was just 22; he had worked at nearby Brother Jimmys for just two weeks before getting fired and deciding he could run a better bar. Someone broke the front glass and stole the poster. Bars & Clubs Gay Bars. I tried to write every single day, first thing in the morning, 10 a.m. Women would crowd around oil drums turned into tables and, while standing on sawdust floors, pound cheap beer and well liquor. A chance encounter with David Bowie at a downtown nightclub. Thats why I started wearing silver hoop earrings. The restaurants where mobsters gathered, ate and got murdered It was a very quiet audience. It became a whole sh*t show, recalls Keith Block. Then we packed up our stuff, went back to the coffee shop to have breakfast and headed home. Youd sit at the bar and someone would say: Hey, were going to Danceteria. Or theyd have a car and youd find yourself in the East Village, which was a total war zone, with junkies passed out and men building fires in trash cans. Then it got to be a habit. 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. (What a loft was, I wasnt entirely sure.) Friday's location on the Upper East Side. It's now a Samsung store. 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. One of his favorite pieces was the Alto Rhapsody of Brahms, sung by Dame Janet Baker. And thats why Block thinks youll never again see an era like the early 1990s on the Upper East Side. The rental apartment upstairs from my mother, with the same layout was recently listed for $9900.00 a month. 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. Or worse. On NYC's Upper East Side, Ladies' Night Ruled the '90s - VinePair My first loss was my partner, around the time Grace Kelly died in 1982. That was the best place to get fresh bread and rugelach and sweets. We made an altar to a llama, and everyone dressed in kind of Greco-Roman outfits I wore a toga with sequins. All the music [in the atelier on 125th Street] came from the VCR. Whats she doing now? She was like [hyperventilating]. LaTanya Richardson Jackson (far right) in Spell #7, 1979. 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. Everyone was very excited. Howard was Lili LaLeen, a German film actress in a vintage Mary McFadden. 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 also had a tiny place on 12th Street between Greenwich and Washington the top back room of a falling-apart townhouse that the owner was renting out. Le Relais, on Madison and 63rd, was more everyone my age and everyone from Europe. David McDermott and Peter McGough, artists. They were on 51st or 52nd between Fifth and Madison. I worked in my office at home, an eight-room walk-up on the Upper West Side. His show was on at 1 a.m., after Johnny Carson. Others would drop by out of curiosity and wonder what was on my mind. 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. A lot of it was crack. I was living at almost the exact point where the Village meets the East Village, in the Colonnade Row building, right across the street from the Public Theater. And they said, Yeah, you can have that they werent even thinking about it. He slowed and turned around: Yeah, you too.. And then we had Robert Rauschenberg, a rascal and a great man. We were just taken with each other. We would get on at the ramp at Chambers Street and ski up to Spring Street to the Ear Inn. 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. See menus, reviews, ratings and delivery info for the best dining and most popular restaurants in East 80s. Ann Magnuson performing at Kenny Scharfs opening atop his Ultima Suprema Deluxa Cadillac on November 14, 1983. The venues didn't matter to me. 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. He wasnt exactly made of money, though he fished through a bucket of change every morning to buy his one meal of the day, a bagel but Block claims this was a time when it didnt cost a ton to open and run a bar in Manhattan. Courtesy of John Kelly, photograph by John Dugdale, John Kelly, performance and visual artist. Anyone can read what you share. It was a real neighborhood place, with people dropping in and hanging out, and a sort of day care center for neighbors who wanted us to watch their kids. 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. 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. The front window was a queer Mount Rushmore, with the heavyweights looking out onto the street: Rene Ricard, Bill Rice, Peter Hujar, Paul Thek. Gracie Terrace, New York, NY (212) 535-3140 (212) 535-3140. If they didnt give us any food, wed go off to the next person. We didnt know how the virus transmitted. People would drop change in your hands, turn their heads when you tried to kiss them. The writer Gay Taleses social calendar for October 1983. Everything had my initials on it, or the name of somebody else on it; it was really crazy. Somebody might have called during the night to say they might have job opportunities, so you always checked your machine. I will never forget the day, because I didnt tell my mother and father that I was going to make a record. His shoulders dropped and he said, Yeah. We looked at each other again when I opened the door for him; we were each wondering what had just happened. The painter David Salle in his Manhattan studio, 1983.