While I do not know them personally, James & Karla Murray are renowned in the amorphous community of NYC-centric bloggers, vloggers, photographers, nostalgists and digital storytellers of which I am also a member. Over the 19 (jeezus!) years I’ve been “keeping” this silly blog, I’ve doubtlessly mentioned their name, evangelized their work and re-purposed their striking images countless times.
James & Karla's lovingly composed photographs of New York City corner shops, bistros, pizzerias, record stores, taverns and mom’n’pop concerns of all stripes have become a crucial part of the documentation of our ever-(d)evolving city, and their magisterial books like “Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York,” “New York Nights,” and “Broken Windows: Graffiti NYC” make any coffee table they are placed on that much goddamn cooler. I’ve frequently spied them out and about — Karla’s signature shock of punky, bleach-blonde hair is hard to miss. On the occasions in which I’ve accosted them (“hey, it’s James & Karla!”), they seem to be in a constant state of buoyant, infectious joy. They clearly live their entwined lives like one long, curious adventure, and are insatiable in their quest to see, go, do, experience, capture and create. I find them quite inspiring, in that way.
Imagine my own joy, then, when I was contacted out of the proverbial blue by a publicist representing a new project for Prestel Publishing, that being the forthcoming book by James & Karla titled “Great Bars of New York City.” I relayed an enthusiastic “yes” to the publicist before I’d even finished reading the pitch.
Beyond my tireless affinity for waxing rhapsodic about the New York City of my growingly distant youth and/or my favorite willfully obnoxious, listener-hostile music, I am somewhat sheepishly notorious for my penchant for putting away many a pint of beer, and I quite relish doing so in any number of establishments — from the endearingly seedy to the stuffily stately — across the five boroughs (yes, dear readers, I have consumed beers on Staten Island). “Great Bars of New York City” speaks directly to that ….uhh…. unquenchable thirst with 239 pages of James & Karla’s brilliant photographs, augmented with text by food & culture scribe, Dan Q. Dao. The pictures are crisp, colorful and packed with nuanced detail, matched by Dao’s meticulous historical research and illustrative prose. It’s entirely splendid. If you harbor any of the same predilections as myself, you will not be able to put this book down, as I haven’t.
Yes, I know – technically, the summer has another whole month left to it (the official end of summer is September 22, I am told), but most folks sort of chalk up Memorial Day Weekend as the last gasp. Personally speaking, as noted in the previous post, now that my daughter has left and we’re leaving in about ten days to drop Oliver off for his first year of college, Summer 2024 certainly feels over and done with. As such, I guess it’s time to dust this off. Here we go…
Defining Moment of Summer 2024
This is going to sound super boring, but I can’t really say that there was one. I’d suggest it was either my son’s graduation from high school, signaling the next big step for him or possibly meeting my daughter’s new(ish) boyfriend from London (he turned out to be a nice kid). That’s about it, really.
Best Purchase of Summer 2024
Time for another super boring answer, but I bought a Mag Charger for my iPhone at ye olde Apple Store, and it’s been a complete delight. On a slightly less practical level, I bought myself a new coffee mug I’m quite fond of.
Best Meal of Summer 2024
On the evening of July 13, the same day that someone took a shot at Trump, the wife and I were out at my mom’s place on Long Island and repaired to nearby Baby Moon Pizza in Westhampton for a late-night meal (where Marky Ramone is a regular). We sat at the bar – under a widescreen television endlessly repeating the news of the day – and ate some truly excellent pizza … while politely refraining from any audible commentary about the big story.
Best Concert of Summer 2024
I don’t know if mid-May counts as the summer (I’m pretty sure it doesn’t), but the last show I saw was the mighty Part Chimp at Bowery Electric. They put on an endearingly loud and slovenly performance, and I was very pleased to run into various similarly inclined friends of mine also in attendance.
Best Book You Read During Summer 2024
I didn’t plow through as many books, this summer, as I normally do, but I very much enjoyed Robyn Hitchcock’s memoir, “1967: How I Got There & Why I Never Left,” and I’m currently three-quarters of the way through Griffin Dunne’s “The Friday Afternoon Club.” I also re-read Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain’s magisterial “Please Kill Me” over the course of a weekend, … just because.
Best Movie of Summer 2023
Not a big movie summer, for me, but if I had to pick one, I’d suggest that I quite enjoyed finally seeing “Have You Got It Yet?,” the documentary about Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd, and his slow descent into oblivion.
Best Gift You Received of Summer 2024
For Father’s Day, my wife put a recent New Yorker cover in a frame for me that features an iconic neighborhood fixture.
Biggest Loss of Summer 2024
The passing of musical iconoclasts like James Chance, Pat Collier and Steve Albini knocked the wind out of my sails, especially Albini. I was crestfallen to learn of the incredibly myopic dissolution of the MTV News archives, and I was depressed and disappointed (but not surprised) to learn just recently that St. Vitus in Brooklyn is shuttered for good.
Song That Sums Up the Summer of Summer 2024
I don’t have a grand explanation for either of these, but it’s either “Adrenaline” by the excellently named French trio, We Hate You Please Die, or possibly “Fear is a Man’s Best Friend,” by John Cale. I mostly slept on Cale’s solo career after he was ousted from the Velvet Underground, and lemme tell ya – that was a big mistake. Cale provided the lion’s share of the sneery abrasion and overall weirdness to the Velvets, and they were absolutely never the same without him. He went onto produce fucking crucial records by The Stooges, The Modern Lovers, Nico and Patti Smith, among many others. I’ve only started exploring his sprawling solo catalog, and there is some real gold therein. A friend of mine posted the clip below on Facebook, earlier this summer and it blew me away. Flanked by storied Womble/erstwhile Sex Pistol producer/guitarist Chris Spedding, Cale – dressed like a mid-`70s tennis pro – delivers an emphatic rendition of the title track to his 1974 album that starts off reasonably and slowly becomes droolingly unhinged. Wait for it.
Happiest Memory of Summer 2024
Beyond just spending loads of time with my excellent little family (it’s becoming rarer for us all to be together for very long), I got to meet and chat with R.E.M. at the Songwriters Hall of Fame induction ceremony back in June. That was fun. I was also super pleased to appear in Catherine Araimo’s award-winning “B Sides” documentary.
Saddest Memory of Summer 2024
It hasn’t happened just yet, but I’m expecting to be quite verklempt when we have to say goodbye to Oliver in two weeks.
Scariest Moment of Summer 2024
For a while — not that we’re out of the woods just yet — it was seeming like a fucking given that Trump would be our 47th President. It remains to be seen, but it’s no longer in cement, I’d suggest.
Murray Street, specifically between Church Street and West Broadway, comes with a lot of associations. Its name became fatefully entwined with the events of September 11th, 2001, when it was discovered that battered landing gear from one of the doomed, hijacked planes had fallen into a narrow alley behind 50 Murray Street. Sonic Youth, who were recording a new album at Echo Canyon Studios just across the way at 51 Murray Street, had to understandably abandon their sessions for a while in the wake of that calamitous event. When they were able to return, several weeks later, all of their instruments were covered with a grim patina of dust and debris. They ended up titling the resultant album Murray Street in observance.
Murray Street was also the home to New York Dolls, a holdover strip club from a less salubrious era of Manhattan, unwittingly named after the seminal proto-punk band of the same moniker. Directly across the street from New York Dolls was a large delicatessen called Amish Market, which stretched between Murray Street to Park Place to its south. Legend has it that rapper Cardi B, having recently dropped out of nearby BMCC (Borough of Manhattan Community College), took a job as a cashier at Amish Market. But after coming in late and lipping off to her manager, Cardi B was fired. Distraught, Cardi took her now-former manager’s withering advice and marched across the street to New York Dolls to get a job as a stripper, a vocation for which she earned considerable renown, eventually turning her penchant for performing into a music career. The rest, as they say, is history.
As neighboring TriBeCa started to further gentrify and essentially widen in size (originally, the southern “border” of TriBeCa was arguably considered Chambers Street a couple of blocks to the north of Murray Street), New York Dolls seemed destined be zoned out of existence, given its location in a burgeoning residential neighborhood. Somehow, they managed to hang on, possibly because the club’s owner bought the building in 2016. The club was re-christened FlashDancers Downtown during COVID and is still there here in August of 2024.
Back in late 2016, meanwhile, I started a job just a block or two to the south of Amish Market and, for that matter, New York Dolls. While I never gave any patronage to the latter, I did initially frequent Amish Market to procure my breakfasts, in the mornings. While a very busy and robust operation (I honestly have no recollection if Cardi B was still working there, at the time – I certainly never knowingly saw her, much less any actual Amish folks), I cooled on Amish Market pretty swiftly. The grill from which one might procure, say, an egg & cheese sandwich never operated with any pronounced stealth or efficiency. In time, I abandoned that option in favor of some frankly lackluster oatmeal but ended up giving that up as well after overhearing someone in my office’s elevator saying that they’d gotten food poisoning from Amish Market’s salad bar. From that point forward, I started getting my grub at the presumptuously named Corner Gourmet deli on Murray Street, on the other side of West Broadway. I know.... fascinating, right?
Not quite as resilient to COVID as its scantily clad neighbors at New York Dolls, Amish Market closed permanently in 2020, and has been gutted and dormant ever since.
Here in 2024, I don’t have a lot of reasons to walk up and down Murray Street unless I’m bound for Benares, a decent option for Indian food at 45 Murray. But there is still something my eyes catch on almost every time I’m crossing Murray at West Broadway ---- the Tinsel Toads.
Either left over from some amphibian-themed function held at Amish Market’s second floor at some indeterminate point or part of some anachronistic promotion of some kind (maybe a special on frogs’ legs?), there are two silhouettes of splayed toads in silver tinsel still affixed to an upper window just off the corner, and I simply cannot wrap my head around why they’re still there, let along what purpose they may have once served.
Walk around the byways of Manhattan here in the years after COVID, and it’s impossible not to notice the sheer volume of still-empty storefronts and for lease signs everywhere. While, as I mentioned, I was not the greatest fan of Amish Market, its departure was inarguably a pronounced loss to the surrounding neighborhood, and I want to believe a new venture will occupy that cavernous space before too long.
Until they do, the tinsel toads of Murray Street will doubtlessly maintain their strange, silent vigil.
And here's Sonic Youth playing a 9/11 benefit in October 2001. Thurston Moore prefaces the performance with his thoughts about what was happening for them and for NYC writ large, at the time. Worth a listen...
It might seem inconceivable that I’ve found yet another reason to write about “After Hours” (the last time, I believe, being this recent post), but here we go.
The reason is the somewhat sad news that 296 Spring Street, the building on the southwest corner of Spring and Hudson Streets that served as the location of Club Berlin in “After Hours” (as lengthily discussed here) is no more. As mentioned in that earlier post, there was an actual Club Berlin in SoHo back in the day, but it was over on West Broadway and Grand Street, I believe. Today, there’s a subterranean club on Second Street and Avenue A called Berlin NYC, but that’s not really related, I don’t believe.
In any case, 296 Spring was originally a bar called JJ’s West. Circa the filming of “After Hours,” Scorsese had its exterior painted in a checkerboard fashion to stay in tune, I guess, with the edgy fashion of the times. In later years, that corner became one of the neighborhood’s few delicatessens. It was seemingly the only spot for miles around to procure sundry items like beer and sandwiches in the dead of night.
My most vivid memory of that deli involves a late night in about 1990 at McGovern’s just down the block on Spring Street. Myself, my friend Sam and a young Australian lady named Madelene had gone to go see age-old noise-rock weirdos Alice Donut play. We stepped into that deli, after the show, and --- for whatever reason – bought three more beers with the intention of consuming them while we walked. We did so, but then just stood outside the deli – awkwardly – drinking those beers. The only reason it was awkward was that, at the time, Sam and I were sort of both courting fetching Aussie Madelene, and it was gradually becoming apparent that Sam had “won” this little competition.
The trouble was that he was having kind of a tough time conveying that information. As something of an ice-breaking punctuation, Sam gave the top of my beer bottle a tap with the bottom of his bottle, an annoying little stunt we were wont to do that usually resulted in the recipient’s beer foaming over. As the suds washed over my fingers, I managed to figure out what he was trying to imply, and I retaliated in kind, unwittingly using too much force as I brought the bottom of my bottle down onto his. The narrow rim at the top of his bottle quietly snapped off, leaving behind a sharply edged shard that no one initially noticed.
I stammered out some anemic comment like, “okay, well, I guess I’ll see you guys tomorrow,” leaving them to what I imagined would be doubtlessly amorous shenanigans. As I was turning to walk away, I watched Sam obliviously raise his now-broken bottle back towards his mouth, and time started to move in slow motion. I frantically flung my arm out to intercept the sharp end before it reached Sam’s face, slamming the bottle to the ground where it shattered, and practically tripping over myself in the process. Not knowing that he’d been about to puncture his face (which also would have been entirely my fault), Sam was understandably confused and angry, compounding the already embarrassing circumstances of the whole scenario. I explained the whole sequence of events, which frankly sounded dubious at best, and I’m not entirely sure either of them believed me.
I started skulking in the direction of the subway back to my then-home on the Upper East Side, until I realized that in only a few short hours’ time, I’d have to come back down to SoHo to open up at the art gallery on Mercer Street where I was working, at the time. I ended up drearily walking to the gallery at about four in the morning, unlocking the door and sleeping on a narrow bench behind the rickety metal desk until opening time. It was not a great evening.
Be that as it may, that deli lasted well into the new millennium. I’m not sure when it officially closed up shop, but in the last few years, the façade was all boarded up.
Sure enough, here in late July of 2024, all that remains of the deli and the location of Club Berlin is a hole in the ground.
Today, 296 Spring Street is gone. McGovern's closed at some point and became a club called Sway, although the McGovern's sign still hangs out front. Madelene ended up breezily fooling around with both Sam and I before repairing back to Australia, never to be seen again. Sam moved to Portland, Maine, then to Seattle, got married, had kids and moved to Portland, Oregon, where he still lives today.
I'm seeing a surprising amount of weepy teeth-gnashing on social media about the closing of the Astor Place Starbuck's, which -- to my mind -- as a single establishment, almost singularly typified the disemboweling of the original character of the neighborhood (later further eroded by Kmart, CVS, Raising Cane chicken, Wegman’s, etc. etc.). I still lovingly remember the Astor Riviera (which you can see here, courtesy of the amazing Glenn Losack) that held court on that corner well prior to the arrival of the Seattle coffee chain.
Someone commented in response to this same topic on a friend of mine's Facebook page: "Vampire landlords are sucking the blood out of this city." While, true, yes, they are, the notion of a fucking Starbucks being indicative of "the blood" of this city made me wince.
I’ve wrung this rant-rag dry, by now, but New York City used to be comprised of an amazing network of independent mom’n’pop ventures, not plagued with endless fast-food franchises and big-box retail outlets. That shit was for the strip malls and the suburbs.
But, sure enough, largely thanks to the efforts of this fucker, Starbucks moved into town in the mid-`90s, and proceeded to spread faster than a spilled cup of pumpkin spice latte.
My favorite memory of the Astor Riviera involves a friend of mine and I ordering a pair of milkshakes there, once, on a hot summer day. An endearingly surly waiter brought them over and plunked them down on our table, only without straws. When we spoke up about needing straws, he took two out of his apron and blithely tossed them in our direction from about a yard away, which reduced us to hysterics. So, yeah, maybe the service wasn’t exactly top notch, but I’d take the Astor Riviera over a Starbucks every single day of the apocalypse.
ADDENDUM: Someone on what used to be Twitter actually typed this with a presumably straight face:
End of an era. For old NYU grads, Starbucks on Astor place and the Kmart by it felt like forever places. St. Marks is also not what it used to be.
It almost goes without saying that the next occupant of that stately space will be another bank, a fucking cannabis dispensary or yet another addition to the maddening proliferation of fitness outlets that now define "activewear alley" or the "fitness corridor." Fuck all that.
You can see “coming soon – the Astor Riviera” (misspelled as “reviera”) in this clip from “Downtown `81,” starring Jean-Michel Basquiat and, in this scene, man-from-the-past David McDermott.
Meanwhile, my feelings about the departure of Starbucks are best summed up by this clip of the Brothers Ramone.
I've shared several of these before, but herewith a clutch of photos of mine of the East Village and Lower East Side in the mid-to-late `90s and early 2000's.
It’s not very often that I go drinking in east Midtown, but when I do, … you might just find me at Strangelove, located just a few steps to the east of East 53rd and Third Avenue.
Insufferable music geeks of a certain stripe will doubtlessly recognize that address as the location of one of the Ramones’ more infamous songs. Back in the mid-to-late 70’s, 53rd & Third was a notorious strip of real estate for male, teenaged hustlers looking to turn tricks for quick cash from a very specific demographic. As documented in the prose of late junkie-turned-poet-turned-author-turned-punk rocker Jim Carroll and in song by Dee Dee Ramone, the furtive business transactions of 53rd and Third provided them both with the financial wherewithall to feed their respective drug habits and the inspiration for their art, so to speak, although while Carroll was quite candid about his doings with the cruisers, Dee Dee couched his with a bit of poetic license. While he expresed in Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain’s “Please Kill Me” that he could only write songs through personal experience, the protagonist of “53rd & Third” claims to be a Green Beret that served in Vietnam before he stabs his John to prove he’s not a “sissy.” I can’t honestly say if Dee Dee ever stabbed anyone, but he certainly never served in Vietnam. But anyway…
To stand on the corner of 53rd and Third Avenue today, you’d never know such activities ever took place there. But continue walking towards Second Avenue, and you will eventually pass the stoop of Strangelove. I can’t honestly remember when they first opened their doors, but they’ve probably been open for about ten years, maybe? (If you know, do write in). Taking their name, presumably, from either the Depeche Mode single or Stanley Kubrick’s fabled anti-war satire (or possibly both), Strangelove has a raison d'être that is pretty straightforward – “Cheap Beer/Punk Rock.” Being that I’m an avowed connoisseur of both, you can imagine why the place might be a favorite of mine, albeit in a neighborhood I’m less likely to be hanging around in.
I actually drove past Strangelove earlier this week during a woefully expensive yellow cab ride (learn from my mistakes, people), and was suddenly struck by something.
Back in 2012, I’d come across a photograph of the legendary Johnny Thunders, the former guitarist of the New York Dolls and The Heartbreakers, (whose birthday it was yesterday), stepping off of a stoop on a midtown street (although the original source material wrongly identified that street as St. Marks Place). After my initial post, my comrade Bob Egan of PopSpots weighed in with usual authoritative aplomb and extensive photo documentation to support his declaration that the building Thunders was depicted exiting was 229 East 53rd Street. See that post here.
In 2012, 229 East 53rd Street was a wine bar called Cello. Here in 2024, however, Cello has since moved across the street, and 229 East 53rd Street is now … wait for it … Strangelove.
If they don’t already, I’m pretty sure the folks at Strangelove would love to know that. Here’s that picture now:
In the wake of so many conflicting reports, I decided to swing by the Corner Bistro this morning, and I'm happy to relay that they are indeed back open for biz, beers, booze and -- wait for it -- burgers.
I spoke with the owner, who was loading new supplies into their kitchen. As speculated, they were indeed re-doing the floors, but after "some idiot on Barstool" started the rumor, he'd been inundated with texts and calls and panicky emails, etc.
In any case, it's still goin'. Go tonight, why don't you?
It was unconfirmed as I posted this, but credible reports seem to be asserting that the Corner Bistro, the iconic West Village corner bar largely considered to serve “the best burgers in New York City,” has closed for good, soon to be replaced by a coffee joint of some kind. Like we need another of those.
I can’t remember the first time I went to the Corner Bistro, but it was invariably during my college years, lured by the legendary burgers and cheap beer. Indeed, their burgers were completely goddamn swell, and it was a very cool place to drink and hang out in. I vividly remember going there with friends from both my high school and college, my fellow abused interns from my SPIN days and, later, the woman who’d become my wife and, later than that, my kids. I remember being spotted “snogging” with my future Mrs. there by the friend of a friend. I also remember having a burger and a beer there by myself on the early evening when I heard my stepfather had passed away.
Yes, in more recent years, it was almost dependably too packed to get into, but I don’t think the quality of their fare ever dipped. The last time I went to the Corner Bistro was probably around last Christmas with my great friend Rob and my son Oliver. It’s hard to fathom that it won’t be there anymore. Like so many New York City institutions -- like the Cedar Tavern or the Roseland Ballroom or Gem Spa or Lucky Strike or fuckin' CBGB -- it seemed like the kind of place that would be there forever.
Evidently, not so.
For the doubters among you, here are two shots snapped by Greenwich Village Grapevine member David Drumgold earlier this week.
In about 1997, one of my best friends, Rob D. – then still a freshly-minted husband to my friend Joanne (I unwittingly introduced them, some years prior), decided that he and his new bride were swiftly outgrowing the five-story walk-up in the East Village they’d been renting. Technically, Rob had moved into Joanne’s apartment on East 9th Street after hopscotching around between Manhattan and his original home turf in Pleasantville (where, we were fond of pointing out, Ace Frehley had allegedly lived). Prior to all this, Joanne had lived in an apartment on East 4th Street that, we learned well after the fact, had also played host, at an earlier point, to unlikely neighbors Madonna and Peter Missing of Missing Foundation.
Regardless, they needed more space, so Rob & Joanne said goodbye to the East Village and decamped to Hell’s Kitchen, right off the “The Deuce” at 303 West 42nd Street, just a few steps to the west of 8th Avenue. The building’s biggest claim to … er … fame was that it played host to the notorious Show World Center, an age-old “sex emporium” from the neighborhood’s fabled bad old days.
Circa `97, while the surrounding area was sharply in the throes of some seriously intense gentrification (largely courtesy of the authoritarian reign of Mayor Giuliani), I believe Show World was still conducting its usual business, which largely consisted of live-sex shows (I shouldn’t have to explain to you what this entails) and floors lined with these strange adjoining booths (see pic below, courtesy of Jeremiah Moss' Vanishing NY).
“Dancers” – for want of a better term – would wait outside of these closet-sized booths, and when a patron expressed an interest, they would each enter their respective halves (kind of like confessionals in a church). The patron would summarily enter tokens he’d have procured upon entry to the premises into a slot, and a hatch would ascend like a curtain between the two halves of the booth, revealing the “dancer” on the other side of a doubtlessly smeary windowpane. To keep the hatch from descending and obscuring full view of whatever the “dancer” might be doing, the patron would have to keep pumping tokens into the slot. Eventually, he’d either run out of tokens … or steam, so to speak, … and the hatch would slam shut. End of show.
Here's a great shot of the 8th Avenue entrance, as captured by Gregoire Alessandrini.
While all that was going on, meanwhile, Rob and Joanne were setting up their new home in a comparatively spacious and bright one-bedroom several flights above. Right off the living room/open-kitchen area, there was a wide fire-escape, where we’d often hang out for hours, drinking beers and talking nonsense. If you climbed those fire escape stairs, you were treated to an amazing roof-top with a full, birds-eye view of the entirety of the surrounding Hell’s Kitchen. That part of it was legitimately magickal.
Newly enamored of Hell’s Kitchen, I picked up a copy of “The Westies” by T.J. English, an exhaustive -- but truly excellent -- history of Hell’s Kitchen’s era under the reign of the titular Irish mob, led by colorful figures like Mickey Featherstone, Jimmy Coonan, Mickey Spillane and their bloodthirsty cohort. That book loosely served as the inspiration for the similarly inclined 1990 film “State of Grace,” starring Sean Penn, Gary Oldman and Ed Harris. Like a pair of green-gilled dilettantes, Rob and I started exploring many of the neighborhood’s less salubrious drinking establishments like Mr. Biggs (formerly owned by mobster Jimmy Coonan as the 596 Bar, where Coonan had rival mobster and loan shark Carles “Ruby” Stein murdered and beheaded), The Savoy, McHale’s, Siberia Bar, The Bellvue Bar, Druids, Rudy’s, The Holland Bar and several others, grimly romanced by the neighborhood’s already swiftly eroding character.
As it happened, however, Rob & Joanne’s stay in their adopted Hell’s Kitchen ended up being pretty short. After only about a year and a half, they decamped to City Island in the Bronx (right across the water from haunted Hart Island) and then, very shortly after that, to New London, CT, the former stomping grounds of Rob’s literary hero, Eugene O’Neill. In the grand scheme of things, Rob & Joanne had only been in Hell’s Kitchen for barely an instant, but the changes to that neighborhood (from a grimy sleaze Mecca in a lawless badlands into a Disneyfied tourist trap) during their brief tenure were pronounced.
Once R&J had split, my journeys into the heart of Hell’s Kitchen decreased in frequency until I took a job – briefly, as it would turn out – at MTV News Online in neighboring Times Square in the mid-to-late 2000’s. Now, almost two decades later, I barely recognize Hell’s Kitchen when I’m back in it. The very name itself – Hell’s Kitchen – has come under fire, in more recent years, from real estate developers trying to re-christen the neighborhood in an arguably more inviting/less inflammatory manner.
Since those days in the `90s, most of the bars I cited have vanished, notably The Savoy, McHale’s, Siberia, The Bellevue Bar and Druids. I believe the Holland Bar might also have closed but am not sure. Rudy’s and Mr. Biggs are still there, last I checked. In the summer of 1998, just prior to meeting the lady who I’d later marry, I had a truly surreal and disastrously Kafka-esque blind date that culminated in Mr. Biggs. Suffice to say, that ridiculous experience left me disinclined to ever want to return to that undoubtedly cursed space (even though, today, it’s just another douchy sports bar). Bad vibes, to say the least.
But, again, this is just my experience. For a more nuanced, detailed and authoritative take on Hell’s Kitchen, check out this documentary below…
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