“This was Andy Warhol’s Factory, Studio 54 and the Algonquin Round Table all rolled into one,” said Brad Vogel. The 70 or so people gathered on Broadway just north of Bleecker Street looked confused and a little skeptical about the empty storefront. “This was ‘the place.’. Not in this building here, but under your feet,” Mr.
When social media lit up earlier this month as the new season of “RuPaul's Drag Race” was announced, it was a clear sign that drag is more popular than ever and a permanent part of today's pop culture landscape. But that wasn't always the case: Back in the 1980s, the centuries-old art form of men donning dresses was fading during the hostile, conservative culture of the Reagan years.
A disco-theme bar, Night Fever, serves vintage cocktails in the Museum of Sex in Manhattan. Nina Westervelt for The New York Times. The never-ending fascination with 1970s New York night life takes a more tangible form at Night Fever, a temporary bar and gallery that opened last November at the Museum of Sex.
Stanley Kubrick’s solar-system-spanning epic 2001: A Space Odyssey got its start in this corner of the universe; New York City was the director’s hometown. In 1964, the Bronx-raised auteur wrote novelist Arthur C. Clarke in Sri Lanka, asking him to come to New York and meet about a new project. Over the course of a few months, Clarke stayed at the Chelsea Hotel as the two met at Kubrick’s office, went to movies in Times Square and strolled through Central Park to discuss ideas for a film that would take a groundbreaking approach to science fiction.
The black-and-white photo shows two buff young men in matching “I ♥ NY” tank tops, buzz cuts and striped athletic socks, standing in a middle of a deserted Manhattan street, their muscular arms intertwined in a tender embrace. It’s not clear if they are new friends, old lovers or something in between.
On a quiet Sunday night in Bushwick, Brooklyn, a few dozen scruffy men and slim women in their 20s gathered inside a converted warehouse, ordering locally brewed pints around a marble-topped bar. It was a scene that plays out in countless bars throughout this postindustrial neighborhood. But then a bartender suddenly yelled, “Now seating for the 7 p.m. screening of ‘Spring Breakers.’”.
Coney Island is a long way to go for a party. But that didn’t stop nearly 500 people from making the trek last Saturday night for the disc jockey Nicky Siano, the music pioneer who helped spawn the 1970s disco scene with his club the Gallery and a stint spinning at Studio 54. He was turning 60. Revelers of all ages, from teenagers with skateboards to older people with canes, converged at the Eldorado Auto Skooter pavilion on Surf Avenue.
The opening night scene at Sid Gold’s Request Room, a new piano bar on West 26th Street in Chelsea, was reminiscent of the 1950s, with well-dressed men in colorful sport coats and women in vintage sheath dresses sipping cocktails around a baby grand. The music, however, was not. Instead of Sinatra, the pianist and co-owner Joe McGinty played the Smiths’s “There is a Light That Never Goes Out.”.
Before the trendy hotels moved in, the meatpacking district was a curious place, with hidden spots behind its battered industrial visage. Sebastian Nicolas, 35, an original partner from the Box, the burlesque club on the Lower East Side, hopes to bring a little of that mystery back with a live music “listening room” called Subrosa.
“There are eight million people in New York City, and three million of them are drunk,” said Ben Maters, 24, an actor and bartender at Fat Baby, a multilevel bar on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side. This wasn’t a wizened mixologist’s quip but a scripted line, declaimed while standing atop the bar as his character, Caleb, kicked off a two-hour marathon of 25 one-act plays called “Play/Date” set in the bar’s banquettes and on the bar stools on a recent Wednesday night.
Fontaine Capel and Matthew Lusk participating in a drink-and-draw night, at Macri Park in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Sunday nights used to be slow at Macri Park, a no-nonsense neighborhood bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. But on a recent evening, patrons jammed into banquettes and sat on the floor, all eyeing Danny Casner, a 28-year-old tattooed bike messenger who wore nothing but black American Apparel underwear and checkered Vans.
Michael Vinereanu, a k a Johnny Panic, performs at a boylesque class at Triskelion Arts Center in Brooklyn. ON the third floor of a former factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, six men in jockstraps crowded around a dance-studio mirror as Chris Harder, 26, demonstrated the fine art of glittering a nipple.
