After fire damage temporarily shut down the place earlier this year, e's Bar is back in business, boasting new banquettes and the . Another location of The Mermaid Inn, another perfect first date spot. So pleaseif youre going to write something about this neighborhood that means so much to so many of us, please dont generalize and please check your facts! Neighbors watched out for each other, and most of the people who lived there stayed for generations, and most of the stores were family-owned businesses. There are cocktail bars with live music, lots and lots of sports bars, and wine bars with people on first, second, and fiftieth dates. From melees to muggings to serial killers to a spiritual revival. We were absolutely terrified. It's just happening. i would love to hear some more stories. A couple of additions (please forgive any repetitions from other comments I havent read every single one.). The drug store on 74th and Broadway was Ritob. Download Upper West Side Nyc stock photos. Have a romantic date at the Arthouse Bar. Today the Upper West Side is cleaner with higher rents and upwardly mobile folk who seem to rent for a couple of years before buying big houses in Montclair or Maplewood. There was a reason Verdi park was called Needle Park. Thanks! But west end was great, and also 86th was great all the way over to the park. This place also does Happy Hour deals every day until 8pm, including half off the whole bar on weekdays and half off beers on weekends. The reclamation of New York City from the forces of criminal chaos and social decay is a familiar tale by now. Food City was also where I dreamt of having my first jobs first as bagger, then aspiring to cashier. May 6, 2009. Restaurant 222 - on 79th St. Zabars was open until midnight. In part that was because the then-senescent New York Post hadnt brought new life to tabloid journalism and forced the fat and happy and rich New York Daily News to follow it, which is what happened in the summer of 1977, when the Son of Sam went on his rampage. at least up until the 90s. Hello. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); document.getElementById( "ak_js_2" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. One could argue either side, and that inspired me to write about it. It was a great neighborhoodbut you had to know which blocks you should avoid! It was known for its burgers, hot dogs, and milkshakes. We neighborhood kids came to call him, with the horrible bluntness of adolescent boys, Charlie Chop-off. Another one had South American clothes but the name has vanished from mind. Here is a nice trip down memory lane of the 1980's! And in part it was due to the difficulty the media had, even in the wake of the 1960s, reporting on the details of the crime (the New York Times, in every one of the fiveonly five!articles it published on the case, referred vaguely to sexual mutilation). Also The Golden Pan restaurant, Levy Bros Stationers, Universal Health Center, the New Yorker Theater and, upstairs, the New Yorker Bookshop. @Janet, I agree. Broadway has become one huge outdoor mall. You'll be lead upstairs to a fancy little space with luxurious seats and bespoke cocktails. I too went to PS 166 and JHS 44 and remember John Gatto, despite graduating in the 60s Just wanted to drop some UWS names from then: Pick & Pay 87th and Bway- TipToe Inn Davega Sports Hermans Toys- and Sam Graham Hardware Mitchells Wines & Spirits Lichtman Pastries or Cake Masters were the places surrounding the Belnord Apts. Italian $$$$ Upper West Side. Chloe 81 Night Clubs Dance Clubs Bars 6.7 Website Amenities: (212) 677-0067 Sure there were some muggings (mostly stealing our bus passes) but nothing serious. By the early 1970s, 20 to 25 percent of American couples had met at a bar, according to Stanford University research. Re: I stay away from the South West corner of W. 71st Street as rowdy teenagers hang around in front of MacDonalds and create a nuisance.. I always saw it as culturally vital and architecturally beautiful. Long gone is the divine Eclair Bakery on W. 72nd St. and the Royale. In the late 1980s, many of New York's megaclubs closed down as a result of the economic crash of 1987. 06/27/16. 210 W 94th St, New . The Nickel Bar all the pre-AIDS era gay bars that made the UWS a gay mecca to rival the Village, and that drew lots of interracial couples to move in and renovate buildings. This map of the Upper West Side shows its location relative to the rest of Manhattan. The tacos are supplemented with other obvious sports bar snacks, including corn on the cob, guac and chips, flautas, plus burritos, quesadillas, and tortas. Ernies, and the best pizza parlor in the city, Vinnys on Amsterdam between 73 and 74th. When we came outside onto west 81 street the person who was supposed to meet us and take us home had not shown up. Three conservative synagogues in a 15-block radius from 100th Street to 86th Street had fallen into decrepitude and near-dormancy. Last Spring, a year ago this month, I watched as a staple of the neighborhood closed, Food City. Local artists sold their wares and the kids tried not to kill themselves in the slightly deflated Moon Bounce. That was true between broadway and central park west. Kelly Ramos: Favorite wings in the entire city. At the same time, 86th & Amsterdam was notorious for being crime ridden. Once the Jets are down by 24 and you want to focus on something else, start working your way through the huge menu of bar food. Amsterdam Ale House plays sports on a few TVs, but it feels less like a sports bar and more like a casual neighborhood spot than any other place on this stretch of Amsterdam Ave. We also went on amazing trips with him, including the Rocky Horror Picture show on Broadway. What about doing a simple Lexis-Nexis search? 80s Night Clubs in New York City, NY About Search Results Sort: Default All BBB Rated A+/A Coupons View all businesses that are OPEN 24 Hours 1. If you want to pay college prices for that pitcher of Shock Top, come during Happy Hour (until 8pm every day). These are the moments, large and small, recounted by 36 writers, artists, fashion designers, musicians and more who. In the early '80s, Mimi Sheraton rhapsodized over the apps: " [The] possibilities are extraordinary, whether you choose the puffy, crisp-crusted Alsatian onion tart, the fine juniper-perfumed duck. We came to wonder if New York was a place that stunted human possibility instead of expanding it.. So my small city is the same and yet it is not the same, because it is today, in almost every way, better. I was born in 1965 and moved away in 1977 (returned later). The space is about the size of a studio apartment, so we wouldnt recommend bringing a group, but its a decent place to watch sports alone or with a friend, especially before 7pm when drinks are half off. From our award-winning Vine Burger to our Cobb Salad, Roasted Cornish Hen, Seafood and Steaks, Madison & Vine satisfies the cravings of the city's most discerning diners. The citys population shrank by nearly a million people between 1960 and 1980, with 300,000 gone from Manhattan over the course of those 20 years. At about the size of a one-bedroom apartment, this bar is a great place to catch any game, especially the Super Bowl! For an interesting look at our neighborhood,check out the Goodbye Girl on netflix. It is the same one in which I grew up four decades ago, and its buildings and landmarks and topography are almost entirely unchanged. but that would be the pot calling the kettle black. In Lyfords celebrated 1966 account of the Upper West Sides decline, The Airtight Cage, he writes of the airmail that landed in the backyard of his brownstone on 92nd between Columbus and Central Park West from the windows of the row of tenements on 93rd street: My first introduction to airmail was a bag of rotten food that landed in my back yard a week after I bought the house.. . I lived on 79th street from 1976 to 2011 in the rent-stabilized apartment I grew up in, and over that time I have seen the neighborhood change drastically. Aside from the Museum of Natural History overlooking Central Park and the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial overlooking Riverside Park, the area lacks notable monuments. Think about it. Arts & Entertainment. The Wildwood. I was 14 in 1977 and went to see laser rock at the planetarium with a girlfriend. Free or royalty-free photos and images. The doormen were alert and ready to menace unwelcome visitors with a baseball bat. They had delicious burgers. You want something obscure, because your horoscope recently told you to try new things. Indeed, everything suggested it would be. That's right, another Infatuation review for yet another location of The Smith. But Malachy's a fixture on West 72nd Street off Columbus Ave. since the late '80s is the kind of place people like "because it's old and ugly," insisted Mike Mishkin, owner of . For the reclamation of the neighborhood proved to have a spiritual component as well. So no matter what type of place youre looking for, use this guide the next time you go out on the Upper West Side. (I had mussels, he had short ribs). The destruction and construction took years, leaving behind rubble that became at-hand weaponry for kids and gangsters and boarded-up tenements that became crime sites and drug dens. Vanguard is one of the best first-date spots on the Upper West Side. I have been unable to confirm the closing date in my research. Photo of storefronts on Columbus Avenue between 82d and 83rd streets in 1982 by Daniel Weeks. Lyford then dumped the refuse over his fence onto the concrete apron outside the offending tenements so that their superintendent could collect it, bag it, and leave it for the garbage men. Friday's location on the Upper East Side. Bodega 88 Night Clubs Bars Brew Pubs (19) 8.6 Website (212) 799-1602 573 Columbus Ave New York, NY 10024 CLOSED NOW 2. We were giving up so much of our city, Myron Magnet has written in a beautiful essay on Saul Bellows great 1970 novel of Upper West Side (and Western civilizational) decline, Mr. Sammlers Planet, and how it spoke to his experience as a neighborhood resident. Upper West Side Perfect For: First/Early in the Game Dates $$$$ 424 Amsterdam Avenue, New York Earn 3X Points Caledonia is, above all, a whiskey bar. And there was also the simple fact that the small city and the larger city had both grown pessimistic about the ability of authorities to do much of anything to prevent these horrors, so it seemed almost churlish to report on them. Mostly, it just feels like a relatively calm pub that happens to have a lot of brown liquid in stock. so i guess we are 3 black kettles since i am being pretty snarky, too. Madison & Vine, an American Bistro and International Wine Bar, has a menu that captures the diversity of America's culinary regions. Japanese. So they are finally free of their daily captors and, like all kids, act out without thinking of who or what is around. Everybody got mugged. Learned how to ride my bike down there. Does anyone remember, like i do, the little grocery store on the corner of 74th and Amsterdam, owned by Dom?wonderful man, full of stories and gossip about the neighborhoodwhen the subway fare went up in 74 or 75, he bought me a bag of tokens so that i wouldnt have to stand in line at the 72nd St. station that Monday morning when it went into effect and everyone had been caught unawareDom always looked out for his customersa real UWS personality. (212) 861-2290. Nostalgia can be a treacherous mistress, because she glamorizes the past and downgrades the present in a way that threatens to make them both intolerable. Let me correct myself for Sarabeths Kitchen was between 79th and 80th Streets on Amsterdam across from Macs. (The church had become a hangout for drug addicts.) A Manhattan townhouse complete with a 33-foot lap pool has hit the market for $17.5 million. It all started at Goddard Riverside and then onto West Side Montessori. Only in Honolulu, wrote the journalist Joseph P. Lyford, is there a greater confusion of blood, ancestry, language, and culture in as small a space. But though there were racial and ethnic tensions aplenty, and these would grow exponentially as the years passed, the division in the neighborhood was primarily one of classa division between the middle class and the lower class. The cavalcade included. I remember Zabars being a nice little store to buy deli and grocery items. Also, bagels at H & H! Via. Those were the days. Retro what does it mean? Over 25 years, we lived in 3 apartments, none more than 4 blocks from Fairway. Ive lived on the UWS for twenty five years now, and when we moved into our current place a few years back, it was the long-term residents who were the most unfriendly, and one who was just downright hostile!! If you want anecdotes, thats one thing; Im happy to provide them. Big flat-screen TVs behind the bar show lists of what theyre currently pouring - and there are also a few other TVs for watching sports. Sometimes for the food. My children, who are very young, will know, as my sisters and I did, the oddity of being both entirely privileged and yet significantly poorer than most of their classmates and friends. RESERVE A TABLE. Does anyone remember the trendy bar in 1981-84 at the corner of 74th and Amsterdam? But in 1972 and 1973, Charlie Chop-off had so little resonance beyond the blocks near me that when I made mention of it in a short story I read to my eighth-grade classin a school on the Upper West Sidemy classmates hadnt heard of it. Amsterdam Ale House The corner of Amsterdam and W. 76th Street has been the site of numerous popular restaurants since the late 1930's. I remember the shoe repair shop between 71st and 72nd on Columbus, and Books, Pictures, and Things, and then Betsey Johnson replacing it. It was a rich neighborhood at the turn of the last century and it has gone back to that. As Lyford wrote in 1966, a twenty-block site of a multimillion-dollar urban renewal program laying between Eighty-seventh and Ninety-seventh streets and bounded by Central Park on the eastand Amsterdam Avenue on the west was the fulcrum of this massive slum-clearance plan, involving the loss of 6,344 households. the 90s were considered pretty scary back then, but the 70s and 80s were lovely. Tuesday's - you could get a rack of ribs, big salad with lots of fresh blue cheese, and a baked potato for $9.99. The Upper West Side is a great place to live: beautiful prewar buildings, Central Park to one side and Riverside Park to the other, Zabar's.It's one of the most popular residential areas of Manhattan and it's also a hotbed for celebrities. Prohibition is a 20sthemed bar with quality live music every night. That is the ambiguous power of nostalgia, as the jagged recollection of hitting a tiny child with a bicycle still has the power to catch like a rusted nail four decades later and open a fresh wound. At the time, I was going to high school a block away and walked every morning past the tenements from which the airmail had been dropped on Lyfords yard. What sets it apart is the fact that there are so many hard-to-find beers on tap. I was also hailed from second story windows in Times Square by topless prostitutes. The Upper West Side is New York City's definitive neighborhood: a polyglot collection of fine architecture, bustling street life, diverse cultures and strong civic activism. Now that the doormen from CPW no longer drink at the bar at Pizzeria Uno on Columbus & 81 (which had a cubby hole in the unfinished end where wed leave each other messages and little presents), thats one thing that Im finding difficult to nail in the neighborhood! Imagine such a thing today. Hi Life Bar & Grill. Upper West Side seen from Top of the Rock. I bought an expensive ($90) hoodie, which lasted about 20 years. The streets of my childhood were dirtier, and the people who lived there were poorer but I played on the street all day unsupervised by adults and we were safe. I remember turning the corner on 71st street one day coming back from PS 89 and discovering that my whole street (71st between Columbus and CPW) had been transformed so that Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand could perform a scene from The Way We Were. Here are the nine places to get your fix: Dive Bar NYC. However, it was still very nice and middle/ upper-middle class between broadway and riverside drive, at least up to about 90th street. He didn't take studio photography or anything like that.". I am offended by the tone in this article. Lets not forget about the orginal frozen cappuccinos on Columbus Avenue before Starbucks. Stephen Hanson's uptown "Chinese" fantasy, which he bravely launched on the un-trendy Upper West Side, was the big box that spawned all of the city's pan-Asian giants. I remember The Jaunting Car Inn next to the Ritzs deli between 71 and 70th on Columbus. It's China Fun now? The neighborhood has lost many small businesses such as delis, bodegas, pizzerias, barber shops, candy & stationery stores. I remember Charivari well. I finally made the right connection when I discovered several glass ampules and hypodermic needles. That said, it isnt a gimmicky spot where you pretend to be an early American settler. View Website Earn 3X Points. The middle class was split between the professionals of the New York intelligentsiamedia and intellectuals and academics and psychoanalystsand more down-to-earth educated folk, public school teachers and union officials and social workers. People have bidding wars over apartments that cost millions of dollars. Raised on 104th. And I briefly lived on 85 street in the early 70s , so I was there a lot. Bear Bar (west side) 2156 Broadway (between 74th & 75th St.) Beer Hall. Even 50 years ago, its leftism was a lived-in leftism, a legacy leftism, dull and humorless and orthodox, inherited from parents and grandparents and already growing threadbare around the elbows like an old tweed jacket whose patches were themselves worn out from use. As an 80s kid, the name cracked me up, it sounded so dated, and even then I could see they where from another time, and I appreciated that. 85th St.; 212- 877-0961. Prohibition is an upscale bar and lounge with some of the best bar food in the Upper West Side. Featuring live music nightly, the jazz age is still present in this dimly lit bar, which is a great swanky alternative without the gouging prices. Not a longtime UWS resident (only two years) but I would warn the author against making what appear to be major overstatements. Because The Smith is always there when you need it to be. The reason I love my neighborhood is I can walk up my street and say hello to my neighbors. I love that my beloved UWS is a desirable place to live but NOT at the expense of those who came before, struggled, survived and created this complicated, beautiful neighborhood. In order to reduce traffic congestion in . Just be aware that the whole place might smell like truffles, since they serve various truffle- and non-truffle-related snacks. There were great clothes stores also on Columbus on the same street, Parachute was one. Bars & Music Mama's Bar. 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